Raising grateful children one day at a time

ABSTRACT

We examined micro developmental processes related to the socialization of children's gratitude by testing whether parents who engage in more frequent daily socialization practices targeting children's gratitude reported more frequent gratitude displays by their children after controlling for potential confounds. 101 parent-child dyads completed a baseline lab visit followed by a seven-day diary study. Using multi-level modeling, we found that parents who engaged in more frequent gratitude socialization acts reported more frequent displays of gratitude by their children across the seven-days (between-dyad effect) and that on days when a parent engaged in more socialization acts than usual parents reported relative increases in gratitude displays by their children (within-dyad effect). These findings show that parent socialization acts are associated with children’s displayed gratitude and point to the need for future work to explore reactive and proactive parent-child interactions that may underlie these associations as well as associations between micro-developmental and macro-developmental processes.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude Project run by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center in partnership with UC Davis with funding from the John Templeton Foundation and by a postdoctoral fellowship provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (T32-HD07376) through the Center for Developmental Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the second author.