It’s indeed very simple.

Just take out what’s precious from them and they’ll realize how grateful they are to have that precious thing before it’s taken from them (By taking out, I don’t mean to literally taking out. Just keep it away for a certain period of time).

For example, for a kid. His mom is really precious to him. She always takes care of him daily. Once she gets sick and can’t take care of him. He’ll feel grateful at that time.

Here’s a more scientific insight from my friend, Ellese.

Whenever we need to encourage a particular behavior, we can always use the Pavlovian conditioning of pleasure seeking and pain avoidance. Like what you were suggesting, relate to the kid the importance of being grateful of important things in life that he may be taking for granted i.e. the mum by taking it away temporary. That is pain avoidance. The kid learns to treasure whatever he has now that he’s been through the possible loss/pain.

The other way is to educate him on the pleasure part. Teach him what’s the benefits of being grateful… tell him stories of people who’ve been grateful and became so admirable that stories of them were passed down. Encourage them to learn from them. Sooner or later, such wonderful stories will be embedded in the subconscious, always reminding him the importance and benefits of being grateful.

You can use this tip to make your kid grateful.

To be honest, I’m experiencing it now. I’m grateful to my house servants and babysitter. Why? Because they all left for their annual vacation (we call it “mudik” in Indonesian, and all house servants are “mudik” now) and my wife and have to keep my house tidy ourselves, including washing clothes, watering the garden, and cooking.

I sure wish my Malaysian friend, Raymond Chua, to come and visit me. You know, since his hobby for stress relieving is cleaning!

You may be wonder why did I decide to do this? There are several reasons but this is the most fundamental reasons:

Passion

One of my passion is parenting and baby development. Having been a new father (my son is still 16-month old so I consider myself as a new father) I have little experience and education about parenting and baby development. In fact I’m still amazed why parenting is not taught in school, in university or college. In short there’s no formal education about parenting so my wife and I learn a lot from parenting experts such as Ernest Wong, Glenn Doman, and Tony Buzan, to name a few.

Therefore since there’s no formal education about parenting, I want to share what I’ve learned, because I believe parenting is very important and it’s a task that’s given by God to us as parents.

New theme

You also must have noticed the new appearance of this blog Yes, I changed its theme to symbolize its new direction in Harmony in Your Family.

Lastly I’d like to thank my friend, James Soh, who advised me to do something that I have passion in.

So moms and dads, please share your wise experience and knowledge so that we all can learn parenting from each other and be great parents for our children!