Can joy be cultivated? And, if so, can we teach our kids how to be more joyful in their lives?
The answer to both of these questions is yes. But it takes knowing what kinds of practices bring true happiness—and not just momentary pleasure—to your life. Once you’ve mastered that, it’s not too hard to introduce those practices to kids in a way that they can understand and appreciate.
Research shows that mindfulness practice can help rewire our brains for happiness. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to decrease stress and increase happiness, and the practice of compassion and caring for others is key to better relationships, health, and emotional well-being. By teaching children mindfulness skills we help them increase their well-being and enable them to meet the stresses of the world with presence, self-compassion, and openness.
Here are two powerful practices for cultivating gratitude and building resilience in difficult times.
1. Gratitude Practices
Why practice gratitude? Because gratitude has been found to increase happiness and social support in kids, both crucial for long-term well-being. It also seems to benefit adults.
Paying attention to what you’re grateful for can switch the channel of your negative thinking and help you appreciate what is here in your life right now. To deepen the effect, though, it’s important to let yourself fully experience gratitude when it’s here and take time to savor the moment, particularly in the body. Even just a few seconds of registering the positive feelings of gratitude when they arise help to strengthen their impacts.
Here are a couple of ways we encourage the practice of gratitude, first in adults, then in kids:
Gratitude meditation for adults
To experience a taste of gratitude, try sitting quietly in a relaxed posture and focusing on your heart center. As you inhale, visualize breathing in kindness; as you exhale, allow negativity to be released. Then reflect on some blessing in your life—any person or thing that you are grateful for. It could be as simple as having eyes to see, food to eat, and air to breathe; or it could be thankfulness for having love in your life or a good job or kind friends. Whatever it is, take time to say a quiet “thank you” and then to mindfully experience the good feelings in your body.
Other gratitude practices we’ve found helpful are writing a gratitude letter, listing three good things in a journal before going to bed at night, or just sharing your appreciation for others when you encounter them in your everyday life. Whenever you do a gratitude practice, you deepen your feelings of joy and increase the joy around you. Here’s the key: Don’t miss it!
Gratitude exercises for children
To help instill gratitude in your own children, try starting a gratitude practice at the dinner hour. Perhaps you can hold hands with your children and all share something that you were grateful for that day. It can be something as simple as noticing a flower or the kindness of a friend. Just sharing in this way helps parents and their kids to get a better idea of what’s happening in each other’s lives and is a simple way to build deeper family bonds.
Whenever you do a gratitude practice, you deepen your feelings of joy and increase the joy around you.
At school, a practice we suggest is to have children gather in a circle and pass around a special stone, sharing what they are grateful for. With a little encouragement, children will come up with many ideas, like “having Mom make my lunch” or “snuggling with my cat” or “living on such a beautiful planet.”
Teachers can encourage kids to write in a special journal about what they are grateful for or to make “gratitude flags”—small pieces of fabric where they write down what they are grateful for—and then hang them from a string in the schoolyard. That way, kids can remember and show their friends what they are thankful for whenever they are outside playing.
2. Practices for Difficult Times
Gratitude and other skills we write about—like intention, mindfulness, and compassion—can be cultivated over time through attention and practice, and they all lead to greater happiness and social-emotional well-being.
But that doesn’t mean that life is always joyful—nor should it be. One of the great truths is that life also brings challenges. It’s important for us to breed joy in our lives not to avoid the inevitable difficulties, but to meet them with strength and compassion.
The practice of embracing the difficult is a vital part of awakening joy. The more we understand suffering and are willing to come to terms with it, the greater the possibility of developing a mind that is not afraid of the hard stuff when it comes—because underneath the pain lies wisdom, compassion, and love that can open to it.
RAIN: A practice for working with difficult feelings
When we suffer, we often experience pain, anger, fear, or sadness. The acronym RAIN can help us remember how to directly open to and work skillfully with these difficult feelings. Here are the steps to doing this practice:
- Recognize what you’re feeling. Let yourself be open to your emotions of sadness, anger, or fear,