Saying Grace

What follows is an excerpt from an article that makes you go "Hmmmmm."

It is about the importance of teaching your kids to say grace, whether you believe in God or not.

It's a long piece, but I've included several key passages.

Our children get relatively few opportunities to pause and reflect, let alone count their blessings. They live in a world that conspires against waiting. Movies are available on demand, television commercials are optional, and homes have more bathrooms and telephones, which means less sharing. Meanwhile, many older kids fill idle moments looking at Instagram on their phones, which encourages them to think about what they don't have -- the party they are not at, the vacation they are not on, the shopping they are not doing -- instead of their own good fortune. They press their noses up against the glass of the device and others ask them to "like" it, literally.

But feeling fortunate is good for kids, and grace is just another word for the regular expression of gratitude. A number of scholars have measured gratitude levels in children and found strong correlations between gratitude and higher grades, levels of life satisfaction, and social integration. There's also a link between gratitude and lower levels of envy and depression. In a series of experimental "gratitude interventions," researchers have asked children to keep a gratitude journal or write a letter to someone who has had a lasting impact on them and then read the letter aloud to them. The videos of these readings are so sweet and sincere they will probably make you cry.

So before your next family dinner, ask yourself this: is there a version of grace that could feel right for your family -- flexible enough to work for all moods and occasions, simple enough to do every time you gather?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-lieber/why-you-should-start-sayi_b_6705700.html