How to Raise a Grateful Versus Entitled Child in 4 Steps
This blog covers why common parenting strategies can contribute to entitlement in children and provides 4 action steps to do instead to foster gratitude.
“I want my child to have a sense of entitlement.”
Said NO parent EVER!
BUT the WAY parents try to instill gratefulness in their kids often backfires and can actually lead to a sense of entitlement...despite their best intentions!
(I blame outdated, mainstream parenting practices for this!)
So what’s a well-intentioned parent to do? Keep reading and you’ll find out!
Don’t want your child to become entitled? Let them be disappointed.
Here’s WHY using the example of gift giving to help illustrate my point:
So your child just opened up their gift from grandma and doesn’t like it. I’m sure we can ALL relate to getting a gift we didn’t like, right?
Their disappointment is written all over their face, perhaps causing our own anxiety to spike.
Our pre-programmed, knee-jerk reaction in this situation may be to:
Force our child to say, “Thank you!”
Tell them, “You should be grateful you got a gift!”
Tell our child, Don’t be rude! You’re hurting grandma’s feelings!”
Lecture (eg. what the “true meaning of Christmas” is, or “the importance of being respectful, etc)
Punish (eg. withhold opening their other gifts until later, publically calling them out, shaming, etc)
I get how easy it can be to go there; these responses are burned into the universal book of parenting norms in our society! It can be hard to break out of these automatic responses, especially if they were used your whole childhood, and still used today by your family!
The PROBLEM with these responses is that they don’t teach children to be grateful like we are intending.
Instead, our child learns:
How I LOOK matters more than how I FEEL
I’m responsible for others’ emotions
Being honest about how I feel/think isn’t OK
I need to hide my true thoughts/feelings
Something is wrong with me if I don’t feel the way my parents are expecting me to (hello, shame!)
I OWE other people gratitude to be liked, loved, accepted
In addition, these responses SHUT DOWN the feeling of disappointment.
As a result, our child learns:
“Disappointment is a bad/wrong feeling to have.”
“I’m a bad person for feeling it.”
“Disappointment is intolerable.”
This shuts down our child and their ability to (eventually) learn effective coping strategies for disappointment because we can only learn to deal with the emotions we’re allowed to feel!
When a child believes that disappointment is intolerable, they will spend the rest of their life trying to avoid it, often going to great (subconscious) lengths in the process.
THIS is what contributes to the “entitled behaviors” we don’t want, such as:
Expecting others to cater to what they want
Demanding special treatment
Getting disproportionately angry when things don’t go their way
Blaming others for their mistakes or when things go wrong
Deflection and counterattack (no accountability)
Believing that certain rules don’t apply to them
Interpreting others’ needs and wants as a burden or inconvenience
That’s pretty much the definition of entitled, right?
So, what’s a parent supposed to do instead?
Here are 4 action steps parents can do to foster gratitude - versus entitlement - in their child:
NAME and VALIDATE your child’s disappointment
Naming your child’s feelings helps increase their emotional vocabulary to give your child language with which to (eventually) name their own feelings, and validating emotions creates safe space to learn emotion regulation skills. For example, if your child is disappointed in their gift, you could say, “You didn’t get the toy you really wanted. That makes sense you’re feeling disappointed.”
Provide CO-REGULATION until the feeling of disappointment passes.
Children are not born with the ability to handle feelings like disappointment by themself. They need the attuned support of their caregiver through co-regulation to get through it, otherwise they will learn maladaptive strategies to survive it. If you’re new to this whole co-regulation thing, a powerful tip I encourage you to use is the 3 C’s of Co-regulation, and they are:
Calm: Meaning keeping yourself - not your child - calm! Practicing self-soothing strategies to help keep yourself relatively calm are critical for helping our child return to calm themself.
Quiet: This is one almost ALL parents get tripped up on! They talk TOO much. I know they mean well and they’re trying to be supportive, but talking isn’t regulating for kids who are feeling upset. Why? Because their emotion brain has taken over, making the part of the brain responsible for logic and listening to go OFFLINE. (I know this technically doesn’t start with a ‘c’, but it sounds like one so I’m counting it)!
Close: Stay close to your child from the start to the finish of their emotion. This part is crucial as it teaches them 2 important things about emotions: 1. Emotions come and go and 2. Emotions are tolerable. Some kids want space away from their parent when they’re experiencing big feelings, in which case you want to stay somewhere near them, letting them know where you’ll be and that you’re available whenever they’re ready to re-connect.
TEACH your child the difference between gratefulness and gratitude
Did you know they’re not the same thing? You’re not alone in this thought! Here’s the difference: “Grateful” is a feeling and “Gratitude” is an action, and we communicate feelings of gratefulness through acts of gratitude.
Repeatedly MODEL acts of gratitude in front of - and on behalf of - your child
Because acts of gratitude are what most parents want their child to do, it’s important to literally SHOW them actions that convey feelings of gratefulness. Be prepared to express gratitude ON BEHALF OF your child for the first 5-7 years of their life as their brain develops and they solidify the skills needed to communicate how they feel. So instead of constantly nagging your child to “Say ‘Thank you,’”say it for them.
One final but important note: There are many other ways to convey gratefulness besides saying “thank you” that kids use but are often overlooked, such as:
An ear-to-ear smile
Jumping up and down in excitement
Clapping their hands
Running around in circles
Crying tears of happiness
A stunned look as they take in the experience
If these aren’t the most genuine expressions of gratefulness, I don’t know what is!
Conclusion
Teaching your child gratitude can be a challenging task when you grew up associating gratitude with “obligation,” feeling unseen, misunderstood, or controlled. Plus the pressure (and subsequent judgment) placed on parents to raise grateful kids is unrelenting!
But it is 100% possible to unlearn the narratives around gratitude that you picked up from your childhood, and learn new strategies to help ensure your child stays true to who they are, and are able to handle disappointment effectively.
Hi! I’m so glad you’re here!
I’m Katie Egge, a Minnesota-based therapist and coach who’s passionate about providing the support, resources, and tools that her clients need - but didn’t get growing up - to heal from and prevent Childhood Emotional Neglect. Katie works with adult individuals, couples, and families all around the world, + leads a virtual Support Group for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.
BOOK A FREE CONSULT with me today to start moving forward in your life with more direction, skill, and confidence.
