Children's and Parents’ Understanding of Gratitude

Ramsey, Meagan A.; Gentzler, Amy L.; Vizy, Boglarka

doi:10.1017/9781316863121.011

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Although their age might be irrelevant, the extent to which they practice and encourage gratitude is not. There is also some evidence that variations in parents' gratitude are reflected in the gratitude of their children (Hussong, Langley, Thomas, et al, 2019;Ramsey et al, 2018), although not all of this research deals with gratitude as a virtue.…”

Section: Operationalizing This Mid-range Theorymentioning

confidence: 91%

Using cultural‐ecological theory to construct a mid‐range theory for the development of gratitude as a virtue

Tudge

Navarro

Payir

et al. 2021

J of Family Theo & Revie

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Gratitude scholarship, whether in the close relationships or developmental literature, currently lacks a coherent framework. The term gratitude is used for a wide variety of constructs, and there is rarely a clear link between conceptualization and operationalization. We think that gratitude should be considered a moral virtue, involving the desire to reciprocate in some kind or helpful way to one's intentional benefactors. Our goal is thus to provide a mid‐range theoretical framework for the study of the development of gratitude as a virtue. The theory from which this framework is derived is cultural‐ecological theory.

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Section: Operationalizing This Mid-range Theorymentioning

confidence: 91%

Using cultural‐ecological theory to construct a mid‐range theory for the development of gratitude as a virtue

Tudge

Navarro

Payir

et al. 2021

J of Family Theo & Revie

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Laypeople do not distinguish between being grateful, appreciative, and thankful, with "happy" also considered synonymous by some (Lambert, Fincham, Braithwaite, Graham, & Beach, 2009;Morgan, Gulliford, & Kristjánsson, 2014;Halberstadt et al, 2016;Ramsey, Gentzler, & Vizy, 2018;Hussong et al, 2019a;Mendonça, 2019). Morgan et al (2014), for example, found that grateful, appreciative, and thankful were the three central components of gratitude.…”

Section: The Measurement Of What Is Termed Gratitudementioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Gratitude? Ingratitude Provides the Answer

Navarro¹,

Tudge²

2020

Human Development

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Current scholarship on “gratitude” has largely ignored its opposite – ingratitude. As a result, gratitude is no longer distinguishable from constructs such as appreciation and happiness. This was not the case over previous centuries – ingratitude was viewed as something monstrous, a failure to reciprocate would loosen the bonds holding society together. The opposite, gratitude, was seen as a virtue. Reciprocity has come under attack because “obligation” has been understood in only one of two possible senses. The first relates to contracts and justice – one has a heteronomous obligation to pay off a debt or fulfill a contract. The second is a sense of obligation that comes from within, autonomously – the desire to help those that have helped us. Here, we argue, is where gratitude and ingratitude are situated. This view has two important consequences; one relates to the measurement of gratitude and the other to raising youth to be grateful people.

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“…There is some evidence that parental gratitude (however assessed) has some links to their children's gratitude. Parents who are more grateful for their material possessions have children who are also more grateful for material things (Ramsey et al 2018). Moreover, parents who say they are more grateful have children who say they feel more helped, and the extent to which they feel helped is related to their own expression of gratitude (O'Brien et al 2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More than this, however, both parents' and children's understanding of what it means to be "grateful" seems far closer to appreciation as Fagley (2016) defined it. Whether parents are asked to describe what their children are grateful for (Halberstadt et al 2016) or whether parents and children are asked about the things for which they are grateful (Ramsey et al 2018) very few even mention gratitude to a benefactor for any specific benefit, let alone the idea that one should reciprocate to such a benefactor. Most common examples include being happy for material things, appreciating what one has, being thankful for participating in specific activities, and being grateful for specific people (e.g., parents or teachers) but for unspecified reasons (Ramsey et al 2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing variations in the expression of gratitude in youth: A three-cohort replication in southern Brazil

et al. 2019

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Children are not born grateful; their understanding and expression of gratitude develops during childhood and adolescence. We used a qualitative measure designed to assess how youth would respond to a benefactor, hypothesizing that their types of responses would systematically alter with age, and were able to test the reliability of this measure via replication across three cohorts. Participants (N = 1101) aged 7 to 14 constituted three independent cohorts (2008, 2012, and 2015-2017) from the same southern Brazilian city. Participants' responses were reliably coded into three types of gratitude (verbal, concrete, and connective); across samples, older youth were more likely to express verbal and connective gratitude; younger youth were more likely to express concrete gratitude. The age-related patterns of expression were very similar in each of the three samples (one discrepant result from nine possible), suggesting that it is a reliable measure with which to assess age-related changes in the expression of youth gratitude. Gratitude, we suggest, is not simply a unidimensional construct allowing judgments of how grateful individuals are; instead, our research suggests that youth of different ages express different types of gratitude, increasingly more complex, the most sophisticated of which comes closest to gratitude as a virtue.

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Children's and Parents’ Understanding of Gratitude

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Using cultural‐ecological theory to construct a mid‐range theory for the development of gratitude as a virtue

Using cultural‐ecological theory to construct a mid‐range theory for the development of gratitude as a virtue

What Is Gratitude? Ingratitude Provides the Answer

Assessing variations in the expression of gratitude in youth: A three-cohort replication in southern Brazil

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