Manhattan Monthly - December 2009

Manhattan College Philosophy Professor Authors New Book on Parenting

Growing Up with Your Children: 7 Turning Points in the Lives of Parents

By Seamus Carey

Gratitude

To suggest that gratitude is an essential virtue for the well-being of parents may be out of step with how many of us feel as we struggle to meet the mounting challenges of raising children today. We worry about their health and safety while struggling to keep pace with mounting bills. We fumble about for the right words to console hurt feelings, often missing the mark. We sacrifice our social lives to save for exorbitant college tuition bills. We honor their birthdays with parties, performances in a school play with flowers, and a good report card with gifts. We spend time and money supporting their sports teams, music lessons, vacations, and camps. Throw in the emotional energy required to handle relationships with growing children and adolescents who seem programmed to rebel and resist, and there is little time, it seems, for feeling gratitude.

To make things even more difficult, gratitude is rarely the first response of children to what they have or what their parents do. In our weaker moments, we sometimes resent their selfishness and wonder why we sacrifice so much for what they don’t seem to want. During these times, gratitude seems like a far-off dream, absent from the emerging personalities of our children and from our own lives. And yet I am suggesting that gratitude is one of the most essential virtues for parents, not only to effectively raise children but also to live a full life. Without gratitude, life never rises above the strain and struggle of household battles. Without gratitude, life is absent of joy. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel suggests that a person without gratitude is missing something in his or her humanity.

As with all of the virtues that are essential for living a good life, parents are faced with the double task of cultivating gratitude in themselves and nurturing it in their children. Because parents face so many obstacles in finding gratitude, we tend to overlook its importance. But we overlook it at great peril because it is, according to Cicero, not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all virtue.

Gratitude makes the other virtues possible. One who is grateful for the gift of life is more likely to show compassion to others. One who is grateful for those upon whom his life depends can more easily see a common humanity in the downtrodden and can more easily fight for justice. Those who understand the fragility of life and are grateful for their own can see the importance of temperance in a world of excess. To the extent that we want to give our children an opportunity to live their lives to the fullest, we have an obligation to sew in them the seeds of thankfulness. To neglect this obligation is to deny them the possibility of achieving an excellence of human character, an essential element of their humanity, and the possibility of achieving what they are capable of.

So gratitude is unique among the virtues, not only is it a prerequisite to the other virtues, it is the most pleasing of virtues, a primal source of joy that transforms our experience of the world when we find it. William Blake went so far as to describe gratitude as “heaven itself.” To be grateful is to share the joy that one feels as a result of having received something pleasing. And this desire to share is itself joyful. So gratitude is joy compounded—a pleasure on top of a pleasure. For parents, this joy can be a source of strength to aid us in meeting the challenges of everyday life. To experience it, however, parents must first know where to look for it.

Though difficult, some parents can find gratitude even in the most difficult circumstances. In doing so, they transcend social expectations and norms that often constrain the human spirit. They also show that gratitude is not just a fleeting gesture like a spark of light that does little to illuminate a dark room. To become grateful can be a dramatic turning point for parents insofar as it re-directs our vision and the focus of our concerns: to be grateful is to see the world in a different way. This vision looks carefully at things, especially the ones we ordinarily take for granted. Sometimes it is our children themselves whom we take for granted and sometimes it is the things we do for them, like throwing a birthday party. To the critic and the crank, these are silly practices, a waste of time and resources that send our children the wrong message about what is and is not important. But looked at from a different point of view, even a birthday party can evoke a sense of gratitude. In fact, in some ways, a birthday party is an expression of gratitude.

A Birthday Celebration

I mention looking beneath the surface of birthday parties because most of the time I am the one who criticizes them as frivolous exercises of excess that breed the antithesis of gratitude in our children. A seven-year-old’s birthday party now requires a rented gym or restaurant along with live entertainment. An entire roster of classmates is invited, each one arriving with the compulsory present that his parents darted to the store to buy the day before. At the end of the party, at which food is ordered to arrive just after the clown finishes performing, the birthday boy sits down to begin tearing feverishly through presents, leaving mounds of wrapping paper to the side. He glances momentarily at each one, occasionally expressing a mild satisfaction before moving on to the next. The pace is fast and furious; he hardly has time to look up and say “Thank you.” These are not gifts in the real sense. They are obligatory tokens of membership, a minimal fee to justify one’s presence at the party. And just like Christmas, the biggest birthday celebration of all, the intent of the party is lost beneath the mound of wasted paper and plastic toys. For many years, this discouraging portrait of birthday celebrations reinforced an instinctual aversion I’ve held toward them since childhood. And this aversion kept me from giving much thought to birthday celebrations until I had my eyes opened to what they can mean when approached in a different way.

On a recent trip to Ireland with my daughter, Caitriona, our hosts, D.J. and Sarah, selflessly organized a spontaneous birthday party in honor of her 8th birthday the day after D.J. lost his bid for a third hurling All-Ireland in a row. On the surface, it was easy to be grateful for being treated so well by our hosts. To have access to the inside workings of an athlete and a sport at the highest level, on its most important day, was such an extraordinary thrill that it justified breaking the private rule of not missing work or school for pleasure. The magnanimity of our hosts, however, revealed something much more enduring about gratitude than what I felt in response to their hospitality. Their hospitality forced me to reflect on the significance of honoring birthdays.

As I thought about the simple but moving birthday party they spontaneously organized in honor of my daughter, there was no place for the usual objections I held against parties. On the contrary, their gesture led me to think carefully about specific events and moments from my daughter’s life during the two-hour drive from Dublin to Kilkenny. The more I thought about these events, the simpler they became until I found myself smiling in response to my image of her smiling. When I thought of her laughing, I felt my gut filling with joy. And as I held the image of her smiling face in my mind, I zeroed in on the quirky way she moves her nose from time to time. At that moment, in response to that simple image, I couldn’t imagine anything more special. I was full of gratitude for her life as I remembered a line from Albert Schweitzer, who said that we each have cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. This, I learned, is why we celebrate the birthdays of family and friends: to honor and thank the people who light our flame to live and work, to play and pray. Beneath the wrapping papers, boxes, and clowns, there is a message of thanks being offered to our children for being who they are. And if our “thank you” is sincere, it is far more than a momentary expression: it is what Meister Eckhart, the great Christian mystic, called a prayer. If “thank you” is the only prayer we ever said, he assures us, it would suffice. I never before imagined a birthday party as a prayer but now I do.