Passing It Down

For many families, passing down generations of traditions and rituals is a wonderful way to continue your family’s legacy and enrich your children’s lives in positive life-encouraging ways. However, passing down toxicity—the impact of adverse childhood experiences and trauma—is a risk parents take when we don’t break the cycle and when we repeat the negative patterns of our family’s previous generations.

“Changing our toxic or damaged routines and rituals is critical in breaking the cycle and ensuring that our children don’t end up having to repeat our mistakes,” says Dr. Shefali Gandhi, a licensed psychologist in Scottsdale, Arizona. “To do this, we must become actively mindful of our choices and the behaviors we engage in when we interact with our children. One of the most powerful ways a parent influences their children is through modeling.”

One of the most important factors in raising kind and grateful children is exposing them to kind and grateful adults. Parents are their first source of information at this age, so modeling kindness and gratitude is the best way to ensure you are raising a kind and grateful toddler.

Temperamentally, children may be innately kind, but you can also foster situational kindness and gratitude by creating situations where sharing is rewarding in and of itself without an external reward. Such situations – where sharing results in a joyful and warm interaction with a parent or sibling – are rewarding experiences for a toddler and will be repeated.

Demonstrating gratitude daily through small routines, such as asking them to identify a time at school when they said thank you or someone said thank you to them, will help make gratefulness a part of their daily lives. Showing them you are kind through helping others is very important because it teaches them to offer help to their peers. Taking a stance of gratitude by overtly identifying what you are grateful for every day will show them how to do the same.

To learn how more about breaking unhealthy cycles add the Breaking the Cycle issue or to your MASK Library.

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