Developing Gratitude in Children and Adolescents

Jonathan R. H. Tudge · Lia Beatriz de Lucca Freitas

Oct 2017 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

In popular opinion, gratitude means saying 'thank you'. While politeness and appreciation are certainly important, gratitude is a larger issue. Appropriately defined, it encompasses the strengthening of human relationships and qualifies as a moral virtue. This important and timely volume provides the conceptual framework for studying the development of gratitude, with a comprehensive and international set of authors approaching the topic from philosophical, psychological, and educational perspectives. The first section provides the theoretical underpinnings for the study of gratitude as a virtue. In the next section, the authors examine the ways in which gratitude develops, including key cross-cultural variations and some possible effects of its development. The final section then considers the links between parent and child gratitude, and the ways in which parents and teachers can help to encourage gratitude, both in their everyday practices and by using literary texts.

About the author

Jonathan R. H. Tudge is a Professor in the Department of Human Development of Family Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He has long been interested in the relations among culture, everyday activities and interactions, and development. His books include The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Countries (Cambridge, 2008), and he has co-edited two other books related to culture and youth development. With Lia Beatriz de Lucca Freitas, he has been studying the development of gratitude in children and adolescents for the past decade, with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Lia Beatriz de Lucca Freitas is a Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychology at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She gained her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of São Paulo. Her main interests are in moral development, specifically moral virtues and the construction of values. She has authored The Theory of Morality in Jean Piaget's Work: An Unfinished Project (2003) and co-edited Reflections on Moral Education (2017), both published in Portuguese. She is a Co-Principle Investigator on a multi-year cross-cultural project on the development of gratitude in children and adolescents, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.