Trying to get my kids to write their thank you notes is about as easy as trying to sell them on the merits of cleaning their rooms. Help! I need some tips on how to make this annual holiday rite-of-passage easier for them (and me).
Your kids may be a bit more inclined to tackle that pile of thank you notes if you cut them a bit of slack in the expectation department. If you’re willing to expand your definition of a thank you note to include e-cards or postcards (as opposed to insisting that they sit down at the kitchen table to write one of those multi-page epistles that were the norm for kids in generations gone by!), you might find that you get a little more buy-in from your kids. And be sure to keep your kids’ ages and abilities in mind. Just writing “Thank you, Love, Ian” can require a concerted effort from a five-year-old who’s new to the world of printing. (I should know. I helped my five-year-old son Ian to write such a note recently!)Sometimes kids find themselves hit with a bad case of thank you note writer’s block because (dare I say it?) they aren’t particularly thankful for the banana yellow sweater that dear Aunt Mildred spent half the winter knitting for them. In this case, you might want to encourage them to think about one nice thing to say about the sweater—“You’re a really good knitter, Aunt Mildred”—and then to add a sentence or two about how much they’re enjoying the holidays.
If you really want to make Aunt Mildred’s day and lighten your child’s thank you note writing burden at the same time, see if your child will put on the sweater long enough for you to snap a quick photo to include with his thank you note. A picture’s worth a thousand words, after all. And you can always offer to burn the negative….
