The Blurred Side

Sige’g maoy. In preparing lessons, most of the teachers write the verb APPRECIATE when they want the learners to develop something on their affective side. As a school head, this writer often ask why is it difficult for the students to master the act of appreciation when in fact whole year round the teachers target for them to master it?

Appreciation is “an emotion that is typically evoked when one receives costly, unexpected, and intentionally rendered benefits, and is thought to play a key role in regulating the initiation and maintenance of social relationships” (Forster et al., 2017).

The word costly is then relative to the person defining it. An example is this, if one does not appreciate the gift of being alive, s/he will then resort to complain in the so-called misfortunes encountered along the way. But the grateful ones see them as challenges worthy to be faced and become leaning grounds.

Steve Taylor (2014) says that the taking for granted syndrome is clearly related to the phenomenon of adaptation, the process by which we quickly “get used to” new environments and situations. When we’re first exposed to new experiences and environments, they affect us powerfully. For example, the first few days in an unfamiliar foreign country, the first few days in a new job, or the first exposure to a new smell or taste. But these experiences and sensations quickly lose their sensory power as we become habituated to them. There almost seems to be a psychological mechanism of “desensitization,” which quickly filters out the intensity of experiences, turning newness to familiarity.

Then, we fall into the trap of taking things for granted.

With the exposure to information about the dismal events in the world, one’s mindset can be muddled with negativity. But if the mind is trained to dwell on the positive side, a different mindset which allows the person to take positive actions can be created.

So why is it that young people these days do not know HOW TO APPRECIATE? Most of them are only concerned on how to be famous; how to have relationships and how to create “Instagramable” moments. So what is the gap?

Even though gratitude has long been considered a powerful ingredient of health and well-being for both individuals and societies, no systematic attempt has ever been made to understand its development in youth. This is a gap that seriously hampers progress in the science of gratitude.

According to the Youth Gratitude Project (YGP), these questions must be asked by parents and educators:

What is the role of gratitude in positive youth development? What can the people with the greatest influence over children—parents; teachers, coaches, and others—do to foster gratitude in children? What school-based programs can promote sustainable increases in grateful character traits? Is there a critical period when the capacity for gratitude is best transmitted from an older to a younger generation? To what degree does gratitude predict positive outcomes such as school success, overall well-being, community service, resiliency, health behaviors, and less risk taking?

But do we care? Do parents transcend on their roles and leave the SELF behind to serve as a good parent to the kids? Do teachers perform things beyond the curriculum in humanizing the learners?

According to Froh, J. J., Emmons, et al. (2011), good parenting and teaching require these four main scopes in looking into the mindset of the young:

Create gratitude scales for children and adolescents; examine the development of gratitude in teens; examine the role of parental and social determinants of youth gratitude; conduct cross-cultural research on a school-based gratitude curriculum.

Embedded in an insecure age of growing through relentless developmental change, to see themselves so positively reflected in parental eyes can mean a lot: “I’m not just a bunch of problems after all; in a lot of ways, I'm OK.”

That is probably the biggest gap. Young people are left alone by the adults to venture the world they do not understand. Basically, the technological backdrop of their ecology is being created by the adults themselves. They are not guided to APPRECIATE simple things and they got overwhelmed by the world they see on the internet. They do not want to be left out that their priorities become twisted so to compete what they have observed on the virtual world.

Yes, we are the reflections of our kids. Did we manage to master APPRECIATION ourselves?