With Thanksgiving approaching in a few days, I wanted to revisit a post I wrote on kids and thankfulness a while back.

“My kids just don’t appreciate a thing I do for them,” a mother in my office lamented a few weeks ago. Every mother knows her frustration. We work tirelessly for our children—especially at the holidays—and when they are over, we feel, well, empty.

Was all of our work worth it? Many times we assuage our sadness with the rationalization that our kids are just kids. We tell ourselves that no child appreciates his mother or father because he is self-centered and psychologically immature. Both of these are true, but I think that we miss something very important when we give our kids an easy pass. The truth is, most of our kids have more stuff than they need—luxuries that we work hard to give them. Many of our kids feel that our job is to provide, and their job is to enjoy.

The truth is, kids are egocentric and cognitively they do have difficulty identifying with the amount of work we do for them. They can only partly empathize because doing so takes a hefty dose of abstract…