Having the ‘gimmees’ is nothing new. Kids have struggled with excessive longings to have more than they do for as long as there have been kids. It is also not new for them to feel that they should have immaterial things as well as physical things, such as longer playing times on their sports team or a bigger part in the school concert.

What is new is the Media Age. Media does not create a sense of entitlement, a sense of “I deserve,” but it fuels that belief by holding in front of our eyes what others have and do. It turbocharges our innate dissatisfaction by showing us new things for our hearts to latch onto and cry, I should have that, too.

Thankfully, since the problem comes from within, there are things you can do to help parent your children as they wrestle with feeling that the world owes them.

Reframe Their Understanding

First, your child needs to develop a more godly worldview than the one they hear every day that legitimizes consumption, jealousy, envy, and covetousness. Help them understand instead that all of life is a gift:

• We did not ask to be born, we were gifted with life.
• We signed up for none of our abilities, advantages, gifts, or talents, they were all given to us.
• We came into this world with nothing, which means that anything we have ever enjoyed was also a gift.

Your goal in these conversations is to bring your children into a bigger world by seeing how much they have already been given.

Be careful how you say this. Do not communicate, “You ungrateful little twerp, you do not deserve the things you have.” Harshness drives some kids to harden their hearts, and others to guilt. Keep your goal in mind, help them see the beauty of what they have because a good, loving God gave it to them.

Create a Culture of Thankfulness

Since an air of entitlement focuses on what people do not have, combat that attitude by drawing your family’s attention to what they do have.

Begin by setting the tone in your house by noticing what you have been given, then say out loud how thankful you are for it. Doing so creates an atmosphere of gratitude for your children to live in, one that challenges an entitlement mentality.

Take time to thank the Lord with your kids for his goodness, an easy way to start is before your family eats together. Ask your children what they are thankful for, or if they struggle to say anything, point out the things you see that they have been given.

Again, do not sound critical. Your tone and attitude should reflect the warmth that God has for his people as he abundantly provides for them.

Think Globally and Historically

Help your children see the other end of the gift spectrum, the one in which others have less than they do, often far less if yours are living in the Western world with its unparalleled access to goods, services, education, and opportunities.

At times it helps to compare life now with life previously. Maybe your kids grew up in a fixer upper and rode around in older cars while living in a well off area. Daily they encountered what they did not have.

What they did not see was how unique their experience was in this country and in this century, and that they have far more than most people have ever had. You want your children to see the beauty of what they have because a good, loving God gave it to them.

So when they felt the weight of what they did not have, you might highlight the larger reality by saying, “I ride around in a chariot that kings would have gone to war over,” or, “Our house is far better than any castle ever was, it does not leak, it is not drafty, and we can regulate the climate.” Such comparisons challenge the notion that we have nothing just because we do not have what a neighbor has.

Pull the Curtain Back on the Wizard

Show that entitlement cannot deliver what it promises.

Have you ever gotten something you really wanted, only to discover that it did not live up to your hopes, or that the joy quickly faded as your sights moved on to something else, or that nothing has truly lasted, things wear out and break, new models replace older ones, people move away and even die?

If all that is true, why entrust your soul’s peace and happiness to having more in the first place? Those things are wonderful when received as gifts, but none of them can nourish your soul, they are not big enough.

In other words, show your kids the transient nature of everything they have felt entitled to, not to be negative, but to help them realize that true satisfaction is found in the eternal Creator, not in temporal creation.

Redirect Them Outwardly

Entitlement is about me getting more for me, locating me at the center of my world. Thank the Lord that he came to set us free from that tyranny.

God says it is better to give than to receive (Acts 20:35), and he gives to us so that we might share in the joy of giving to others (Matt. 10:8). That is why you read that the Macedonians begged “earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints” (2 Cor. 8:4).

Help your kids see that bigger, more beautiful way of living. With greater gifts comes greater responsibility to care for those with fewer, and there is wonder and delight in giving to others like God has given to them.

Remind Them of the Gospel of the Giver

Ultimately, point your children to Jesus, who for their sakes, though he was rich, became poor to make them rich (2 Cor. 8:9).

Why did he voluntarily impoverish himself, Because there is something that we are rightly entitled to, something we deserve. We are owed God’s righteous judgment for thinking we were owed anything.

But what has the offended God offered instead, Mercy, mercy that gifts us with his friendship now and a future of him pouring out the riches of his grace (Eph. 2:4–7).

This same mercy does not only release us from what we owed, it changes us so that we escape the trap of believing we should have more and more. It lets us enter into the amazement of the grace we have been given.

Remind yourself of this grace giving, gift giving God as you engage your children. If they are to escape feeling entitled, they will need you to give them a small portion of the grace he has given you and a taste of the gratitude that you are growing in.

For more from our latest series please visit: Gratitude That Endures: Cultivating Thankful Hearts in Christ

This is a guest article by William Smith, author of Parenting With Words of Grace.

This post originally appeared on crossway.org, used with permission.