26. In 2008, the first year of the recession, the percentage of the population living in households in which at least two generations were present rose nearly a percentage point, to 106 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. The high point , 24 . 7 percent, came in 1940, as the Depression ended, and the low point, 12 percent, in 1980. Striving for Independence

25. Did he get any thanks? No; his wife took it all for granted—and so did her sons. They never imagined that they owed their stepfather anything—not even thanks!

24. I know a man in Chicago who has cause to complain of the ingratitude of his stepsons. He slaved in a box factory, seldom earning more than forty dollars a week. He married a widow, and she persuaded him to borrow money and send her two grown sons to college. Out of his salary of forty dollars a week, he had to pay for food, rent, fuel, clothes, and also for the payments on his notes. He did this for four years, working like a coolie, and never complaining.

23. If our children are ungrateful, who is to blame? Maybe we are. If we have never taught them to express gratitude to others, how can we expect them to be grateful to us?

22. But why should children be thankful —unless we train them to be? Ingratitude is natural—like weeds. Gratitude is like a rose. It has to be fed and watered and cultivated and loved and protected.

21. Parents have been tearing their hair about the ingratitude of children for ten thousand years. Even Shakespeare's King Lear cried out:“How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

20. Here is the second point I am trying to make in this chapter: If we want to find happiness, let's stop thinking about gratitude or ingratitude and give for the inner joy of giving.

19. I believe my father would almost have qualified for Aristotle's description of the ideal man—the man most worthy of being happy.“The ideal man, ”said Aristotle, “takes joy in doing favors for others;but he feels ashamed to have others do favors for him. For it is a mark of superiority to confer a kindness; but it is a mark of inferiority to receive it.”

18. After I left home, I would always send Father and Mother a cheque at Christmas and urge them to indulge in a few luxuries for themselves. But they rarely did. When I came home a few days before Christmas, Father would tell me of the coal and groceries they had bought for some“widder woman”in town who had a lot of children and no money to buy food and fuel. What joy they got out of these gifts— the joy of giving without accepting anything whatever in return!

17. Does that sound like sheer, impractical, visionary idealism? It isn't. It is just horse sense. It is a good way for you and me to find the happiness we long for. I know. I have seen it happen right in my own family. My own mother and father gave for the joy of helping others. We were poor—always overwhelmed by debts. Yet, poor as we were, my father and mother always managed to send money every year to an orphans' home—the Christian Home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Mother and Father never visited that home. Probably no one thanked them for their gifts—except by letter—but they were richly repaid, for they had the joy of helping little children— without wishing for or expecting any gratitude in return.

16. There are thousands of women like her, women who are ill from “ingratitude”, loneliness, and neglect. They long to be loved; but the only way in this world that they can ever hope to be loved is to stop asking for it and to start pouring out love without hope of return.