Both of my parents worked full-time when I was a little girl, so my grandmother would stay at our house during the day. We would watch game shows in the living room. Our favorite was The Price is Right. We would call out our answers along with the players.

When I got older and started going to school, we couldn't watch our game shows regularly. That was okay with me, though, because the one thing I liked better than watching game shows with my grandmother was helping bake. Watching her in the kitchen was amazing: she never seemed to need the recipes but everything she made tasted delicious.

At first I would just sit in the kitchen and watch, even though I didn’t understand what she was doing. As I got older, she let me help with the easy parts, such as measuring the sugar. The day she let me separate the eggs. I felt like I had found complete pleasure.

At last. my parents decided that I could take care of myself, and my grandmother stopped coming over every day. The love of baking, however, stayed with me. I started baking by myself, and even if the cookies ended up being burnt sometimes, more often they turned out pretty well. I tried out new recipes, and whenever I got to a thorny part. I would call my grandmother for advice. Sometimes I would call her just to talk, too. I felt like I could talk to her about anything.

My grandmother passed away ten years ago, but I still think of her every day, Last week, I found a recipe book she made for me. It included her recipes for brownies, cookies, and my favorite, lemon pie stout anything. As I looked through the pages, I thought I could hear her voice. She was the one who taught me not just about baking, but about life.

Amy, a day old, was abandoned at a police station in Seoul. Her birth parents couldn’t afford to give Amy the appropriate healthcare then. She spent her first three months in an orphanage before she was adopted. “I always thought, why should I be more thankful to my adoptive parents than the next person?” she says.

In 2011, Amy reconnected with her birth mother in South Korea, her adoptive mum by her side. “My Korean mother took my American mother’s hands in hers and said with tears, ‘Thank you.’ After that, my whole world changed,” Amy says. At the time, she was working in the e-commerce sector and struggling with anxiety, depression and an eating disorder. Reconnecting with her birth family, however made her feel like the luckiest person in the world and she wanted to actively share her good fortune. That year, she quit her job and co-founded the Global Gratitude Alliance, which partners with grassroots organizations to create community-led solutions or social and economic change.

Since then, a reflexive sense of thankfulness has become Amy’s frame of reference for work, relationships and daily life in general. She tried to rethink her world view, appreciate the little things and make connections with others. For Amy, the attitude shift helped her overcome health issues—she didn’t need the drugs any more after she returned from Korea.

Those positive effects inspired Amy to share the experience with others. Through a partnership with a home for orphaned children in Nepal, the Global Gratitude Alliance provided teachers with workshops that concluded with a ceremony of giving thanks. The participants used those techniques to help their students and community after the destructive earthquake of 2015. Children from the school recently visited a local seniors’ home to build relationships with the residents there. “Gratitude creates a cycle of giving and receiving,” Amy says.

Has anyone noticed how, with the passage of time, one’s relationship with one’s grown-up daughters and sons becomes changed? I’ve been aware of this for some time but I’m not quite sure how to deal with it.

Take the kitchen sink for example.

Following a family get-together at my place, I walked into the kitchen to find Kate, my daughter carefully cleaning the sink.

“Don’t do that; what are you doing that for?” I said, unhappy about the hidden criticism.

“Mum,” she said, “you really ought to put your glasses on when you clean the sink. Behind the tap here was black!”

But it’s not just things like kitchen sinks. Another time Kate arrived to pick me up to lunch. She looked at me and then asked, “Mum, why do you use brown eyebrow pencil when your hair is grey?”

A sudden memory of her, aged 14, going to her first mixed party flooded back. She had come in to say goodbye. For a moment I thought she’d been an accident. Both eyes were black. I remember suggesting that perhaps a little less eye make-up might be more effective.

Now I told her, “My hair used to be brown.”

“It looks absurd.”

“Mrs. Menzies had dark eyebrows with grey hair.”

“Yes, but you’re not Mrs. Menzies, are you?” she said triumphantly, as if that proved her point.

But a recent event made me realize that something really must be done.

She had returned some for a few weeks before getting married. One evening I went out on a dinner date. By the time my companion left me at the front door, it was about 2am. As I stepped in, an angry figure in a white nightgown stopped me.

“Well, what time of night is this to be coming home?” she shouted. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick!”

Shades of the past come back to disturb me. But what should I do about all this? Nothing, probably. Maybe, after all, it’s only a stage young people are going through.