Teaching Our Childen The Purpose of Giving

Over the past couple of months I have (in)directly observed two situations on opposite ends of the giving spectrum. The first is a current event and is positive and inspiring. The generosity demonstrated by Americans in donating money and material goods to the victims of the Haiti earthquake has been amazing. There have been endless examples of adults leading and assisting our children with projects of giving. Big or small they have combined in genuine efforts to ease the suffering of the Haitian people.

On the other hand I was party to a large family discussion before Christmas about what  children should receive gifts based on age and relationship to other extended family members. There were many nieces, nephews, godchildren and grandchildren in this family and most were present for this discussion. The big issues were the spending limit per gift given these tough economic times, the number of gifts a child could receive as a matter of fairness at the main holiday dinner and the cutoff age of the gift recipients.

The conversation got so heated between the six siblings involved that one member walked out of her sister's 50th Birthday Party. I was appalled by the overall behavior of the group generally but especially in front of the children they were trying to be "fair" to. I was also greatly distrurbed by the commercial aspects of the entire conversation towards Christmas.  Friends or not, these people had completely lost sight of the spiritual meaning of the holiday.

If you have an extended family, you probably have had some kind of experience like this. So as a general public service there is an article below written by Ray Horner. It lays out a pretty good summary of what values we should try to instill in our children that we should also adhere to ourselves as adults in the practice of giving and donating. Remember, the true value of a gift comes from your heart not from your wallet ...

Life Lessons Teaching Children the Value of Giving:

Its common knowledge that who we are as adults is a result of what we were taught as children. In these materialistic times, it’s of paramount importance for us to teach our children the important virtue of giving. We can do that by molding our gift ideas in a way that would automatically show our children how much fun giving can actually be. In other words, instead of just giving the children gifts we can add some spin to our conventional gift ideas and gear it towards inculcating the noble virtue of giving.

Here is how a mother came up with one such gift idea:

Jessica is a 12 year old girl who wished for a chance to read stories to the chilren living in a homeless shelter. For her 13th birthday, her mother came up with the brilliant gift idea of asking the guests to only gift little Jessica story books. After the birthday party when the guests had left, Jessica had about thirty odd books that were gifted to her. Her mother, drove Jessica to the nearest homeless shelter and arranged for her to read out stories to the little children there. At the end of a good 3-4 hour story reading session, Jessica then distributed those books among the children there. Now, although Jessica did not end up with any gifts; she had the best and most memorable birthday of her life. These are the kind of childhood gift ideas that mould a person into caring and generous adults.

By far the best way to teach your children the value of giving is to practice giving and generousity yourself. Taking this thought further, another good value based gift idea is to have your children spare a certain percentage (ideally 10 percent) of their pocket money for the less fortunate children. There is nothing better than having your children give out a percentage of their pocket money with their own hands. If the children prefer to give things then you can also take your kids along with you to the markets and malls and let them buy whatever they want for the less fortunate children.

Another very effective value-driven gift idea is to have the kids donate their old clothes and toys to the homeless shelters. Get them into the habbit of packing up their old clothes, shoes and toys every six months and donating it – the bottom line here is to get them involved.

Get the children to donate not only money and things but time as well. Make it clear to them that donating money is no substitute for donating time. Encourage them to help out at the homeless shelters and reward them with tokens of apprecition everytime they do so. Also, encourage them to help out their elderly and sick neighbours, relatives and family friends. Its important to constantly make them feel good every time they act out of a sense of gratitude and kindness.

When coming up with value-driven gift ideas, its important to let the children decide how they want to donate their time and money. Our jobs as parents is to encourage that sense of philanthrophy in children and let them choose the manner in which they want to give.

Be creative and design gift ideas that are geared towards your child’s prefered modes of giving. Its also imperiative to allow children to give their time and money all year around rather than just during the holiday seasons.

The World Institute for Development Economics Research at the United Nations University did a study which indicated that the richest 1% of the world’s adults owned 40% of all global assets and that the top 10 % owned about 85% of all global assets. The study further tells us that the world’s bottom 50% (adult population) owned just about 1% of all global assets. I would disagree with anyone who says these are economic, political or social problems. These are spiritual problems – it’s a question of learning how to give and share – ensuring a more balanced future depends on our ability to teach our children the value of giving.