An important lesson to teach your children is to be kind and charitable toward others, especially those less fortunate than yourself. Not everyone has the same privileges in life, though how people come across these difficulties varies: some are born into it, while others end up struggling due to catastrophic weather or other disasters that regularly occur around the world. These moments are the ones you can use to show your children what it means to help others out in their time of need. You can have your children help choose the charity you’ll be donating to, let them prepare the envelope that the check will be sent in, or even choose an activity the family can do together to help an organization out.
Here are just a few ways you can teach your children to be charitable.
Donate Clothes
Everyone has clothes that either no longer fit or that they no longer want, and this especially applies to children as they grow and age. Their preferences or style can change in the span of a few short years, and young children, in particular, go through clothes quickly as they get older. You can use these moments to encourage your children to go through their clothes, find what they no longer wear, and show them how they can donate the clothes to be used by others. Don’t go through their clothes for them—that only diminishes the point of this activity. In order to instill a charitable heart in them, your kids need to do this on their own. Then you can take them to the drop off location so they can give the clothes to the person in charge of collection themselves (with your supervision, of course).
Collect Spare Change For Donation
How much spare change do you have lying around your house? Whether it’s in your pockets, sitting on your kitchen counter, or collecting dust in a container in your car, you can do so much more with your spare change than leave it sitting there to look pretty. Create a charity jar for your family and, when you give your children their allowance for the week, encourage them to share some of their allowances with others by placing a dollar or two into the jar, and tell them to place spare change into the jar as well. When the jar is full, let them pick where the money is going to—it could be put toward saving the sea turtles, homeless shelters, cancer research, and much more. Research these different charities so you can help your children make an informed decision about where their hard-saved money will be going.