In their December issue, Reader's Digest profiled a few families who are doing unto others. It would have been funnier if they had said "kids who kare", but they aren't going for humor. (I'm a little silly, I know. Bear with me.)
This is actually an important topic. When the economy was flying high – Dow at 10,000, blah blah blah – it was easy to forget those less fortunate. Or, if you were more a more charitable sort, it was easy to remember them, since you had more money. Now that your wallet is a little lighter than before (especially if Bernie Madoff was handling your money), it's easy to make charity one of the first cuts.
The thing is, that's not a good message to send to your kids. There are ways to do something for other people without giving money, and children need to learn that at an early age.
Reader's Digest profiles five families who did their part for charity in various ways. One that I liked, because it's year-round and fairly basic, is the Church family, who keep a tzedakah box in their kitchen and drop any spare change in it. "Once a year, they empty it out and decide what organizations they want to donate to that year." Tzedakah is a Hebrew word meaning "charity" but Wikipedia adds that the root of the word is tzedek, which means "justice". (I also think it's funny that the Church family is Jewish. Because I'm silly.) What I like about this is not that it's a religious thing, which is fine. It's that a family could do this no matter what faith they are, even if they have no religious leanings at all. Heck, even a Satanist could stick a coffee can in on the windowsill, toss spare change into it and give it to charity when it fills up. (I'm not sure if they would. I don't actually know any Satanists. But it seems like something that could happen.)
The bottom line is that it's important to somehow impart to kids that there are people that are less fortunate than you are, but in a way that they can understand. In the fifties, some kids were told to eat their vegetables because "children were starving in China." I grew up in the Northeast Bronx, so my mother told me that there were hungry children in the South Bronx. Being a budding loudmouth, I offered to bring them my peas via subway. This is an example of a method that doesn't work so good. However, my mother also used to pack food to be delivered to homeless shelters, something she still does today. Knowing that she did this, an action that was direct, apolitical and required only her time and not much money, absolutely had an effect on me.
For some specific examples of families Raising Kids That Care (Kare? Nah), check out the Reader's Digest article.
Image/Source: Reader's Digest
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