How Can I Teach Kids about Charity?

These are great ideas, but better than giving the canned goods at a food drive at school. How about collecting them from neighbors to take to the food bank? Let your kids have a lemonade stand to raise money for a favorite charity of theirs.

Teaching charity to a child is very some. Simply take a trip to your local church on a Sunday and has the basket comes around sure to fill it up. Ask your child to provide some of their weekly allowance and give it to God. Teaching charity is as simple as that.

If the child questions the value of the money they are giving to the church just describe to them all the wonderful events of charity that the church provides to the community.

I think it's all nice and very well to bring canned foods to local school and even to go to the local shelter and ladle out bowls of soup for the needy but I think that there is a certain value in creating the actual goods that you were going to be giving for charity.

when a child is asked to produce the work or perform the manual labor that in turn will allow them to purchase the food that is used for charity only then will they see the value that goes into the charity being offered.

If the parent hands a couple of quarters to their child so they can give them to the local bum on the street corner there is no value in the charity seen by the child because the quarters came as charity from the parent to the child.

Now if the child was required to go in the lawn on a weekend for a neighbor and then use the money to give to the bump himself, a true form of charity and the value that it takes to give charity would be discovered by the child.

@Ubiquitous, while I can appreciate your desire to teach your children the value of charity with using canned food drives at the local school, I think there are better and more effective means of teaching such a value to our young generation.

One of my favorite methods of teaching charity to children and young adults is the use of a field trip to the homeless shelter in any given city. While it may seem cliché to stand in the line serving homeless people a hot meal the effects can be wonderful and yet very disturbing at the same time.

Seeing the eyes of these helpless, downtrodden, and disturbed individuals can break your heart and also cause confusion as to how we can live in a world where this type of poverty exists.

This hands-on approach to learning what charity means and what it is to give to the needy is in my opinion the most effective means of learning about the socioeconomic divide that creates tension in our society.

Charity is a hard concept to come into a child's mind. It is often seen as a value that can only be taught through a parent and for this reason we as parents must be very certain to instill quality characteristics such as charity in our children.

I personally like to teach my children about charity in a variety of different ways. Contributing to the schools fundraisers as well as canned food drives can be an excellent way to show that giving is helping other people.

The other problem with this though is that sometimes not seem that people do actually need the charity can leave a disconnect in a child's mind as to where that canned food is going.

It seems that a child needs to see the hungry hungry person enjoying the food in order to accept the fact in their mind they provided that meal and satisfaction to the hungry persons belly.