Teaching the Way of Give to Our Children

A mother’s job is never done, but are we so busy that we are neglecting an important aspect of our children’s character?

Have you ever heard “The Mom Song”? Sung to the tune of the “William Tell Overture,” it condenses everything a mom would say in a day into 2 minutes and 55 seconds. (If you have time, you can click here to listen: “The Mom Song.”)

As moms, we are busy. Busy telling our children so many things. Busy trying to keep our houses in order and meals cooked. Often, we are busy working full-time jobs as well. But are we so busy that we forget (or don’t make time) to teach our children the things that are really important?

This life is all about relationships. God’s way is all about relationships—our relationship with Him and with each other. A huge aspect of relationships is learning the give way as opposed to the get way of life.

It seems that children naturally understand the get way. Children have to learn how to share. They often ask for everything they see when you take them down the toy aisle at Wal-Mart. If we’re not careful, at special times like the Feast of Tabernacles, their first question will be, “What am I getting?”

Finding ways to focus on others

When my daughters were 5 and 3, I really started to notice this, and it bothered me. What was I doing to teach them about building relationships and showing love through giving? Not much. Until around age 11, children do not think abstractly; they are concrete learners. What better way to teach a concrete learner than by doing? And, hopefully, if they do enough, those actions will become habits, and they will become givers without even giving it a second thought.

As “The Mom Song” demonstrates, every day is crammed full, so when do we find/make the time to teach our children about giving? There will be times that you can create a specific event just for that purpose. For example, my girls help me make unleavened bread to give to the widows and elderly during the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

Teaching our children to give starts with activities like that—making cards to mail to those who are sick, taking homemade dog biscuits to the pound, anything we can think of that puts their focus on someone else.

Realistically, though, for most of us, those activities will only occur a few times throughout the year. Moms (and dads) have to develop a watchful eye for those “teachable moments” when our children can be reminded of the importance of developing godly character through giving:

• Leaving the last piece of cake for someone else when going through the snack line after church.
• Opening the door for an adult.
• Letting a younger sibling have the “leader remote” on the Wii every now and then.

Leading by example

In teaching our children about giving, or anything else for that matter, probably the most important part of our job is to lead by example. We’ve all heard it before: “Do what I say, not what I do.” That’s not very convincing to us, and it certainly isn’t to our children. They need to see us have a giving heart. We need to go out of our way to put other people first, especially when our children are watching and learning from our behavior.

Being a mom is hard, and we are busy. But we should never be too busy to instruct our children in the ways of God.

The Bible says, “Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4). Learning to give and esteem others higher than ourselves is a lesson that will take our children far.

Hopefully, if we capitalize on those teachable moments, we will help shape them into children that we can be truly proud of, and children that God is proud of as well.

Amanda Weiss is a mother of two small girls and a full-time school counselor in East Texas.

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