Teaching Children About the Holidays

The Holidays are still upon us. How do you teach your own children about the giving season? Our children seem to focus on what they are getting during the Holidays more than how to be more giving. It truly saddens me that there is only one season of giving. This is something that should be practiced everyday in our lives and modeled for our children to carry on with giving tasks. After all, the Holidays come but once a year, however there are such great needs in our homes, communities and around the world that should be addressed more often than once a year.

Warm-Hearted Walrus helped students collect for their local pantry one year. Then, the children got to visit the pantry to see what it was all about. They learned that there are people in their own community that struggle, sometimes need help and that they are able to help them. This is a powerful lesson and one that every child should learn. At times we take for granted that there is food on the table, clothes on our back and a roof over our head. For so many this is a struggle, never should a person have to hide from going through hard times, we all do. It’s up to us, as a people as a community as a society to help others, it’s just the right thing to do, each and every day of our lives. In the meantime, it is the Holiday season and this is a good time to teach, model and discuss with your own children:

Easy ways to remind kids what the holidays are really about:

• Focus on the present not the presents

• Continue your family traditions and discuss ways to start new ones

• Embrace these traditions and build off of them

• Don’t share your stress, model the joy of the Holiday

• Give with all your heart

• Discuss the year gone by and what the New Year holds in store for your family

• Involve your children where you can and expose them to the beauty of the Holidays

Ways to Teach Children About Giving Over the Holiday Season

• Include your child in the giving

• Connect with elderly relatives and friends or facilities where they live

• Focus on the meaning of giving, dive deep into this topic and make an impact on your child

• Emphasize and model family time, discuss how you as a family can make a difference, starting with the Holidays

• Clean out your home, find things that don’t serve you or you have doubles of and donate them to a community location who accepts them

• Choose Random Acts of Kindness all year long and involve your own children so they feel the joy and will continue with this

  What are some ways to get in the Holiday Spirit?

  • Start with decorations, these can be home made or store bought

  • Enjoy your community with window shopping or enjoying the light displays

  • Make cards to bring to a retirement community or homeless shelter in your area

  • Bake and if you’re able to, donate to the above locations as well

  • Craft, make some home made ornaments and give them to family and friends

  • Give back where you can with what you can

While it seems that the Holiday season is the most giving time of the year, I truly feel that kindness should be a daily occurrence for all of us.

How can we teach our own children to be kind?

• Be a role model yourself

• Involve your children in kind conversations

• Encourage them to show random acts of kindness

• Allow them to feel kindness and

• Allow them to give kindness

• Host a food drive at your church, your school, your business, your team for the community you live in, let your child be involved in this

• Host a coat drive in the winter for the same as above

• Host a sock drive during the Fall for the same as above

• Talk to your own children and learn what they think it means to be kind, how they think that they can make a difference.

Sometimes, all we need to do is listen.

TELL me and I forget, TEACH me and I remember, INVOLVE me and learn. Benjamin Franklin