Cultivating Generosity in Your Children

If you’re reading this on Christmas Day, Merry Christmas from all of us at GEB America!

We hope you’ve been able to spend your day with loved ones and that you’ve felt the love of Jesus during this exciting time of anticipation to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child.

If you were with children today, hopefully you got to witness the joys of seeing them excited about their gifts as they experienced your generosity. But just as you have been generous to them, it is important to start training them at a young age to be generous themselves.

Today and every day, here are a few ways you can entourage generosity in your children:

Model Generosity

It doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy or not, generosity is an attitude of the heart—not a dollar amount. Be willing to share things with your spouse, children, and give what you can (i.e. time, money, kindness) to whomever you can who needs it.

When children see that you get joy out of meeting a need, they will be more likely to want to follow that example.

Talk to them about Privilege, Entitlement and True Needs

No matter who you are, there is someone else out there who is probably struggling harder than you are at this moment. Your children may not realize that there are millions and millions of people who cannot read, get paid pennies a day for back breaking labor, don’t know when they’ll be able to eat next and may not even be free.

In an age appropriate way, talk to you kids about the things in this world that are not good and what they can do do avoid them and also help those in need. Teach them that it is their responsibility as lightbearers of Christ to meet needs that are unmet in this world.

Have Children of All Ages Volunteer

Nothing teaches a child about the joys of giving quite like volunteering. It doesn’t matter if it’s helping with a Habitat for Humanity build, caring for puppies at the Humane Society or serving dinner to the homeless with your church—when a child sees that they can actually make a difference in someone else’s life by helping out, it empowers them to be generous in their thoughts and actions.