What are some ways to teach generosity to your children?

Hello, my name is Ron Blue, and one of the great challenges that we have in our culture today is to teach our children generosity. Generosity is a pretty common word in Scripture, and we are encouraged and commanded to be generous.

Well, how do you teach your children generosity, and how do you teach them generosity when basically we live in a society where there’s almost unlimited resources – not only from an income standpoint, but also from the ability to borrow. So, there are no real limits. How do you teach them generosity?

A couple of things that we did: we always had breakfast together, and we had dinner together. Whenever I was in town, we always had breakfast together and we always had dinner together. I was always home in order to have dinner, and I didn’t leave until we all had breakfast together.

I’ve got to tell you that those were probably the two greatest teaching times that we had as parents. We never left the table until the last kid left the table, so we were there. We found a lot of laughter around the table, we found extended times around the table. I know it’s more difficult today, but if I were going to teach a child generosity, it would start with having those times with the child.

We had prayer cards. We prayed for all the missionaries that we were supporting. We would pass the cards around the table, and everybody would have a card and they would pray for a missionary. They knew, then, our children knew, that we were supporting those missionaries. The amount wasn’t really important in terms of how much we were supporting them, but the fact that we were giving to these missionaries, I hope sent a signal to our children.
And another thing that Judy and I did that I find very, very few parents do is that we included our children at the end of the year in the giving decisions that we were making. We would say, “here are all the requests” (and they all come in during December), and, “here is what we know about this particular missionary or this particular ministry,” and we would have discussions and make our decisions as a family for our year-end giving.

I would think a third thing is that you need to teach your children generosity, obviously, by being generous yourself. And I found it important to do our giving in church every Sunday. Paul said, “on the first day of the week, lay aside something,” so I believe that as our children saw us giving on a regular basis, it couldn’t help but send a message to them also.

We wanted to teach them to give regularly, and to give faithfully, and to give generously.

There’s no greater gift that you can give your child than to have them leave home with a generous spirit.

Click here for the May 22, 2009 Blog Entry