Thursday, March 01, 2012

Does forcing children to give to charity really make them grow up to be charitable?

There's a parenting technique where people force their children to give to charity in an attempt to teach them the value of charity. For example, they might require the kid to put aside a certain portion of their allowance for charitable donations, or they might make a rule that the kid isn't allowed to get presents at their birthday party and instead the guests should make a contribution to a charity.

I wonder if this actually makes the kids grow up to be charitable?

Any attempts my parents made to force me into charitable behaviour just made me resentful. The one with the strongest emotional impact was one time when my parents decided we needed to donate a toy to a xmas toy drive. The toy drive collection was at the credit union, so they drove us and the toy there and then told me and my sister to put the toy in the collection box. All the credit union ladies watched us and went "Awwww!" I had no idea why they were doing this, but it made me feel objectified and humiliated (although I didn't know those words yet.) It also made me wary of any parent-instigated attempts at charitable donations, because I felt (although I couldn't articulate this yet) that my parents actually wanted me to do it so that they could be smug (although I didn't know the word yet) that their children are being charitable. This was also a strong contributing factor to my current practice of only donating anonymously.

I wonder how it worked out for other people. Did your parents try to force you to be charitable? Did it work? Did anything else they did end up actually making your charitable?

3 comments:

laura k said...

I grew up in a house controlled very tightly by money. My father (the controller) didn't force us to be charitable, but to his credit, he did teach us to be charitable by example. He was unbelievably tight-fisted, but he did contribute generously to certain causes. He also believed in anonymous charity.

I think perhaps the best thing parents could do to help their kids be charitable is be charitable themselves, and talk about why they feel that's important.

impudent strumpet said...

In the shower, it occurred to me that the toy drive incident could have instilled favourable feelings about charity if my parents had focused on having us pick out the toy. Explain that there are poor kids whose families can't afford to get them presents, so we donate these toys so they can have presents. Then ask us to use our expertise as children to pick out toys that they'd enjoy. Then we'd be thinking about and empathizing with the charity recipients, and would probably be invested enough in the process that we'd be proud to put the toy in the box.

The allowance thing could be tweaked similarly by designating a separate charity fund rather than making it part of the kid's allowance that they're not allowed to spend. For example (using numbers that make the math easy), instead of "You get $10 but you have to give away $2 of it", parents could say "You get $8. On an unrelated note, you get $2 to donate to charity. Where do you want to donate it to? Here are some ideas." (I know part of the reason for making the rule that you have to donate part of the allowance is to ingrain the idea that you don't spend every single dollar you receive, but that idea could be enforced separately from the idea that charity is good.)

I blogged before (4th paragraph here) about a failed attempt by my father to convince me to contribute to his United Way donation. It would have been more effective if he'd shown me the list of charities you can designate your donation to and asked me which one I thought would be best.

Even the birthday party situation could sometimes be achieved by making it a choice. "What kind of birthday party do you want to have? Do you want to have friends over here? Do you want to go to Chuck E. Cheese? Do you want to raise money for the food bank? Or to buy a goat for a family in Africa?"

I think the mistake is in setting it up as Charity = Self-Deprivation. Even if the kid is donating the parent's money to start with, and even if it initially leads to Barbie dolls in the toy drive box and sugary cereal in the food bank box, I think you'd get better outcomes with Charity = "Here's a problem that exists. Here's how you're empowered to help."

laura k said...

"I think the mistake is in setting it up as Charity = Self-Deprivation."

Right. Also, your shower additions give the young person more control, which is empowering and helps teach decision-making skills. Good additions!