It Is Better To Give Than To Recieve
Parenting is not an easy job. Good parents, in my opinion, not only love and care for their children, but they also take the time to mold their children and teach them values. While parents should teach their children to help others all year long, the Christmas season offers many opportunities for lessons on how to help others.
I was lucky enough to have a parent that felt it was important for me and my brother to know how important it is to help others. Every year at Christmas, we each got to pick a child off of the tree at church and we’d go out shopping and buy them some presents. Such a simple task, but one that is very meaningful. There are so many ways to help others, but this is one that the children doing the giving can understand. Every year, my son’s daycare adopts families from the daycare that need some extra help. They put paper mittens on a tree with gifts that the children would like. Even though Nick has no clue what we’re doing, I wanted to show him right from the start how important it is to help others, so we took a few mittens from the tree. Later I found out that my brother wanted a mitten so he could buy a gift for one of the children, too. When my mother told me that, it showed me just how deep those life lessons from our childhood went, because even though money is tight for all of us, we still feel that we should take the little extra we have to help make a child’s Christmas better.
As I was taking the mittens off of the tree it brought back so many memories of other times we helped out and I remembered another wonderful giving opportunity that was good for kids. In December, 1997 we were in a terrible car accident and my brother ended up in the ICU at C. S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan. While he was there my brother was given a special teddy bear to help him feel better. A few years later my mother’s office participated in a competition where employees would dress up teddy bears that got donated to Mott’s to be given to other hurt and sick kids. For the competition firefighters judged which teddy bears were dressed the best and the top three bears won a prize. One year my brother wanted to include a note with the bear he dressed telling the child that got it how important the bear he had received was to him and that he hoped the new dressed bear would make the child receiving it feel better. My mother wasn’t sure the note would be allowed, so she hid it in the outfit. Not sure that the note would ever be found. Well, the firefighters found it, and they were so touched by the note that they cried! Needless to say David’s bear placed that year.
Children need to be taught at a young age that giving back and helping others is important. An article that I recently read in Parents Magazine mentioned that it’s so special when young children help others because they have no ulterior motive for helping. As we get older we often have a reason for helping. An example being that high school and college students often help because it can help them get into college or land a job. The article also said that children who help when they are young, and who see there parents helping others, are more likely to continue doing it as they get older.
The lesson that we should help others seems to be one that both my brother and I learned. I hope that I can pass that lesson on to Nick. Times right now are especially tough, and when we can give back we should. Getting gifts is fun, but it is so much better to give than to receive.