TEACHING CHILDREN MONEY AND EMPATHY

Thank you to those who have contributed to the Kid's Channel Easter Basket Contest. Have some interesting history and ideas. Greatly appreciated! One of the wonderful things about the internet – making community out of world. I'm still accepting applications/ideas. I'll keep accepting them right up through the day before Easter.

Please also accept my apologies for being religiously narrow-minded. I know precious little about Passover, nor do I know if gifts are exchanged during this period of time. If they are, and someone feels like suggesting how to celebrate this holiday on a “creative” (read: limited) budget, please feel free to contribute to our contest, and/or simply provide us an explanation of your holiday – at least one of us (uh, yeah) will be enlightened. Always appreciated!

Picking up on a thread from last week's article involving how to make children feel special on a limited budget. Let's talk some more about the irreplaceable lesson of empathy. More true now than ever, as we all suffer, no matter how “slight” it may seem, we're all suffering. Gas prices are still up (and then down, and then up, and then down . . .); salaries are down; unemployment is up; foreclosures are WAY up; even if children are fortunate enough to belong to a family that isn't being directly affected by our country's economic situation, chances are that they know at least one person or family that's being affected. Either their best friend can no longer come to day care because their parents can no longer afford to send her, or their grandmother can't come spend the summer with them because she can't afford to take the time off of work, or afford the airfare, or the gas, you get the drift. Children, whether they're directly affected or not, are affected. And, as always, are keenly aware of all that which goes on around them. They sense the tension, they hear the occasional expressions of fear, whether they're expressed from someone in their home, or from someone on the television.

And don't we all love something that kills two birds with one stone? I know I sure do.

One of the suggestions from last week's article about making children feel special had to do with giving back. My example involved my family yearly serving the homeless on the night before Thanksgiving. I have always been sad that I didn't start this tradition sooner with my children, and now, with child #3, the soon-to-be-5-year-old, we get another chance! Lucky for the little one!

Actually, we've already begun with our youngest, and honestly, I wouldn't recommend it if I didn't see the bang she got out of giving to those who don't have as much as she does. At this point, 5 years old, on the verge of kindergarten, she's willing to take our word for it that there are children and families in this world that don't have enough money to buy new clothes; or that don't have enough money to buy enough food; or that don't have enough money to buy toys – old or new.

The first time I presented her with the concept was when I was going through her season's end clothing, and sorting through that which was too small, too worn out for anyone to keep, and that which had a chance of being able to be worn again next year. She quizzed me as she always does – what are you doing; why are you doing it; where will this pile go; where will this pile go; and what do you mean we'll take these that don't fit to the second hand store?

It was my first opportunity to explain money and how some people don't have as much of it as others, and sat back and watched her reaction. She certainly wasn't interested in helping me sort through clothing, which gave me a certain amount of encouragement that she was not wholly without sense.
It was when she came back to me some 15 or so minutes later with her arms loaded with toys that she said she was “too big” for, and that she wanted to give to the children who didn't have enough money to have nice toys that I had to choke back some tears. Needless to say, I praised her up and down, took her very carefully selected collection of toys and put them in their own, special bag to take to the Good Will.

We all now go through our clothing regularly, and make bags for the Good Will. Rya also makes a pile for her favorite cousin Chloe, who is exactly a year younger than her, and she loves to give her cousin clothes, so she gets a special pile. Rya is the only one of us that has an extra project on that special day of each season, and that is to go through her toys and pick and choose those which she still wants, and those which she would like to donate. She continues to set aside toys regularly, in preparation for our seasonal Good Will day, and adds more to the pile when the official day arrives.

What has touched me the most, however, is watching her make special piles for specific children in her life whom, for whatever reason that I can't pretend to understand, with the exception of one, she perceives need their own pile of toys. We dutifully take our normal drop off to the Good Will, and then we figure out ways to “donate” Rya's special treasures to her special friends (whom I have to agree with her, for the most part, look the part of a child who might need a little extra something every now and again – whether the reality is so or not, I will never know). Sometimes we try to time our leaving pre-school simultaneously, and I explain to the child's mother that we were going through our seasonal “weeding out” process, and for whatever reason, Rya had chosen her child to give a bag of toys to, and here they were, and they were free to keep them, donate them, give them back, or do whatever they would like with them. I generally explain that I simply feel it my obligation to help get the “special present” to the child, and then let the mother take it from there, hoping, of course, that I haven't heaped another burden on them (as we all know how overwhelmed the house can feel with toys on occasion).

Rya has yet to be met with anything less than an almost speechless mother, who is clearly choking back her emotions. The child has always been thrilled to receive her “donations,” especially because with my Rya, she wants to be able to go through the bag with the child and to explain to them exactly why she chose each, specific toy – in her own way, there's always a method to the madness.

The child for whom she makes a pile to which she adds almost daily is a child she knows to be living away from his biological mother, with her favorite babysitter, who has guardianship of this not yet two year old child, whom she seems to think of as a younger brother. Rya is adopted. Rya knows this, and although she has different feelings about it at different times, for the most part, she feels very proud and seemingly excited to have been specially chosen, especially having been informed that her biological mother was simply too young and incapable of caring appropriately for a child.

Rya has met this young man's mother, and suffers no hesitation whatsoever in expressing her opinion about how pitifully she mother's her young “Baby Michael.” “Baby Michael” gets a new book, or a new ball or a new stuffed animal, or a new something every, single day added to his ever-extant pile in a special corner of her room. She has explained to me that since she got lucky enough to have her Mommy and Daddy (meaning myself and my husband), and she didn't have to be treated badly by the girl whose tummy she grew in, she doesn't know how to make Baby Michael's mother any better, “because I'm too little and she won't listen to me,” nor does she know how to get him adopted by her favorite babysitter who is his current guardian, the only thing she knows how to do is to give him the things she loved when she was a baby, so that hopefully they will make him happy, too.

It doesn't get any more poignant than that. I wish I could tell you I had made it up, and take credit for the “lesson” and the story, but I can't. It's all Rya. But I won't sell myself completely short – just like I would ever so gently suggest that none of us, as parents, should sell ourselves completely short, as we all too often do. The role I played in those special, little Ryaisms, was to watch her, and notice her; give her my time and attention; teach her even those things that seem like small life's lessons, such as give unto others, and the feeling you get inside is its own reward; I try to pay attention to that which puts a sparkle in her eye, and whenever she gets to choose clothes to give to Chloe, you'd think it was time to plan a party – the “noticing” is not hard word; I try to make her think about what she might want to have given to her if she were a child who didn't have a whole lot of money or toys, and to challenge her to really give of herself that which is difficult, and not easy, and I'm ten times more rewarded than she will ever be – when I watch her struggle with the shopping bag full of toys for Baby Michael, because she got Mommy and Daddy, and she wishes she could give him that, but instead she can just give him her favorite animals, dolls, books, and toys, all of which have always made her feel safe and loved.

Not expensive, just priceless . . . .

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