How To Teach Your Kids To be Generous

Parents want their kids to grow up to be generous, thoughtful, community-minded adults, but putting our good intentions into practice can be a challenge. In our busy day-to-day life, creating opportunities to talk about generosity and giving back sometimes feels like heavy lifting.

If you’re looking for a thoughtful, yet easy-to-do way to teach your kids about generosity, try adding a charitable allowance to their life!

Think about a charitable allowance as pocket money for charity that you give to your kids on a regular basis. You choose the amount and frequency, and together with your children you can select causes or charities they want to support.

[tw-divider]Why Start a Charitable Allowance?[/tw-divider]

Here are three good reason why a charitable allowance could be the right choice for your family.

Foster Your Child’s Personal Development

A charitable allowance helps you start a conversation with your kids about values important to their personal development.

Giving to charity teaches kids to be generous, thankful and empathetic, and lays the foundation for life-long charitable habits. When kids start to think about how they can help other people, they learn to take personal responsibility for the world around them.

Explore Meaningful Activities With Them

Choosing and actively giving to causes they care about enables kids to explore their interests. It’s also a hands-on approach that lets them experience the influence they have over their environment — and how their actions can make the world a better place.

Empower Your Child To Live A Happy, Healthy Life

A charitable allowance can help your kids become happier, healthier people in the long run. A recent UBC study shows that kids who perform acts of kindness report being happier and feeling more accepted by their peers.

[tw-divider]How To Start A Charitable Allowance[/tw-divider]

There’s more than one way to introduce a charitable allowance to your family. You could start with giving your kids $1-5 a week to give away to charity. Or you could reward them with a small dollar amount for chores done.

Need some inspiration? Have a look at how two families have made charitable giving part of their family life.

Meet Jasper & Felix

Felix likes science and Jasper likes colouring — and they both like giving to causes they care about. To make giving fun and easy, their parents set up a charitable allowance for their kids.

“It can be a bit hard making giving a lifestyle with kids,” says Andrea, mom to Felix and Jasper. “So we always try to just make giving something that they can really connect with and understand. We try to make it very personal and connected to their lives and the people around them.”

10% For Charity

Henry Cromack has decided to follow the 52 week saving challenge  and give 10% of all his savings to charity at the end of the year.

To support their son, his parents are giving him small dollar amounts for chores done, such as babysitting his two younger siblings or bringing the recycling downstairs.

“I like to save money for charity because there are many kids who don’t have the chances that I have, so I can give them something,” Henry says. Because he’s a big sports fan and plays soccer himself, he plans on giving the money saved for charity to “sports causes that pays for kids to get equipment”.

If he sticks with his plan, he will have $138 to give away. Not bad at all for an 11-year old!

[tw-divider]How Chimp Can Help You Start A Charitable Allowance[/tw-divider]

Ready to start your own charitable allowance? Set up a free Chimp account and “pool” your family’s charitable dollars in a Giving Group.

A Giving Group is like your own fundraising page for your family and makes it easy to give money away to any charity — or charities — in Canada. You even get a tax receipt for your donation emailed to you right away.  

Start giving with your family on Chimp or learn more about how you can make giving a family matter.