About Children Helping Others

You often read of children helping others in ways both big and small. It's important to society as a whole and the recipients of the help in particular to teach children service. It's a skill that not only enriches the child's life, but helps the child as she matures and better understands the world around her.

Function

• The goal of having children help others is to teach children compassion, service and respect. Typically, children are involved in helping others who are in need due to disasters--such as schools having penny drives for Hurricane Katrina survivors--or because of economic circumstances, such as annual holiday canned food drives. By making developmentally appropriate information available to children, and ensuring the help is tangible, children have the opportunity practice these important skills.

Features

• Most help that children provide to others is direct and clear--it's not an abstraction, such as a petition or particularly public, such as a sit-in. Instead, it's pennies in a jar, gently used books shared with underfunded sister schools, shoes for children in Africa or letters to soldiers.
  Scout troops provide an organized way for children to work together in a service project. They may sponsor a warmed coat drive, such as One Warm Coat, or older Scouts might help with construction with Habitat for Humanity.

Benefits

• Children who help others learn early the value and satisfaction derived from service. By exposing children gently to the varied economic conditions that people live in, the hardships that some people survive and the help that a simple can of soup can provide, you teach the child to believe in his own ability to aid others. This can build a lifelong commitment to service, a key element to many successful communities. In addition, the opportunity to help a child develop empathy--critical part of a child's development--also minimizes the potential for child to make poor choices later in life (see Resources below).

Effects

• Children helping others makes the world--from the local nursing home to the hurricane ravaged shores--a better place. Very simply, engaging children in the process of helping others eases the strife of those in need. Not only do the children learn about how to help, why to help and when to help, the recipients of the help have their burdens lightened.

Warning

• Consider carefully the level of information you provide to your child when she is engaged in a service project. For example, if she is collecting pennies to aid those who survived Hurricane Katrina, she may not be of an age where a conversation about FEMA is appropriate, nor is it wise to discuss the details and specifics of the struggles of the survivors. This may be appropriate for older children, but young children do not have the developmental capacity to process much of this information and nightmares may be the result.
  Similarly, do not use a service project for survivors of a disaster to become a launching point for disasters that may befall your geographic region--hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes. This will frighten, not enlighten, your child. Those conversations are important, but should be separated from the service project at hand.