Today We Teach Service – For You and For Them
It’s crisis time, and you are in charge of your child’s schooling. But you are strong. You are adaptable. If you stumble, you get back up again. You will succeed in teaching your children to learn!
According to the recipe in the last post, you are cooking up some love of learning with curiosity and humility. Remember to include the quality resources as your main ingredients and mix it up in a positive learning environment. Sprinkle in some modeling (as in, your kids should see you read a book too). Add a dash of fun.
While that pot simmers on the burner, what’s next?
Ever talk to a perennial graduate student at a dinner party? He’s a collector of sorts, though his catch is not the rare lunar moth or Picasso painting. Doctoral degrees are what he pins to his wall. And while he is most practiced in the art of learning, able to answer any question–without Google’s help– somehow he emits an unsettling air of imbalance. He functions but is missing something from his life.
Service
Learning for the sake of learning is fantastic. However, knowledge only truly comes to fulfillment when it is used to serve others. Therefore, we believe that teaching our children about Service is one of the most crucial endeavors to undertake.
This mission can be fun! It can be easy. Most importantly, in our current climate of fear and uncertainty, it can be heroic.
In Resilience Parenting, we posit that Service comes in four easy-to-explain categories. Teach these to your kids, then brainstorm projects you can undertake in the next few days to bring some service to our world. Given this time of isolation, create ways to connect to others in positive, constructive ways. You will change the course of someone’s day, perhaps the outcome of his life!
Gifts
Well-placed gifts relieve a need, either physical or emotional. Young children can pick flowers to leave on someone’s doorstep. Older ones can invest themselves further by making a gift, maybe a letter or a drawing to let the receiver know she is in their thoughts. Money makes a great gift, and older children will benefit from setting aside part of their earnings to donate to a cause they deem worthy.
Kids love receiving gifts. Teach them to understand the joy they bring by being on the other side of the equation. Giving little gifts in childhood sets a precedent for adulthood, enabling our children to experience the fulfillment created by serving others in simple ways.
Labor
Working to help someone else is perhaps the classic form of service. This category includes every kind of work on another’s behalf, from doing a neighbor’s grocery shopping, cooking her a meal, or tending to her unruly garden. Get creative with how you can involve your children in serving the elders in your community from a safe distance. How about playing them a song on that musical instrument your son is supposed to be practicing? Or playing a game of charades through a window or a video chat?
Labor-based service for children also includes age-appropriate household chores like setting the table and taking care of the pets. Even the littlest children can be taught to perform tasks like folding dishtowels and wiping dust. If having your children at home has put a strain on your ability to accomplish home management, now is the time to teach them how to help!
Acts of Justice
We can improve the lives of others by helping them maintain their human rights. To do so, we need not have money or the ability to labor, but only the strength of our voices and our resolve to stand for the fair treatment of others.
A small child can promote fairness by learning to take turns. A young person can assert the rights of another by standing up to a bully. A teenager can confront a peer who makes racist, classist, or sexist comments. From your home base, you can take your mind off of the virus and put it onto other current topics—ones in which your child might make a difference by drafting a letter to a senator or congressman. People who practice these kinds of acts when they are young will become adults who advocate for justice throughout life.
Teaching
Encouraging children to teach is often straightforward. They seem to naturally derive pleasure from sharing what they know. A young child can teach someone to play a game. An older child can help her friend or younger sibling with how to master long division. Teenagers can offer online lessons on how to knit or throw a good roundhouse kick.
Teaching might be viewed as the highest form of service, for it provides a person with aid in perpetuity. By teaching your kids—about service, learning, integrity—about anything—you are providing them with the promise of a functional and fulfilling life. What’s more, you will find that by teaching, you yourself will experience fulfillment, and will trade feelings of anxiety from our current pandemic for feelings of hope for the future.