Giving gifts is a traditional practice in most families. On special occasions throughout the year, and especially during the holiday season, children are faced with gift-giving decisions that will shape their lifelong values about giving. If we look beyond the external act of giving gifts, research in child development tells us something important about what happen to children’s internal worlds when they give to others. The gift giving process helps shape their identities. Tell us, what are you doing to help your children and teens find meaning through their gift-giving experience? How does gift giving support your family values?
Below Are Things To Consider When Giving Gifts
Why is Giving Gifts Essential?
Understanding the importance of giving gifts is the first step to mindful giving. Children associate their birthdays and the holiday season with being receivers of gifts. According to studies on human development, it is giving gift that reaps the biggest psychological rewards.
Giving Gifts Shows Others That You Care
Positive relationships are built upon caring and respect. Even a simple card or electronic message with a note of encouragement is viewed as a gift by the recipient.
Giving Gifts Is an act of Kindness
Being kind to others improves a family’s and a community’s quality of life.
Giving Gifts Increases Well-being
Devoting personal resources on behalf of others has been found to be one of the most important predictors of satisfaction and well being.
Giving Gifts Builds Empathy
To give meaningful gifts, children must put themselves in others’ shoes to imagine “what would be meaningful to someone else”.
Giving Gifts Through Action
What values does your family hold about gift giving? How do you express those values? Parents can help children and teens citizen the internal rewards of giving by teaching them how to give back during the holidays and throughout the year.
Set a time to talk together as a family about your gift-giving values and how to put them into action. Families are often so busy during the holidays that it’s easy to go through the motions of giving gifts without connecting to deeper meaning of giving. Yet it is these deep connections that shape children’s identities, that teach them the gift of giving.
Family projects that involve giving to those in need can be turned into powerful lessons that teach compassion, empathy, and meaning to children. By adolescence, young people have the capacity to think and act independently from their parents- to give conscious attention to and become. Passionate about giving. Whatever your gifts giving traditions, it is important to revisit how your thinking has changed, and how you might want to adapt your traditions. Making children part of the dialog on gift giving. Engage their ideas and allow them to strategize with you. Studies show that when youth learn about and participate in active giving during childhood and adolescence, the internal benefits last a lifetime.
