Teaching Kids About Social Responsibility

Our family had a wonderful opportunity to volunteer together last weekend. Food 4 Kids Backpack Program of North Florida was recruiting families to help sort donated food for the upcoming school year. The program provides needy families with backpacks of food every Friday to hold them through the weekend. I had been trying to find ways to teach our kids about giving back. One year we prepared boxes for Operation Christmas Child and I have taken the kids to donate used toys, but I wanted something different. So when this opportunity arose, I quickly enlisted my hubby and two little ones to volunteer two hours of our Saturday morning to help out.

Operation Christmas Child

However, the kids were not as enthused as I was. Wanting to stay home and play, they fought getting out of bed, they fought getting dressed, they fought getting out the door. But, knowing this would be a great learning experience for them, I fought back. My cousin Mari always tells me, "Fight the fight." In other words, don't give in. So I finally got everyone in the car and we were on our way to make a difference.

On our way there, I explained to them the purpose of the program: to feed kids who don't always have food at home. I told them that these were kids who might even go to their schools and if we have the chance to help someone, we take it. Although it probably went over my 3-year-old's head, I think my 6-year-old understood to a degree.

Once we were there, we were assigned to a station of bagging extra items for the long weekends. The kids really got into handing me packages of raisins and bagging boxes of pasta. Once those items were exhausted, my son helped out by handing us cans of beans and soup for our assembly line. I heaped on the praise and continued to teach them how much we were helping out kids just like them.
We prepared 200 hundred bags of provisions in one hour! The kids worked hard and were exhausted, so we let them play while we boxed up backpacks with the help of some older children. It was great to see kids working hard and serving as an example to the little ones.

Pretty excited about sorting cans ;)

I'm excited to learn about more opportunities like this in our community. Though my kids might be too young to understand the concept of social responsibility, it's never too early to teach them how they can help others.