Growing up generous: kids and giving
For young people, as for adults, a right relationship with money is important for our physical, mental and spiritual health.
Let’s be clear from the get-go. We don’t want our our children and young people to help solve any financial problems in our church. We don’t expect our children and young people to help solve financial problems in our church. There’s way much more at stake.
Star Trek: the Next Generation featured The Borg, an aliens collective who tried to assimilate every other species. Their motto: Resistance is Futile. Not for the crew of The Enterprise. Not for us.
Our young people need to build early in life the twin habits of financial capability and generosity. We want to gift them the freedom to resist. To make lifestyle and discipleship choices in our consumer society.
Under pressure
It’s not easy to make good choices around money. Not for kids. Not for adults. Advertising to young people is an industry worth over £100m each year. Our young people have more money to spend than earlier generations, and way more people telling them how to spend it. Twenty years ago, the National Consumer Council found that 80% of kids aged 10-12 had a passion for conspicuous consumption - and it’s not got better since then.
Advertising is more than TV, billboards and magazines. Think social media, influencers, peer to peer marketing, adverts embedded in electronic games. Think peer pressure; the symbolic value of technology'; famous brands. Parents are under pressure as well. They want to prevent bullying. They want their kids to fit in. And yes, they know what ‘pester-power’ feels like.
The hard truth also is that deprivation makes a difference. And that children pick up on and are all too aware of adult anxieties around the cost of living crisis.
All age resources
Thing is, kids learn sharing and generosity from a young age. At school there are all kinds of ways children engage with generous giving, from Comic Relief to Operation Christmas Child. It’s foundational to a healthy attitude to money and possessions - and to mature discipleship.
We’re building all age resources around generous living and giving into all the themed worship and preaching resources on our website. They are a small part of a big picture. We’re definitely not asking our young people to give to solve our church money worries. We do want to help our young people:
to build their financial capability and maturity and not be overwhelmed as they grow
to make sense of and critically assess the advertising culture all around them
to listen carefully in a noisy consumer culture to a still small voice which invites generosity and connects their growing faith with the world in which they are growing up.
Adult anxiety
Here’s the thing, and there’s just no getting around it. We can only talk about money with our kids when we can talk about it ourselves. Our adult anxieties are just that. Adult anxieties. There’s no reason to avoid the issue with our kids. They’re living with it. There’s no reason to not prepare our kids for the world all around them. They’re living in it.
Resistance isn’t futile
Like the Borg, our consumer culture wants to assimilate all of us, adults and kids. It wants us to be good consumers. And if people don’t have money, if they can’t spend then, in the powerful words of Zygmunt Baumann, the poor are redefined as ‘flawed consumers’. But resistance is not futile.
Parents and pastors, Sunday school teachers and youth leaders, let’s give our our kids a fighting chance. It’s possible to grow up generous in a complex, consumer world.
The gift of gratitude
Gratitude anchors our hearts and our minds to what we have been given rather than being swept along with the desire for more. We can learn gratitude, and teach our kids. It’s the fruitful soil that grows generosity.