Efforts abound to help kids find the 'let me' hidden among the season's 'give me'

Steinorth knows a family that sits down on New Year's Eve and creates a "calendar of giving" for the coming year. They are so much happier, they tell her, since they started to do that. Their secret is making it a habit.

Efforts to teach kids to think outside themselves should be consistent, said Steinorth.

But they don't have to be flashy, added Julia Simens, a psychologist from Incline Village, Nev., who wrote "Emotional Resilience and the Expat Child." "For me, it starts with the smallest things, like helping someone in the grocery store. It says that as a family we help other people — not just when we are in a good mood or when we can write a big check. It is part of the makeup of who we are."

When her son, G.L., was 17, they helped families affected by a flood. He didn't really want to go that day. She didn't fight him on it — she just told him she was going and he was welcome to join her.

"He very much enjoyed it," she said, noting that they handed care packages to people who couldn't get to stores and restock their supplies. They weren't in danger, but it helped them. And G.L. went "above and beyond what I initially thought he would do."

It's easiest, she said, when you start with kids young. Then it more readily becomes a way of life. Simens grew up that way, on a Kansas farm. Farmers never had money to give, she remembered, but they took care of each other.

Reaching out

"We have a problem with people not being happy in America," said author Todd Patkin, who wrote "Finding Happiness." "We've confused success with happiness and the focus is on achieve, achieve, achieve. Later, we realize it's more about having good friends and being there for others."

He knows from personal experience that it's human nature to become a lot happier when you start doing things for others, he said.

Jennifer Little, a teacher with degrees in special education and educational psychology in Portland, Ore., has spent a career working largely with low-income children and their families. She thinks schools have adopted community service policies because so many people no longer volunteer to serve in their community.

She believes people who have been in need are more likely to try to solve others' needs and said research backs it up. "I have seen this over and over in the classroom and outside it with friends living in poverty. They would give, even when it hurts them to give."

Kids don't act selfishly because they don't care. Often, they aren't taught how to give back, noted Patkin, who suggests that parents work early on instilling a passion for others in their children. And, like others who spoke to the Deseret News, he said it begins not with words, but with parents modeling the behavior in the way they live.

"I'm convinced that the 'me' generation isn't as egocentric at heart as it's made out to be," he said. "However, kids do need to be guided in a positive direction. ... Parents are the great influencers when it comes to developing their kids' habits and behaviors — including cultivating a desire to give and to help others. If they see you giving back as a part of your regular life, they'll learn that and carry it with them into adulthood."

Experts say it's a mistake to let kids think that philanthropy means money, although that's part of it. Nor, noted Patkin, is generosity "limited to giving away things you no longer want." Kids need to know why it matters whether you give. That's what leads people to adopt philanthropy as a normal part of life. Kids also need to learn that it's not "one-size-fits-all."

Kendrick asked a nurse friend who long worked with hospice and those at the end of their lives what she'd learned. "I've learned the best thing I can give — and I've done all kinds of nursing — is just to abide with people," she told him.

His own kids, now grown, often went with his wife to deliver Meals on Wheels. He took them regularly to the food bank where he volunteered. "Gratitude and giving. I find them inseparable," he said, adding humans are "happiest when giving."