The Opposite of Spoiled

by Ron Lieber

  Two tactics can help make the giving experience more meaningful. First, try to give money in the kids’ names once in a while, even if it means losing out on a tax deduction. Once this happens, they’ll start getting their own solicitation mail. Not only do many children love getting letters when they’re first learning to read, but it’s fascinating to see how young children respond to the pitches and the perks.

  Bruce Kimmel, a father of three in Saint Paul, Minnesota, started having his kids give at an early age. Not only did they love getting the mail, they were also hooked by the conservation organization that sent out stuffed toy lemurs to children who gave $50 or more. In contrast, the local zoo sent only mail and no gifts, so it dropped off the kids’ giving list. It’s completely normal for kids to be swayed and probably harmless in the moment. But offering the gifts isn’t all that dissimilar to the tactics that I see credit card companies and brokerage firms using in my work as a personal finance columnist, where they offer tens of thousands of frequent flier miles to potential customers. Point out to children when they’re being manipulated this way, just so they begin to recognize these offers and rewards as the marketing pitches that they are.

  The second tactic to use with younger children is for them to give the money in person. This will work only with local organizations, but it’s worth doing at least once; one study has shown that smaller kids are much more likely to be generous when they know that somebody else is watching. If the choice is a zoo or a museum or a school or a shelter, call up the development office and ask if they’d mind accepting a donation from a child in person. My daughter decided to give six months of her accumulated Give money to a nonprofit that raises money for research on hearing loss. Her cousin is hearing-impaired, and I’m not sure I’ll ever forget the look on my sister-in-law’s face when my daughter handed over the money. Hopefully, my daughter won’t either.

  Next Step: Giving Without Benefits

  After a few years of giving, consider introducing a new challenge that I learned about from Catherine Newman, who blogs about her two children from Amherst, Massachusetts. Like the Kimmel kids who loved the lemurs they got in exchange for their donations, Newman’s daughter enjoyed the stuffed otter that she got for giving to the World Wildlife Federation. Eventually, the family instituted a rule that required at least some of their kids’ giving budget go to helping people. Animals are cute and easy to care about; thinking about humans in need is hard. But part of the point of the exercise here is to ask kids to consider the hardships of others. Whether these gifts are local ones to food banks or homeless shelters or donations to global organizations, they benefit people who probably have much less than our kids do. Whenever children can grasp that idea, we should ask them to increase the portion of their Give money that goes to organizations that help other people we do not know directly.

  This is often a harder thing for adults to accomplish than it is for kids. About one-third of all charitable donations in the United States go to the religious institutions where we worship. That money supports plenty of good deeds, whether it’s making services available to all comers or doing work in the larger community and the world. Still, it’s at least partly self-interested; the tax-deductible contributions give us a place to bow our heads and reflect with paid clergy who may also provide religious instruction to our children. Plenty more money goes to our various alma maters. Some of it replenishes the scholarship funds that allowed us to afford these schools in the first place, so it feels like a moral obligation to give. But that money is not helping the people in the world who need it most, at least not directly.

  There is no hypocrisy in setting one giving rule for children as a teaching exercise and having different guidelines for ourselves. Part of what we’re trying to do as our kids approach adolescence is help them consider the lives of people outside their own small community. Once they do, however, they’ll begin to question our own charitable choices, especially if we’re giving plenty of money to organizations that we have a stake in. So be forewarned. Still, this questioning of priorities is something we should welcome, and there’s one great way to invite the conversation as they grow older.

  Letting Children Participate in the Charity Budget

  The best way to help kids learn about giving is to give them a literal seat at the table when the grown-ups make decisions about donations. This may involve some adjustments in our routine. It also means making an actual household giving budget and thinking about it as one large pie that we divide consciously and conscientiously.

  Start by reviewing last year’s numbers, as my wife and I recently did with our daughter, who had just turned 8. We didn’t tell her the dollar amounts, and she didn’t ask, though we probably will give her the totals in a few years. Instead, we took 100 dried beans and put them on the dining room table. Then we took some scratch paper and made labels representing all the organizations we had supported the previous year. A donation to provide malaria nets in developing countries accounted for about 25 percent of our giving, so we moved 25 beans next to that label. We repeated this with all of the beans and all of the donations. As we did so, we explained to her how we had heard of the organization (if she wasn’t already aware of it) and why it was important to us.

  Next, we handed over a pile of mail, all the solicitations that had arrived from charitable organizations in the previous three months. One surprise was how our daughter applied her understanding of wants and needs to the giving conversation. A solicitation from a public art fund didn’t pass muster with her because she didn’t think that new statues in a park were a true need. She also rejected a solicitation from an organization where she’d once taken dance lessons, because it didn’t explain how it would help kids who could not afford the fees. Using similar logic, she wanted to support a scholarship fund at her camp to help other kids attend. She did not question too many of my wife’s and my priorities, so we did not need to rearrange many of the beans to make her feel included. We know that challenges from her will come in time though.

  Watching my daughter’s mind work in this way was one of the highlights of the holiday season for me, even if I didn’t always agree with her choices. We ended up turning over less than 5 percent of the giving budget to her and plan to increase it bit by bit in future years. For families with one child, there isn’t much negotiation involved. Families with two or more kids will need a system for decision making, though it could also be fun to let the kids sort it out themselves. Can they come to a consensus and perhaps have more impact with a larger donation to fewer organizations? Or will they split the kids’ portion of the budget among themselves and make their own decisions? Ask them to explain themselves and report back on the organizations they chose and why. What swayed them about a local organization as opposed to a global one? Why disease, say, and not poverty?

  Laura Sundquist, a financial planner who lives in New Hartford, Connecticut, has taken a different approach, making giving a more regular event. On January 1, each of her two sons gets 12 checks for a modest amount of money with the line for “Pay to the Order of” left blank. Each month, they think about a cause that’s important to them and send the check off. She tries to encourage them to learn a bit about the organization they’re sending money to as well. One of her sons is a cancer survivor and has given money to a research organization in that area. The boys have also donated to a town fund that helps people in need, U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, a group that raises awareness of Down syndrome (which a cousin was born with) and a jog-a-thon to raise money to build a new playground. With regular practice, they seem to have settled on an eclectic mix of charitable organizations that touch them personally and do good deeds for people they do not know.

  Consider taking the blank-check approach to gift giving when a holiday or birthday rolls around. One approach my family has tried is to gift three checks to the kids in our extended circle, along with a short explanation. One check that we write is for the recipient’s college savings fund, if we’re
reasonably sure that it isn’t going to be easy for the family to pay for college themselves. Another goes toward a bit of mad money that the recipient can spend on anything at all. The third check has the “To” part left blank, with instructions to send it to an organization that needs it and a request to let us know which cause got the money and why.

  How Much to Give, and of What

  Once giving becomes a regular activity in families, the topic will probably come up spontaneously on a fairly regular basis. For those of us who want to stoke the conversation a bit, we can make a ritual of talking about something we did that day or that week that helped someone else. Who was it? Why did we do it? How did it make us feel? For parents who are weary of the monosyllabic answers our kids give when we’re actually able to sit down for dinner as a family, the conversation starters from the Central Carolina Community Foundation may be helpful. Its “Talk About Giving” box comes with dozens of cards with a single provocative question on each:

  “What is our family’s history of helping?”

  “What do you appreciate most about our town?”

  “If we were to live on less money, what could we do without?”

  “What’s something you’re willing to do without right now?”

  Those last two questions can be particularly consequential, since your kids may surprise you with what they’re willing to give up. If you decide to honor their request, it could change all of your lives. This is what happened to Kevin Salwen, a journalist, and his wife, Joan King Salwen, a consultant-turned-educator, when their Atlanta-based family first started having serious discussions about giving. They didn’t have many dinnertime rituals during their first 14 years as parents besides asking someone to say a quick blessing. It was accomplishment enough that the family managed to dine together at all most nights, even if the conversation often centered on the logistical puzzle of getting their teenage daughter, Hannah, and her younger brother, Joseph, to their various activities. They came home each day to a 6,500-square-foot house complete with Corinthian columns and an elevator that led to Hannah’s bedroom. People walking through the neighborhood often stopped to take pictures.

  The family was charitable, giving away about 3 percent of its income each year, but the parents wrote the checks and the kids didn’t know much about it. Still, there was no reason for Joan and Kevin to think that the kids were brooding over whether they were fully meeting their responsibilities to their fellow human beings. But one day, as Hannah and her father pulled up to a stoplight next to a large Mercedes and spotted a homeless man on the street, she made an observation. “If that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” she said. Kevin sensed that he hadn’t heard the last from her on the topic, and sure enough, she brought it up that night at dinner. “She wanted to know why we were not better participants in closing the world’s disparities,” Kevin said, sitting across from Joan in an interview 6 years after that meal. “We all slowed down to think about where we were.”

  Joan and Kevin soon realized that their giving hadn’t made any impact on their kids. At first, they were defensive with their daughter and tried to list all the checks they had written, but they realized how that sounded. “Soulless” is how Kevin described it. “We needed something the kids could feel.” Hannah kept questioning their commitment and generosity, and eventually, Joan pushed back.

  “What do you want to do?” she asked her daughter. “Sell our house? Move into a smaller one and give what’s left over to charity?”

  Yes, in fact. That’s exactly what Hannah wanted to do.

  With the benefit of hindsight, Hannah’s parents can see hints of what led to her strong feelings in general, and about money and justice in particular. Some of it was nature; she had been literally an outward-facing baby, preferring to look out at the world from her Baby Björn. Her parents read her and her brother stories aloud from the newspaper that raised complicated ethical questions. They encouraged her to work, and she babysat and had a business making blankets. She volunteered at a food bank, and her parents let her work at a restaurant for homeless people, though they did check it out for safety first. She also loved Chicken Soup for the Soul stories.

  “She would memorize them,” Joan recalled.

  “The more saccharine, the better,” Kevin added, as they both broke out laughing.

  So perhaps Joan should have known better than to push Hannah’s buttons with what amounted to a dare. “Maybe another parent would have said ‘OK, that’s enough, we’ve explained our generosity and our involvement in the community, and it’s time to drop it,’” she said. “In a way, this was my way of saying that: ‘For heaven’s sake, how far do you want to go?’” Except Hannah really did want to go halfway to zero, cutting her family’s living space to a still generous 3,000 square feet or so and giving away whatever was left over after they sold one house and bought another.

  Now, put yourself in Joan and Kevin’s shoes as a parent. At the time, they had no mortgage and knew they had enough saved for retirement and college that giving away half of the equity in their home wouldn’t destroy them financially as long as neither one of them got sick or injured. And they’d managed to raise a child committed enough to the world to give up a bit of comfort for whatever good might come from that sacrifice. Shouldn’t they be proud? How much could they learn together if they said yes? And how much fun would it be to give a bunch of money away now, instead of in a will when they were dead, or to some future grandchildren that they might not live to see?

  So they said yes. They put the house on the market for just under $2 million, bought another for $962,000, and ended up giving nearly $1 million through a six-year pledge, even though the original house sold for only $1.4 million amid a real estate downturn. They would not tell me (and still haven’t told their kids) what percentage of their net worth that contribution represented, but they did not have to put Hannah’s or Joseph’s college tuition at risk.

  As for what they did with the money, figuring it out was a large enough project that Kevin and Hannah wrote a book about it called The Power of Half, easily the most inspiring work I read during the years I spent researching this book. Right away, they established that all four of them were going to have full and equal voting rights on where and how they would give the money away. They agreed that any project should meet the following specifications: They wanted to solve one problem completely, see a project through to completion, have the project be in Africa, work with an organization that had expertise in the area and that allowed the recipients to control the donation. Ultimately, they decided to pay for two epicenters in Ghana and the staff that would work there—buildings that serve as meeting halls, micro-lending banks, food-storage facilities, and health centers that include small residences for nurses. With the help of experts, they saw the projects through, including training for the staff, and visited the completed buildings.

  “Only now do we look back at our old life and marvel at what we used to be,” Kevin said, six years out from Joan’s challenge and Hannah’s (and, eventually, Joseph’s) affirmative response. “I don’t think we were bad parents or a bad family, but we were so far from whole. What we gained outstripped what we had, in terms of the closeness of our family relationships, in terms of the richness of our lives. We got to go to Africa, to understand how subsistence farmers live and the kinds of decisions they make, how extraordinarily creative they are, when all we would have done otherwise is read about it in a book. Our lives are so much fuller now. I don’t think it’s even close.” Joan is still an educator, while Kevin writes and is a board member for organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Year Up.

  When you give away half your home equity and write a book about the experience, it’s natural to hope that other people will be inspired to do their own good works. And once The Power of Half was published in 2010, a handful of other similar initiatives did spring into action. After hearing about the Salwens, a lawyer in Los Angeles named Tony Tolbert moved in with hi
s mother and handed over his house keys to a local homeless family. They stayed in his home for a year. “It’s the damn most flattering thing I’ve ever heard,” Kevin Salwen said.

  Tolbert is single, but there is at least one family that also traded down after hearing about the book. The Solimene family lived in Barrington, Illinois, a suburb where equestrian-minded Chicago families often keep their horses. Husband Mick grew up middle class, earned an MBA at the University of Chicago, and forged a successful career in finance, working with troubled companies. Wife Keely came from a family that struggled financially, though she never realized that she lacked anything. “When I went to college, I began to understand that shoes came in boxes and didn’t come looped with a piece of plastic at Zayre,” the local discount store, she said.

  The pair had four children in fairly rapid succession, and the first big twist of generosity in their lives came when they heard about a 3-year-old girl in a Vietnamese orphanage. At the time, their youngest child was already in grade school, and some friends who had recently adopted themselves heard that this girl was available for adoption as well. She was an excellent soccer player; Mick was an ex-player himself.

  “We had no plans, adoption or otherwise,” for additional children, Keely recalled. But they decided to try to adopt the girl anyway. Once it was clear that they would be approved to take the child home, it also became apparent that separating the soccer player from a younger girl in the orphanage who she had bonded with was going to be intensely traumatic. So the Solimenes adopted them both in 2002.

  In the years since, they have returned to Vietnam often; on one trip they discovered that one of their new daughters had a twin sister elsewhere in the country. In 2008, they tracked her down and the two now Skype every weekend. The Solimenes have given money to the orphanage and to support their daughter’s twin and her family.