Teaching My (Young) Kids to Have Servant Hearts

Guest Post by Leigh Ann of Meal Baby

One of my goals as a parent is to teach my children to love with a servant heart. However, as mom to a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, it is often difficult to find opportunities for young children to serve or volunteer in the traditional sense.

 

I have learned to think outside the box in finding or even creating our own ways to serve others. In December, we created our own “Fun Run” where we invited our friends to bring toys to donate to a local rescue mission as an entry fee into our race. My girls were involved in every step of the planning, the event, and the toy donation. It was a great lesson in giving to others, along with bonus lessons in planning, organization, and fun with exercise!

 

 

 

 

Recently our neighbor’s beloved dog of 14 years passed away. My girls helped me with a simple (and delicious) recipe for a fruit cobbler. While the cobbler was baking they colored coloring sheets with a sympathy note that I printed from online. When our neighbor arrived home from work that day we made our special delivery and talked about how our neighbor was sad and we were doing something nice to help cheer her up a little.

 

It does require you to be intentional, but if you look around there are always ways to find teachable moments of loving and serving others. One way your whole family can be involved in serving someone else is by preparing a meal for someone in need, or even preparing a meal as a “just because.” Wouldn’t that be awesome if someone showed up at your door with dinner for you “just because”!? Certainly young children can be involved with some of the preparation even if it is just scribbling “love notes” on some coloring sheets while you cook dinner for a new mom, or putting sprinkles on cookies for the new neighbors who just moved in.

 

To top it all off, all of these experiences are a great time to practice our letter M verse from our ABC Bible Verses book:

 

“My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.” 1 John 3:18

Leigh Ann is a stay-at-home-mom to two little girls. She is also the Marketing Director for MealBaby.com. MealBaby is an easy (and free!) online tool that allows you to create a meal registry for someone in need – such as when a new baby is born, following surgery, during extended illness, relocation, job loss, or the grief of losing a loved one