How to Help Your Children Develop a Heart for Service

There is a formula for how to instill a desire to serve…

Here is one of my favorite quotes about giving, lending a hand, and being kind to others……

“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

Watch the video below to learn more about how you, too, can instill and pass on the desire for service projects to your kids.

When it comes to instilling the desire for service projects to your kids and really passing that desire on to them there’s a few things that you can do. In fact, we’ve learned the following formula that has transpired from intentionally mentoring my kids on giving back.

I’m going to take you back to what we did because I think it might be applicable to you.

1-We can all do it together

You see, we’ve got young adult children now that are doing their own service projects. Recently, we had one of our kiddos lead a service project locally and then take it all the way over to Africa.

If I trace that all the way back to……

Where did that start?

How did that desire get created?

I go back to one of the first service projects we did as a family. It was a food bank. Now, what’s special about a food bank that made this stick that made this really become significant for our family.

Well, number one, it was something we could all do together. It didn’t matter.

Our youngest child could do it. Our oldest child could do it. We could do it.

We realized that the one thing it had in common was all of us could do it.

2-It’s relatively easy to do

The second thing that made project service so special is that it was relatively easy for them to do.

They just had to stand in front of a table and pass out food.

Sometimes the table had only two food items or one food item, therefore, it was very easy to follow the instructions.

Learn more here about how to connect with your family using this one thing.

3-It is meaningful to all of us

The third thing is it was very meaningful. Every single one of our kids was impacted by this experience.

They talked about it for days.

We even had some of our kids that went back to the food bank and volunteered for months.

One of our kiddos that ended up being the one with the project in Africa, volunteered for years and it became very significant and very important in her life.

Overall, and as you can tell this became a really cool formula for kids lending a helping hand. This is formula you too, as parents, can use to instill service projects to your kids.

You could do the same thing and choose a project that your whole family can do and go from there.

Make sure it’s easy enough to follow the directions, so that your kids don’t get overwhelmed and get put off by the whole experience, because you want it to become meaningful to them.

When you do that, you’ll plant the seed for service inside of them.

I believe that service is like a seed and it’s our job as parents to plant that seed, nurture it, encourage it, and watch it grow.

Are you interested in achieving professional success without sacrificing personal fulfillment?

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2 Comments

  1. Mor Maty Seck on May 22, 2021 at 5:53 pm

    it is essential to come up with an idea for children to thrive at work. We all dream about it, but we don’t know exactly how to achieve it. We vaguely tell ourselves that in order to do this we need to immerse ourselves in tasks that allow us to express our full potential and also feel a deep joy.

    • Chris Davis on July 19, 2021 at 3:15 pm

      YES!! I agree with this, Mor Maty. Thank you for sharing.

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