Soapbox: Don't Make a Good Thing Bad

This won't take long, I promise. This time of year it is very popular to try to teach children altruism, the importance of giving to others.  This is a good thing.  Unfortunately sometimes the way organizations and groups do this turns it into a not so good thing.  Case in point:  Local school always does food drive this time of year.  They used to do it by placing large boxes in the hallways and kids who brought stuff in would just place it in the box as they arrived at school.  That was great.

Then they started totaling the boxes and keeping track from year to year, trying to beat the previous year's total.  Still OK. The next step was putting collection boxes in each room, and now I was starting to get nervous. [I don't like social pressure that accents the haves and the have-nots in a classroom.] Now they have gone over the edge... they now have competition between each homeroom for the most collected in that grade and between the grades for the most collected.  The winning homeroom gets a pizza party and the winning grade gets a special privilege.  NOT good!

Why does that bother me?  Because I watched children being pushed and pushed to bring in more and more and more.  I saw children bragging about how they went to the store and bought the food and then put it in the homeroom box with great fanfare, counting each item. I saw children whose parents were both unemployed bringing in canned goods that they needed themselves, because they didn't want to be teased or to be the "reason" why their class "lost." The result was children who felt badly, who felt guilty and even worse than they already did about their family's condition, who felt the have-not of their lives and the choice of whether to be honest or keep the "shame" a secret.  This is NOT great. This is NOT ok.  You don't have to stop doing the good thing.  Just ....don't make the good thing bad.  Let it stay a good thing.

Image credit: newhopespringmills.org, blogs.consumerreports.org