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| Book cover for "The Giving Manger" by Allison Hottinger and Emily King. Image source. |
So I recently bought the book The Giving Manger [affiliate link] for my son. (That link is for the set that includes the book and a small manger, but I bought just the book- don't have an Amazon link for that though.) This is an activity you can do with kids during the Christmas season, to teach them to help other people.
Basically, the book is about a family where the dad made a little wooden manger and said that throughout the month of December, any time they help people, they add a piece of straw to the manger, to get ready for baby Jesus. Because Jesus said, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, "whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me"- which means that helping other people is helping Jesus. (And, full disclosure, the idea that "helping other people is helping Jesus" is one of the most important Christian beliefs to me. Like I am SO HERE for this.)
I first heard about this activity from commenter 'Becca a year ago, and then I happened to come across this book, so yeah I'm gonna go ahead and try this with my son. He's preschool-age. We'll see what he thinks of it.
My initial thought, upon hearing about this activity, was that I don't really like the idea of... gamifying morality? Like I don't necessarily think it's good to conceptualize "doing the right thing" as ... counting up individual actions that you took? It should be more about your overall attitude towards other people. Having empathy and compassion because those are inherently good things. Helping other people because you believe that a world where people receive help for their problems is better than one where they don't. That sort of thing. Not like, doing "enough" good things to reach some personal "goal."
(Related to that: Is Christianity about how you as a individual can escape hell? Or is it about participating in building the kingdom of heaven on earth? Is the parable of the sheep and the goats meant to teach us how to get to heaven, or to teach us that we should help people who are in need? If something bad happens, but nobody can claim it's your fault, are you fine with that or does it still matter to you? Is sin bad because it separates the sinner from God, or because there is a victim who is hurt by it? Is it more important to not be called a racist, or to actually change society so that people do not suffer from the effects of racism? Even the idea of "helping other people is helping Jesus" can be seen as "gamifying morality"- shouldn't you help people simply because it's the right thing to do? [I have seen atheists criticizing Christians for that reason, but I disagree with the atheists there.])
But anyway, even though I don't think that counting up good deeds is a healthy mature adult way to view morality, I guess for children you have to start there. My son doesn't really have the concept of having compassion for people in a general abstract sense. So I guess to teach little kids about morality, you have to start out with very concrete actions they can do, and there has to be an obvious and immediate "payoff" to them.
So we'll try this out and see how it goes. Merry Christmas everybody~
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Follow-up post: "The Giving Manger" Recap
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