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DD1 was 3.5 this past Christmas and that's the first time I concisely remember her understanding what it means to give. We adopt a family every year for the holidays. This year we also started filling a shoebox for operation Christmas child. We involved her in picking gifts and wrapping the presents. We were pleasantly surprised that there was no "what's for me?". Just a lot of "let's get this for the little girl!". As the girls get older we hope to involve them more in regular volunteer, donating, etc.

I think asking a kid this young to give away something of theirs is a lot to ask!

This is something we still work on almost daily. There are definitely still days where sharing with her sister is a struggle. But overall she really is quite good about it if we explain to her.

@MoonMoon: Have you heard of the book "The Opposite of Spoiled?" I haven't read it, but I've heard good things. I believe it's for an older child, but maybe it has good ideas to start aiming for in there for you.

I don't think its too young to start. But I'd probably not start with giving his things away. We get books from the dollar spot and donate them. We participate in food and pet drives. We take things to our firemen (cases of water or home baked goods).

I feel like we have always done this and this is very important to me. My oldest child is 5, but we talk about how when we are done with some things it's nice to give them away to people who aren't as fortunate as we are. We talk about what it would be like if we only had one toy instead of shelves full of toys. We talk about how fortunate we are to have pretty much everything we need and want and how we need to spread that to people who don't have as much (and not just in the material sense, I want them to learn compassion too). When the refugee crisis came to a head last fall here (we had thousands of refugees arriving in our city daily), I made a point of telling my LOs that I was taking some of our things along with new things and food to donate and I explained what was going on in an appropriate way that the older one could understand. Even last week, we had to buy two gifts and my son was adamant about wanting to pick them out. I agreed to take him shopping but I told him he couldn't have anything for himself, we were only buying for friends. We took him to the Lego store and Legos are his favorite toy. I was really impressed that he did not once ask for something and instead had fun picking out the gifts. I even complimented him on this after we had left the store. Like @yoursilverlining: said, there are plenty of ways to model and demonstrate generosity and compassion year-round.

@Moonmoon: I meant to reply to this thread the other day. I highly recommend The Opposite of Spoiled. There are lots of great ideas for a variety of age ranges for teaching generosity, money management, and long term planning. It was a great read.

We are a ways off from this but it's something I think about. I feel like telling a child to be generous can have the opposite effect. My guess is that for really young kids, the most important lesson is for them to observe you and DH being giving and generous so LO can learn that it's normal to behave that way.