Last Friday, Geraldine’s school had a “Hats for Haiti” fundraiser.  I didn’t send her with the dollar/hat for a few reasons, the main one being that they didn’t tell us where the money was going.  Regardless of the fact that it was only a dollar, I’m not going to give my money vaguely “to Haiti.”  The list of charities I’m willing to support is much shorter than the list of those I’m not comfortable supporting.

I had not taken the time to explain this to Geraldine, however, and she assumed that I was careless and had forgotten, which is all too often the case.  When I picked her up from school, she said she would remind me “next time it’s Hats for Haiti.”  Next time?  I asked if anyone had explained the purpose of the fundraiser to her class.  She said no, with an intonation that suggested no one had mentioned anything about it having an actual purpose.

I guess that explains the gimmicky nature of the fundraiser—you can convince kids to want to wear hats without bothering to explain anything else to them!  It reinforced my decision not to participate, but it also provided an opportunity (that I should have provided myself, in all honesty) to discuss the situation with her.

I started out by recalling what I had learned about earthquakes in an introductory course in high school…15 years ago (gasp!)…hoping I was more or less getting the information right.  I moved on to talk about what little I know about Haiti (in general), then gave a very broad overview of what happened:  “A lot of buildings collapsed, and a lot of people got hurt.”  Finally, I explained what the monetary donations were for, how it’s important to pick a charity equipped to provide the most help to the most people, and why I wasn’t comfortable giving money to Hats for Haiti.

She seemed receptive.

Then, yesterday, I overheard that the earthquake in Haiti had worked its way into their pretend play.  First of all, awesome.  I’m glad they’re tackling the big issues.  On the other hand, that led to Geraldine explaining the situation to Rhys, which meant paraphrasing the under-informed explanations I had given her.  It sounded pretty okay (i.e., she seemed to absorb a lot of what I told her), but clearly we need to take some time and expand our collective knowledge.

Reading Rockets posted an article in mid-January called “It Happened Over There: Understanding and Empathy Through Children’s Books.”  It’s a resource guide for using picture books to explain natural disasters, and contains a book list with fiction titles that explore Haitian culture and nonfiction titles that talk about earthquakes.  The plan is to work our way though a number of the books, both fiction and nonfiction.  We’ll let you know how it goes.

[ Posted in » Family + Parenting Channel ]