Tithing and Offerings — Why Families Give

Why It Matters

If you had asked kids all over the world a hundred years ago how their families gave money to help others, you would have gotten very different answers. A Jewish family might have mentioned a tzedakah box on the kitchen counter. A Christian family might have talked about the tithe — a tenth of their income — going to their church. A Muslim family might have explained zakat, a yearly portion given to people in need. A Buddhist family might have told you about dana, giving to monks and to those without enough. A family with no religion at all might have said, ‘We just always put something aside for the people down the block who are having a hard year.’

These traditions look different on the outside. On the inside, though, they have a strange amount in common. All of them ask the same question: before you spend your earnings on yourself, how much are you setting aside for other people, and have you decided that amount ahead of time? The common answer is: yes, you decide ahead of time, and yes, it is a real portion, not just whatever happens to be left over.

There is a reason so many different cultures landed on this same habit. People who wait until the end of the month to decide how generous they feel almost never end up giving much. The money is already gone, or already planned for, or already spent in their head. Deciding ahead of time — before the money shows up — is how people actually manage to give meaningfully over a whole lifetime instead of just in rare bursts of feeling.

Whether or not your own family follows one of these traditions, it is worth knowing about them. Not because you have to copy anyone. Because people have been trying to solve the problem of ‘how do I make sure I actually give and do not just feel like I meant to’ for thousands of years, and some of the answers they came up with are smarter than anything you would invent on your own.

A Story

Four Families and the Same Habit

This is not one story but four short ones. They are about four families who live in different places and believe different things, and who each came up with a way of giving that they did not invent from scratch. They inherited it from their grandparents, and their grandparents inherited it before them.

The first family is Rebecca’s. She is seven. Her family is Jewish. On top of the kitchen shelf, where she has to stand on a chair to reach it, there is a small metal box with a slot in the top. It is called a tzedakah box. Whenever Rebecca’s parents get paid, they drop a few bills into it, and Rebecca drops in coins when she has them. When the box is full, the family decides together where the money should go — usually to a shelter or a food pantry. Rebecca’s mother told her that tzedakah does not really mean charity. It means something closer to justice — the idea that some of what we have was never supposed to stay only with us.

The second family is Ahmed’s. He is eight. His family is Muslim. Once a year, near the end of the holy month of Ramadan, his parents calculate a small percentage of everything they have saved, and they give it away. It is called zakat. His father explained it to him like this: “Once a year, we count up what we have and we give back a little piece of it, because none of it was ever only ours in the first place. This is how our family remembers that.” Ahmed did not love the explanation the first time he heard it, but he has been hearing it every year since he was four, and now it feels like part of what winter means.

The third family is Anh’s. She is seven. Her family is Buddhist. Her grandmother taught her about dana — the practice of giving, freely, without expecting anything back. Some months her family puts rice and food in a bowl for monks. Some months they give money or groceries to a neighbor. Her grandmother always says, “We do not give so we get something later. We give because giving is part of being a person who is not tangled up in grabbing.” Anh is not sure she fully understands yet, but she remembers the words.

The fourth family is Owen’s. He is eight. His family does not belong to any religion. His parents are not sure what they believe about most of the big questions. But every two weeks, when his father gets paid, his parents move a fixed amount — they call it the giving envelope — into a separate account. At the end of the year, they sit down together and decide which people and organizations they want to send it to. His mother told him, “We are not doing this for any god. We are doing it because your dad and I noticed that if we did not decide ahead of time, we never gave anything. So we decided.”

All four kids live in different worlds. All four kids are learning very similar habits. In Rebecca’s house it is called tzedakah. In Ahmed’s it is called zakat. In Anh’s it is dana. In Owen’s it is the giving envelope. The words are different and the beliefs underneath are different. But the actual habit — deciding ahead of time, setting aside a real portion, being faithful to that choice even when it would be easier not to — is nearly the same.

This is what grown-ups mean when they say some human truths are older than any one tradition. People who have never met each other keep inventing the same tool. That is usually a sign the tool works.

Vocabulary

Tithe

A practice, most common in the Jewish and Christian traditions, of giving a set share (often a tenth) of what you earn. The word comes from an old word for ‘tenth.’

Zakat

A practice in Islam of giving a set portion of what you have saved each year to people in need. It is one of the central duties of Muslim life.

Dana

A word from Buddhist and Hindu traditions meaning generosity or free giving — especially giving done without expecting anything in return.

Set aside

To decide in advance that some of what you have is not for you to spend on yourself. Once money is set aside, it has a different job than the rest.

Guided Teaching

Let’s look at the common pattern underneath these four families. Each family decided ahead of time how much they were going to give. They did not wait until the end of the month and try to feel generous. They made a choice before the money even showed up.

Ask your child: why do you think deciding ahead of time works better than deciding later? What happens to money once you already think of it as ‘yours to spend’?

Here is what happens. When money arrives, your brain starts making a list of what it is for. A bit for groceries. A bit for a bill. A bit for something fun. By the end of that thinking, the money feels fully claimed. Trying to squeeze a gift out of that already-claimed pile feels like losing something. But money that was set aside before you ever started planning is different. It never felt like yours to spend in the first place.

This is a simple trick, but it is also the secret of almost every giving tradition in the world. Tithe, zakat, dana, the giving envelope — they are all ways of saying: decide first, spend second. That order matters more than the specific amount.

Here is a fair question to sit with: is it still generosity if you were going to give the money anyway because it was already set aside? Or is giving only generosity when it is spontaneous?

There are two good answers. One is that generosity is not only about the moment of handing something over. It is also about the kind of person you are building over years. People who give only in big spontaneous moments are usually less generous over a lifetime than people who give a small amount faithfully every month. The habit matters more than the burst.

The other answer is that traditions like these are not supposed to replace the moments when you see a need and want to help right now. They are the foundation. The giving envelope takes care of the baseline. Spontaneous giving is on top of it. The two are not enemies — they are partners.

A thing worth remembering: many different people, in many different places, with very different beliefs, have arrived at the same basic habit. When that happens, it is usually because the habit is answering a real problem that exists for everyone, not just one group.

You do not have to pick one of these traditions. Your family may already have one, or may not. The point of this lesson is not to tell you what to believe. The point is that the problem these traditions are solving — how do people actually give, consistently, over a lifetime — is a problem worth thinking about, and the answer most humans keep rediscovering is some version of ‘decide first, set it aside, be faithful to the decision.’

For Discussion

1. 1.Why do you think so many different groups of people, who never met each other, came up with such similar habits for giving?
2. 2.What is the difference between deciding ahead of time to give and waiting to see how generous you feel at the end of the month?
3. 3.Rebecca’s mother said tzedakah is closer to ‘justice’ than to ‘charity.’ What do you think she meant?
4. 4.Anh’s grandmother said, ‘We do not give so we get something later.’ Why does it matter whether you expect something back?
5. 5.Owen’s family is not religious but still sets aside a giving envelope. Does that seem the same, different, or a mix of both compared to the other three families?
6. 6.If your family already sets aside money for giving, how did they decide on the amount? If they don’t, would you want to talk about starting?
7. 7.Is it harder to give a lot at once, or to give a little faithfully every month? Which one do you think changes a person more over time?

Practice

Your Own Set-Aside

1. 1.Find a small container — a jar, a box, an envelope. Label it something honest: ‘giving jar’ is fine, or whatever word your family uses.
2. 2.With a parent, decide a small, specific amount or share of your own money (from allowance, jobs, gifts) that will always go into the jar first, before you spend anything on yourself. Pick something small enough you can really do it — a dime from each dollar, or a fixed amount per week.
3. 3.Every time you get money, put the giving share into the jar first. The rest is yours to plan. Do not skip the giving share even if you really want something this week.
4. 4.After four weeks, sit down with your parent and talk about where the jar money should go. You decide together.
5. 5.After you give the money away, write one sentence about whether the habit of setting it aside first made giving easier or harder than you expected.

Memory Questions

1. 1.What is the common pattern underneath tithe, zakat, dana, and the giving envelope?
2. 2.Why does deciding ahead of time work better than waiting to see how generous you feel at the end of the month?
3. 3.Name one of the four traditions in the story and say, in your own words, what it means.
4. 4.Is a planned gift still real generosity? Why or why not?
5. 5.What does it mean to ‘set money aside,’ and how does set-aside money feel different from regular money?
6. 6.Why might it be a sign of something true when very different people invent almost the same habit?