Giving is such a tricky procedure, especially when it comes to your children. Jenn Choi has a wonderful perspective on this problem. Instead of a solution, she has an approach. Except in crisis relief (and maybe even then if it's not cruel), thoughtful giving needs to be matched with thoughtful receiving. I recommend reading this short article about how she got her kids to thoughtfully receive a basket of Lego bricks.

Quartz: How to give your kids everything but a sense of entitlement, 2014-Jan-4, by Jenn Choi

[An article recently read] encourages families to make their children do chores and express thanks for their meals and other gestures. But I have young kids and those tactics felt too abstract.

And so, I turned to the best tools I have to make my kids understand: toys. Kids do not know how big or little your paycheck is. Kids do not understand what income tax or health insurance deductibles are either. However, they do know how much a Nintendo DS game cartridge costs. They know how much a Wii costs. Or a slice of pizza or a bottle of Gatorade. This is their vocabulary—their understanding of values in our material world. We can work with that. And to get our kids to understand the meaning of gratitude, we must.