The Share jar is one of the great inventions of early-childhood financial education. It teaches kids — gently, on a small scale — that some money should go to people who aren't us. Beautiful concept. Lovely intention.
Until you get to the part where your 5-year-old looks at the jar, which now has $6 in it, and asks: "What do we do with this?"
And you, frankly, haven't thought about it. You'd been so focused on the concept of sharing that you'd forgotten to plan the application. So you stall. "We'll... figure it out... soon." Translation: probably never, until the jar is full and the question becomes urgent again.
Here's how to actually make the Share jar do its job. Specifically. Tangibly. In ways that mean something to a kid whose entire concept of generosity is currently rooted in handing over the last goldfish cracker to a sibling, sometimes.
Why abstract charity fails young kids
Adults can write a check to a charity and feel like they've done something good. The good feeling comes from understanding, abstractly, that the money will be used for good purposes by people we trust.
Five-year-olds can't do that.
If you say "we're going to donate this to UNICEF," a 5-year-old hears, basically, Mom is going to give my $6 to a stranger I have never seen for reasons I do not understand. Not a great pitch. Not surprisingly, they often resist. "But what does UNICEF do? Where does the money go? Why?" These are real questions, and the abstract answer doesn't satisfy them.
The fix: make charity specific. A specific person, a specific thing, a specific outcome. The more concrete, the more it lands.
The specific-person principle
A 5-year-old can absolutely understand: "Some kids don't have enough food. We're going to use this money to buy food and bring it to a place where they pick it up." That works because it has:
- A specific who (kids who don't have enough food)
- A specific what (food)
- A specific action (we go buy it and bring it)
Notice the kid is part of the action. Not just writing a check — actually going somewhere, doing the thing, seeing the place.
Compare to: "We're donating to a food bank." For an adult, those mean the same thing. For a 5-year-old, the second is abstract; the first is a Saturday afternoon errand they can imagine.
What this looks like in practice
Some specific applications that work for kids ages 4-7:
Food bank donations, kid-chosen. Take your kid to the grocery store with the Share jar's contents. Let them pick which items to buy. Six dollars buys maybe three cans of something or a couple boxes of pasta. Then drive to the food bank or drop-off location together. Let your kid hand the items to the volunteer. That handover is the lesson.
The "buy a friend" model. Many communities have angel-tree-style programs at Christmas where kids get to pick a wish-list item for another kid. Your kid uses Share-jar money to buy that specific item for that specific other kid. Maya wanted a stuffed animal. We got her this one. We don't know Maya, but she'll know someone got her something. That's the cleanest, most kid-comprehensible version of giving I've ever seen work.
Animal shelter food or supplies. Lots of kids respond to animals more readily than to abstract human causes. Buying a bag of dog food or some cat toys for the local shelter — and visiting the shelter to drop it off — is a tangible chain your kid can follow from start to finish.
The classroom or community fund. If your kid's school has a "we're collecting for X" thing going, that's a natural fit. The recipients are part of their world, not abstract.
Library or Little Free Library books. A used-bookstore voucher or buying a new book to drop in a Little Free Library lets your kid see the result. Some other kid is going to find this book and read it. Big idea, simple action.
Letting them pick (within reason)
The thing that consolidates the lesson is letting your kid pick what they care about. The first time you sit down with the Share jar at $5 or $10, instead of telling them what you're going to do with it, ask:
"There's $7 in here. What's something or someone you'd want to help?"
You will sometimes get answers you didn't expect. My son once said he wanted to give his Share jar to "the man with the bag at the bus stop" — someone he'd noticed who looked like he was sleeping rough. We didn't end up handing money directly to that man, but we used the conversation to look up the local shelter together, and the $7 went there in a way that felt connected to what he'd actually noticed.
The point isn't that they pick the most efficient charity. The point is that the act of caring about something they noticed — and following through with a small action — wires in a habit. The efficiency they can learn later. The caring they have to build now.
Frequency matters more than amount
A $50 donation once a year is more impressive on paper than five $5 donations across the year. But for a 5-year-old's brain, the five smaller gestures do far more.
Each Share-jar empty-out is a chance to revisit why we do this. Each one builds the small ritual of here is some of our money; some of it goes to other people; this is what families do. Repetition is what wires it in. A single big gesture is more like a one-time spectacle.
So aim for 4-6 small Share-jar empty-outs per year, around $5-10 each. Don't overthink it. Don't optimize. Just keep the rhythm.
When they don't seem to "get it"
A real warning: your 5-year-old will, sometimes, not seem to feel anything when you do this. They'll hand over the food at the food bank with the bored face of someone running an errand. They'll watch the dog at the shelter and ask if they can go home now.
This is fine. The feeling will come later. Right now, they're laying down the behavior. The emotional understanding catches up, usually somewhere around age 7 or 8. Don't force the emotion. Don't make them say something gracious to the volunteer. Just let the action happen.
By age 10, kids who've been doing the Share-jar ritual since they were 4 have a kind of casual generosity that's striking. They notice need. They suggest small actions. They don't think of giving as a special category of behavior — it's just something families do. That's the whole arc.
The $6 in the jar is the starter, not the prize. The point is what you build around it.