Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not just a time for reflection on the civil rights leader’s legacy. It is also a day of service in remembrance of his call to action to help others. To help families celebrate MLK Day, a federal holiday observed the third Monday of January, and teach children the value of his message, we’ve compiled some suggestions.

Learn about MLK

There are many great books and videos to help children of all ages, on their own and with parental guidance, learn more about King’s life and dedication to combat racism and inequality.

Videos

BrainPOP, an online educational resource for children, offers free animated videos and related educational materials:

• For children in grades K through three, the six-minute video on King is accompanied by quizzes and links to age-appropriate videos on other important figures in Black history.
• For children in grades four through eight, this video also comes with links to historic newspaper articles and extra reading material on King’s accomplishments.
• BrainPop also offers a short animated summation of civil rights history in the United States aimed at older children.

If your kids don’t need animation, Free School offers a nice six-minute bio of King’s life and work.

And, of course, you can hear and watch King’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech” together.

Books

Younger children will enjoy My Daddy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., written by his son, Martin Luther King III, and illustrated by A.G Ford. It offers a glimpse into the family life of a crucial figure in this nation’s history.

Let the Children March is a multi-award-winning picture book by Monica Clark-Robinson with illustrations by Frank Morrison about African American children who marched for civil rights in Alabama after listening to King speak.

Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., written by Doreen Rappaport and illustrated by Bryan Collier, puts the civil rights leader’s words in context. It adds additional straightforward text and powerful images.

Mature tweens and teens may like the graphic novel March: Book One by the late civil rights pioneer and U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin with illustrations by Nate Powell. Starting with Lewis’ upbringing in Alabama, the 128-page book covers his life-changing meeting with King and its influence on his efforts to bring about racial justice and fairness.

Volunteer, serve to celebrate MLK Day

If you celebrate MLK Day by volunteering to help others in some way, you are following one of King’s sagest pieces of wisdom. “Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve,” King said. “You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” AmeriCorps, an independent agency of the U.S. government focused on service, suggests several ways for the whole family can volunteer to celebrate MLK Day, such as:

• Bringing meals to homebound neighbors
• Organizing a food donation drive to benefit a local food pantry
• Create community green spaces by planting trees, grass, and flowers, especially in locations that may lack adequate green space
• Clean up a park or abandoned space
• Shovel elderly neighbors’ walkways, clear leaves or help with other yard maintenance

Points of Light, an international nonprofit dedicated to engaging people and resources in solving social problems through voluntary service, offers several resources to help you celebrate MLK Day through education and activity, including several DIY projects families can undertake.

Other ideas include:

• Build a Little Free Library for your neighborhood.
• Write greeting cards or letters to cheer deployed military personnel through Soldier Angel, or to isolated senior citizens through Letters Against Isolation.
• Organize a clothing donation drive to benefit a local shelter

Photo: © Atomazul / Adobe Stock.

Do you ever get tired of parenting in our “selfie” culture? While many recent self-esteem movements have nurtured children’s healthy development, it seems other cultural trends have fostered their self-absorption. (We could begin with the coinage of the word “selfie” and its widespread practice on social media.)

So how can parents counteract selfie culture and its ongoing attack on empathy? There are many strategies, but two have been most powerful for our family:

• When the children are young, practice empathy in the home.
• As children age, find ways to practice empathy outside the home — e.g., through volunteer work.

Many experts agree that qualities like empathy, or “emotional literacy,” are learned gradually by young children via family life. Simple habits modeled by parents at home like communicating face-to-face (without technology), listening intently to each other’s needs, and caring for younger siblings or a pet lay the groundwork for children to develop empathy. Empathy can also be developed by reading literature or watching films together that explore unfamiliar perspectives.

When children reach elementary school age, having the whole family do volunteer work together can be an effective way to build empathy as well as strengthen family bonds. Finding volunteer opportunities can be challenging, but try asking fellow parents and researching local religious organizations, civic or government institutions, and places like soup kitchens. When our two daughters were that age, my wife and I discovered a family program at a local food bank that helped introduce them to the value of service work. It also began to open their eyes to the needs of less-fortunate people.

Ideally, by the time your children are teenagers, your family life will have immunized (or least partially protected) them against the onslaught of selfie culture that spews from cell phones and social media. But continue to help them find volunteer opportunities, especially ones they want to fulfill by themselves. Some high schools require a certain number of “service hours” to graduate, and that is a noble intention. But it risks making volunteer work a “have to” rather than a “want to.”

Youth Challenge impact on our daughters

Six years ago, our teen daughters were fortunate enough to find a local volunteering program called Youth Challenge. Youth Challenge pairs youth volunteers (starting at age 12) with physically disabled children to play adaptive sports together. Our daughters’ volunteering began as a service, but they soon gained much more.

At first, the Youth Challenge volunteers and participants are brought together by their differences. But gradually they realize they have much in common. They are all young people who enjoy getting to know each other, playing sports, exchanging high fives, laughing at jokes and just plain having fun. In the process, they even become friends, and the participants help the teen volunteers learn how to overcome adversity in their own lives.

Youth Challenge has even impacted the way my oldest daughter — who just started college — thinks about her future. She knows that whatever career path she pursues, a key priority will be helping people.  She has a much better understanding of the value of nonprofit agencies that help fulfill the needs of community members. She has also developed a healthy awareness of her physical privilege, which has bolstered her sense of fairness and access.

Perhaps the most valuable — though invisible — benefit of a volunteering program like Youth Challenge is that it helps growing children crystallize their sense of self. They become more confident in what they stand for as individuals, and less fearful of people who seem different from them. They may still take plenty of fleeting teen selfies, but their actual self-image becomes more rooted through volunteering.

Volunteer photo by rawpixel on Unsplash