Tina Wang in NCU: Revised Annotation 4

Distort the Original Intent When Volunteers Can Be a Plus
—Parents Should Lead Children by Themselves

In my third annotation, I mentioned that parents volunteering with children might improve their relationship. However, double-income parents are too busy to volunteer with children. Parents understand if children volunteer, they can learn something different from what teachers teach in school, such as service and being concerned about the disadvantaged. Still, parents depend on third parties to encourage their children to volunteer. Nowadays, a lot of schools make a rule that students have to volunteer over maybe 100 hours, or they cannot graduate. Also, our Ministry of Education gives student extra grades to encourage them to volunteer. Students are willing to volunteer due to extra grades but not wanting to help others or improving themselves; they become utilitarian.

News below is about extra grades for volunteers:

Source: http://www.ctitv.com.tw/news_video_c16v105263.html

The piece of news describes that our Ministry of Education makes a proposal to encourage students to volunteer. If students volunteer over 6 hours in a semester, they will get extra 2 grades. However, when students have volunteered for 6 hours, they will not keep volunteering. Besides, schools do not have enough volunteer jobs for so many students; they do not have enough staves to check out jobs, either. Then, the quality of volunteers is unstable.

Figure 1: Parents lead children.
Taken from: cutcaster.com

The proposal is debatable. People volunteer because they want to help others, but not wanting to get reward. The proposal reverses the purpose of volunteers. It is indeed a good thing that students volunteer spontaneously; but if students volunteer just for extra grades, it is not worth encouraging them to volunteer, because it might make students more utilitarian. If parents want to help children develop a kind heart and improve their relationship, the best way is that they themselves lead their children to volunteer! Although teachers in school sometimes take students to visit the disadvantaged, it cannot improve the patent-child relationship directly. Parents are the most important learning model for children. When children see their parents also doing what parents have talked to them, they might be more willing to follow. Also, parents and children will have more topics of conversation instead of schoolwork.

Double-income parents are busy; however, they still have to share their leisure time with children. In the morning, parents can say "Good luck!" or "Have a good day!" to their children before going to work. At the table, they can turn off the TV and talk about what happened today to each other. If parents make good use of fragmented time, they will be surprised at the good results.