Pay it Forward - Teaching Children to Help Others

If you have never seen the movie, the 2000 release of Pay It Forward, you have missed a great family movie from Warner Brothers Pictures. It's rated PG-13 and is relatively mature thematic, but not overtly suggestive. Trevor, the young 12-year-old optimist always believed in the goodness of humanity. Most children this age are interested in making the world a better place. It's like do a good deed for someone and then pass it on...the consequential passing-it-on will move outward, like ripples in a pond, in the hopes that the good deed will go forward. Thus the name given is, Pay It Forward.

This movie features Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment as Trevor, the 12-year-old. Most young children, commendably, want to change the world for the better, and Trevor's teacher gives him the means to do so. He's given an assignment to think of something that could change the world. And he certainly did. Trevor's idea was not to pay back a good dead, but to pay it forward, to someone else and to do it for nothing in return.Its one thing to pay for something for someone, but to pay for something for someone, with no pay back expected, only a pay it forward, created an outward, positive force of change; change for the good. Social Studies were never like this in Middle School. Trevor convinces the recipient to repay the favor by doing something similar for the next person, whoever that might be.

The young Trevor is afraid for his mother's safety and welfare from the often dangerously abusive father, who is an alcoholic. John Sacksteder, the author, shows that good things can happen to people in bad situations and make them a better person for it. Dysfunctional habits, diseases and lifestyles can be changed by a positive attitude of one young boy.

Paying forward good deeds is contagious. You can make a persons day by one simple act of kindness. That is exactly Trevor's intent. He wants to change the world, but setting up a chain-reaction of good deeds, that becomes an endless chain of events. And it works. The amazing thing is that it eventually comes back to him. That is the ultimate poetic justice. What happens to the givers is that the ones doing the good deed also become recipients of a positive attitude.

Try this yourself. Pay it forward to someone today and see if it doesn't make you feel better about yourself. You may never see the end of the paying it forward, but it will change the world, at least in your corner of it. I highly recommend this movie for a family movie night. Paying it forward is contagious. It's the gift that keeps on giving. And a gift your children will quite naturally want to do; to change the world for the better.