Seven-year-old Amanda Palin likes to tell her friends that her mother works at a carnival.

A second-grader at Dalton, Amanda helps her mother, Roxanne Palin, choose raffle prizes, party favors, rides, and games for Hamptons Family Day – the summer festival that benefits research at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

“We talk about how there’s a lot of things we need to find cures for,” Ms. Palin, a carnival chairwoman whose family summers in Southampton, said. “She knows it’s not just a carnival, that she’s helping create something that makes money to help others.”

The Wild West-themed event, which will take place on August 6 at Diamond Ranch in Water Mill (tickets are $150 for adults, $75 for children), is among the family-friendly benefits that have become increasingly popular in recent years in the Hamptons. Other such upcoming events include the “American Picnic With Fireworks by Grucci,” benefiting the Fresh Air Home in Southampton, on June 30; the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund’s “Super Saturday” fashion fund-raiser and carnival on July 29 in Water Mill, and “Lemonaid,” when East End youngsters pool their Labor Day weekend lemonade stand revenues and donate the money to the Robin Hood Foundation.

“Now people are celebrating the fact that they’re having children,” a society photographer, Patrick McMullan, said about Hamptons residents. “It used to be, ‘Oh, you’re married and settled down – you’re dead.'”

The Hamptons has long been fertile fund-raising soil, but these days more of the charity functions are geared toward young families, the founder of Boys & Girls Harbor, Anthony Duke, said. “A lot of people appreciate the value of training their children to be responsible citizens,” Mr. Duke, an 88-year-old who owns property in East Hampton and heads up a summer camp for underprivileged children, said.

A party for party’s sake no longer brings out East Enders the way it once did, observers say.

“People don’t just have a store opening anymore,” a public relations executive, Alison Brod, said. “It’s not enough to just have a party. There’s usually something else.” Ms. Brod’s clients include Godiva and JLO Lingerie.

That “something else” is generally a philanthropic component, as when Gucci coupled the grand opening earlier this month of its East Hampton store with a benefit for Jessica Seinfeld’s Baby Buggy, a charity that distributes baby clothing and other infant-care necessities to needy families.

“If it had just been a store opening, I would have thought, ‘Oh gee, isn’t that great,’ and then dismissed the invitation,” a socialite and philanthropist, Simone Levinson, 40, said. “By the virtue of my friends hosting it, it became a ‘need to be there’ event.”

Now that she’s a mother – her son James is 4 – it takes a compelling reason to “put on clothes, put on mascara, and come out for the night,” she said. “We’re not in a place in our lives that we want to do body shots and dance on tables,” she said. “We did that 20 years ago. We had a great time, but that was 20 years ago.”

Out of fashion nowadays are the promotional party houses, like the Sony sponsored “PlayStation 2 Estate” in Bridgehampton, according to summer residents who say feting a new video game console, cosmetics line, flavor of vodka, or nothing at all just doesn’t bring out the Hamptons elite the way they once did.

“That seems too commercial,” a manager of the MAC cosmetics company’s AIDS fund, Craig Cichy, said. “My assumption is that people are more inclined to go to events that have a deeper purpose.” The fund is a key sponsor of the annual Love Heals AIDS education benefit at Luna Farms in Sagaponack.

Many small businesses in the Hamptons also support local charitable gatherings throughout the summer, residents say.

The Love Heals gala, which some say marks the unofficial kick-off to the Hamptons giving season, was canceled last weekend due to lightning showers and flooding. However, the charity fostered good will when staffers and board members made their way through knee-deep mud to hand out plastic containers of barbecued ribs, pulled pork, and gift bags with cosmetics, candles, T-shirts, and other goodies to would-be party goers who stopped by despite the weather. About 90% of the 700 people who had purchased advance tickets did not request their money back, and the charity raised about $175,000, according to its executive director, Jasmine Nielsen.

“People love to have parties, and if you can be charitable and give back at the same time, it makes it all the more enjoyable,” a mother in her early 40s who is a board member of the Children’s Museum of the East End in Bridgehampton, Tracy Shopkorn, said. “A lot of people who have been coming here a long time are maturing, having families of their own, so the parties take on a different bent. They don’t want to go out all night; they want to give back to the area where they live or enjoy.”