Gifts and Talents Christian kids guided discussion

We have a challenge for you today!

As parents and leaders surely one of the most tricky and most essential things we can do for our children is to encourage them to exercise and develop their gifts and talents.

And yet so often it can be something we've neglected in our own lives. As Christians, much of the parenting we do should involve breaking chains of negative behaviours and institutions we've inherited from our own parents/education/leaders, which takes a concious and concerted effort, and an awareness of our own shortcomings.

So let's break some chains today, let's invite Jesus into the situation and encourage our children to explore who they are and who they want to be in a way we may not have experienced ourselves.

And for those of us who blossomed under the care of wise and loving parents, let's pass that down the line today!

Before we can offer encouragement to our children in their area of gifting though we need to overcome the hardest part, which is to wisely discern what that gifting is, and here's a good way to make a start: the gifts and talents that God blesses us with will be fed by a heart of love. 

This is how we can recognise God-given talents: by what motivates them and brings them into the light.

To really pin that down simply and practically it means this: what does LOVE make your child want to do? What does LOVE motivate your child towards? And that's going to be the heart of your guided discussion today, which should lead you into any number of potential activities.

This is not the be-all-and-end-all of understanding your child of course,but a part of an interesting journey of opening them up to their potential. So the basic format of the discussion should be this:

SITUATION: Present a hypothetical situation to your child/children which may require some sort of intervention (a fire, somebody's hungry, a child is in danger, the library doesn't have enough books, children have nowhere to play)

RESPONSE: Discuss with them what measures might be taken to improve the situation.

YOUR ROLE: This is about looking into the heart of the child. Try to create situations that require some inventive creative thought, from rescue to fundraising, putting on a show to giving somebody help painting a bedroom, or picking flowers for somebody in hospital. Try to present scenarios for which there may be more than one way to help.

What you are looking for is to see what interests and lights up your child. A successful discussion might see the child quite disinterested for the most part, if everything sounds like a wonderful opportunity to them you may be missing the point!

The point of this exercise is to begin to see how love can motivate your child. A 'love' response is a powerful clue to a latent talent you and your child may not yet be keenly aware of, and which should be nurtured and tended carefully.