Author: Thereasa Winnett

Thereasa Winnett is the founder of Teach One Reach One and blogger at Parenting Like Hannah. She holds a BA in education from the College of William and Mary. She has served in all areas of ministry to children and teens for more than thirty years and regularly leads workshops for ministries and churches. She has conducted numerous workshops, including sessions at Points of Light’s National Conference on Volunteering and Service, the National Urban Ministry Conference, Pepperdine Bible Lectures, and Lipscomb’s Summer Celebration. Thereasa lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband Greg, where she enjoys reading, knitting, traveling and cooking.

Your Kids Need Multiple Reasons Why They Should be Christians

As adults, we begin to value the concepts of complete forgiveness and eternity in Heaven. In fact, the older we get, the more important they can become. Teens often have a difficult time understanding why they should be concerned about something that happens after their death. At that age, many teens have almost a sense of immortality. It is one of the reasons why they readily participate in risky behaviors most older people would reject as “not worth it”.

Your teens need to understand how God and Christianity can have a meaningful effect on their lives right now. Yes, you still need to impress upon them their need for forgiveness and the desire to spend eternity in Heaven. For a teen though, the most impactful things you can share are how being a Christian touches your life in meaningful ways every day.

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Creating Your Christian Parenting Village

We are having tons of fun these days planning our daughter’s graduation party. We decided to turn it into a huge thank you party for all of the people who have helped us raise our daughter over the years. We are inviting everyone from her “aunties” to the sweet lady at the cleaners that always asks about her activities and buys Girl Scout cookies to our neighbors and the people at Church who have had a hand in her spiritual growth. Don’t tell my husband, but it’s a long list!

I am a strong proponent of learning from the mistakes and lessons of others rather than insisting on making the same mistakes yourself, “just to see”. Probably one of the least heeded scriptures in the New Testament is Titus 2:3-5. It admonishes the older women to teach the younger, with the implication that the younger women are listening. Yet if you ask older women in most churches, they will tell you the younger women routinely dismiss any wisdom they have to share as old-fashioned or uninformed.

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Banishing Tantrums (And the Surprising Reason You Need to Make It a Priority)

I’ll never forget a particular lunch out with a friend when our daughter was a toddler. Something didn’t go my child’s way and she was definitely thinking about her best course of action. Suddenly, she quickly settled down and the crisis was averted without changing my decision and giving in to her request. My friend looked at me and asked how I did it. At first, I didn’t know what she meant. My friend replied, “I could see her thinking about pitching a fit, but somehow you not only convinced her not to have a tantrum, but that she was perfectly content to obey you.”

I began to analyze why our daughter never pitched a tantrum during her toddler years. Don’t get me wrong, she misbehaved quite a bit (especially at three) and could do her fair share of crying when she was unhappy. She even had to be unwrapped from my legs once or twice as I left her at home with someone else. She never threw a tantrum, though.

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Christian Families and Mission Drift

Nothing makes me sadder than to listen to Christian parents who are obviously experiencing mission drift in their homes. They are totally unaware this drift will most likely take their children away from the core spiritual beliefs the parents think they are instilling. In fact, the drift can become so severe the children grow up to reject God entirely.

Recently, I was privileged to read the new book Mission Drift: The Unspoken Crisis Facing Leaders, Charities, and Churches by Peter Greer and Chris Horst. Although I think it is absolutely imperative for all leaders of churches and ministries to read this book, it may be even more important for Christian parents to read it as well.

You see, mission drift is when an organization (your family) forgets its purpose in favor of practicality. You make tiny, little, seemingly meaningless decisions on a day to day basis. What we often don’t realize (until it is too late) is that the sum of these decisions has caused us to drift away from our core mission: raising children who will be dedicated Christian servants of God and who will go to Heaven when they die.

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Helping Your Child Nurture Godly Friendships

Helping Your Child Nurture Godly Friendships - Parenting Like Hannah Today’s children are lonely. Oh, they are surrounded by people from the time they wake up until they hit the pillow at night. Yet, that is perhaps the worst loneliness of all – the loneliness that won’t disappear when other people come into view.

Unfortunately, so many aspects of our culture are robbing our children not only of quality parent involvement, but also the solid friendships many of us had in our youth. The incessant rushing in our lives does not allow for hours of “I don’t know, what do you want to do” discussions or analyzing everything happening in your worlds in order to support each other and try to make sense of things.

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