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.

How to Like Your Children

Often when people learn we homeschool our daughter, they will say something like “I don’t know how you stand to be around your kid all day.” or “My kids and I would kill each other if we had to be together that much.” At first, I just smiled and shrugged. After awhile though, I started to wonder. Do most parents really dislike their children?

I would never question a parent’s love for their children. For most parents, their children are without a doubt, loved and wanted. How many parents really LIKE their children though? I have heard parent after parent talk about how they can only stand to be around their children for a small amount of time or how they can’t wait until their children go back to school/move away/go to college because they are driving them crazy.

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Developing Your Child’s Skills for Service

One of my friends shared something interesting with me the other day. She said it is hard to find younger women who know how to bring home-cooked meals to people who need them or organize dinners for large groups of people. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, but they really didn’t know how to do it.

As we analyzed the situation, the light began to dawn. During our childhood, most of our mothers stayed home. We might have participated in one activity a week as a child and at times none at all. What resulted was a lot of time at home with our parents. Times when we invariably annoyed them with complaints of boredom.

Since there were few activities to enroll us in, they enrolled us in helping them do whatever they were doing. This meant many teens could cook entire meals for large groups of people, make simple repairs around the house, sew, knit or display dozens of other practical skills.

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Bridging the Generations

Conversations between grandparents and grandchildren are often hysterically funny. The older generation still tells stories featuring typewriters and record albums, while the younger ones are texting and discussing the pros and cons of the latest gadgets. Sometimes there are more puzzled looks and “huh’s?” than actual communication. It’s almost as if they are from different countries.

That’s the premise of the book Sticking Points: How to Get 4 Generations Working Together in the 12 Places They Come Apart by Haydn Shaw. Shaw’s premise is that most of the tensions in the workplace and our homes is because of our generational issues. We feel like we aren’t being heard by those in older and younger generations, because in reality we are speaking a foreign language to them.

Although aimed primarily at problems generational differences cause in the workplace, there is a lot for the parent and teen child to glean as well. Shaw defines the types of problems in our homes and workplaces that are actually caused because of generational differences. He spends a lot of time attempting to help readers understand why the other generations think and act the way they do.

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Teaching Your Children to Follow Where God Leads

Teaching Your Children to Follow Where God Leads - Parenting Like Hannah If you have been following the twelve month plan for Teaching Children to Live More Like Jesus, you have been busy working with your children on quite a few practical Christian habits and attributes. This month is probably the toughest, perhaps because I am still working through the subject myself in some ways.

One of the qualities Jesus displayed time and time again was that he went where God led him. Sometimes it was to dinner at someone’s house, sometimes it was to heal people. In the end, God’s Will led Jesus to die a painful death on the Cross. Jesus was obviously not thrilled about the idea of a painful death and separation from God even for a time, but ultimately Jesus went where God had led him.

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What Soil Are You Using to Grow Your Child’s Faith?

What Soil Are You Using To Grow Your Child's Faith? - Parenting Like Hannah It’s hard to tell in this picture, but these lemons are huge. Not just a “that lemon is nice” large, but anywhere from the size of a large orange to the size of a grapefruit. It is not genetically engineered fruit, but fruit that was grown in the richest soil on earth. Volcanic soil, in this case that of Mt. Vesuvius.

If I lived in a slightly warmer climate, I could have a lemon tree in my yard. I could read up on how to care for a lemon tree. I could water the tree, fertilize it and talk to it. No matter how well I tended it, my tree would never produce lemons the size of the ones in Pompeii. Why? Because the soil in my yard is red clay, possibly some of the worst soil for growing wonderful lemons.

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