The statistics are frightening. Years ago, I don’t ever remember hearing about a child committing suicide. Teen suicide was even somewhat uncommon. Today elementary school teachers have to be trained in suicide prevention. Why? Because for the last few years a child under the age of 13 commits suicide every 3.4 days. Most of these children are 11-12 years old, but the youngest was only six. If you are African American, you have even more cause to be alarmed as roughly twice as many African American children commit suicide as their Caucasian peers.
Category: Faith Development
Jigsaw Puzzles and Family Bible Lessons
If your family likes to put together jigsaw puzzles, you probably have quite a few around the house. Often dollar stores and box retailers – even yard sales – sell cheap jigsaw puzzles. So grab a couple of puzzles and try one or more of the ideas below. Even if the picture on the puzzle has nothing to do with the Bible, you can still use them to teach your kids some important lessons.
The best puzzles to use are often those with 50 or less pieces – especially floor puzzles. The pieces are larger in a floor puzzle, but if you can write small and your children can read fairly well, a regular sized puzzle piece will work just as well. (I would avoid those mini-puzzles for most of these activities.) The “picture” side of the puzzle is not extremely important, but I do prefer photographs of beautiful things or “Bible” puzzles if you have them.
Here are some of my favorite ways to use jigsaw puzzles to teach your kids some important things God wants them to know:
Timing In Christian Parenting
One of my favorite spring trees is the tulip tree. It’s one of the earlier bloomers and the flowers are just beautiful. Because it is one of the first trees to bloom though, the blooms are often destroyed by the cold before they have faded. In years where the timing of the weather and the blooming is better, the same flowers can last for many days.
Parenting, especially Christian parenting, has some timing aspects to it also. Often choosing the wrong timing for teaching your kids about something can have a negative impact on their spiritual and emotional health. If the timing is too early, they may not be prepared to handle the emotional and spiritual aspects that often come with that knowledge. Wait too late and they can be left vulnerable to the tricks Satan plays in those areas.
So, what are some of the areas in which Christian parents most often miss the timing and cause their children and themselves unnecessary problems? (“Too Early” or “Too Late” indicates the timing mistake most often made by parents.)
Top Tips for Choosing Entertainment for Your Kids (Part 2)
If you aren’t actively overseeing which movies, shows, books and games your kids use for entertainment, you are possibly allowing them to be swayed by those who want them to believe ideas that run contrary to God’s commands and principles.
Satan wants parents to believe monitoring our kids’ entertainment is excessive and unnecessary. Yet, even the Bible points out the influence the things we expose ourselves to can have on our thoughts and our faith. If you are a Christian parent, you absolutely must take the time to find a way to keep your kids from consuming mass amounts of entertainment that will change their thinking and in some cases even the hard wiring of their brains.
Ratings are virtually useless for Christians. What is now considered acceptable for children and teens to watch would have been rated “R” or “X” even a few decades ago. So what do you need to consider before allowing your kids to consume a particular entertainment item?
Continue reading Top Tips for Choosing Entertainment for Your Kids (Part 2)
Top Tips for Choosing Entertainment for Your Kids
What’s the last movie you took your children to see? What are your kids’ favorite shows or games? What books do your kids read for pleasure? It would seem like entertainment marketed to their age group would be appropriate for your kids. Or if it is a “hit” all of your kids friends have seen, then surely it must be fine. Right? Not so much.
Whether we are aware of it or not, what our kids watch can influence their thinking over time. It can literally change the way their brains are hard wired in some cases – making it much more difficult to think, speak and behave in the ways God would want them to do.
Continue reading Top Tips for Choosing Entertainment for Your Kids