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.

Fun Holiday Dinner Conversation Starters for Kids

Holiday meals and gatherings can add an interesting dynamic to any family. Suddenly large groups of family members are spending time together who may not normally see each other for a variety of reasons. Children can be shy around people they don’t know well in general and if your kids spend a lot of time online, making conversation may not be one of their strongest skills.

It’s not just the kids though. Sometimes adults become very stilted and awkward around children. Or they ask embarrassing questions or feel a family gathering is a great time to give a personal critique of everything about your child they find unfortunate. Throw in a few random discussions about politics and family hot topics and things can go wrong very quickly.

Thankfully, there is something fun you can do to encourage healthy conversations when everyone gets together. Place conversation starters in front of every place setting. Each person should have unique questions in front of them. These are open ended questions designed to get people opening up in fun ways and telling stories. You can find free printable conversation starter cards online, but add a few of your own. Make sure to include a few that encourage the Christians in your family to share their faith stories. Questions like, “Tell about a time you saw God working in your life” or “tell about a time you realized God was smarter and wiser than you” can provide some interesting faith stories.

If you have people in your family who have rejected God, place questions in front of their plate that are more subtle about pointing them to God, like “name three things for which you are grateful” or “what is your favorite way to help others”. Their answers might let others get a peak into how to better minister to them.

If you know a family member has a particularly good story to share, you can give them a set up question that will hopefully lead to the story, like “tell about your funniest encounter with someone famous” or “tell about the time an older relative had an interesting encounter with the mailman”.

Have fun with it. You can take turns with everybody listening to the same stories or divide the table into smaller conversational groups. If you do smaller groups, bring everyone into the same conversation during dessert and have everyone share the most interesting or funniest thing they learned.

This year minimize awkward and boring conversations. Have some fun and bond as a family by learning more about each other.

Fun Family Devotional on Priorities (Especially on cool days!)

Your children will make thousands of decisions in their lifetime. Often their choices will be informed by their priorities. What is most important to them will often sway their decisions. While you want their top priority to be pleasing God, if you aren’t careful, other things can creep in ahead of God. There is a fun family devotional you can do to begin a discussion about priorities.

Before you begin you will need the ingredients to make a lentil stew. You can use any recipe, but this one claims to be somewhat authentic. (Note: If your children aren’t used to these spices, you might want to adjust the recipe slightly.) For extra fun, have your kids help you make the stew. While you are eating, share with them the story of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 25:29-34.

Ask your children what would have made Esau give up something as important as his birthright for a simple bowl of stew. Point out that Esau would have gotten twice the inheritance of Jacob as well as being the ancestor of Jesus (whether he knew it or not) had he not traded it for a bowl of stew. Ask your children what Esau’s priorities were when he made that important choice? Was he taking a short view or a long view of life when he traded it away?

Explain to your children that if your priorities aren’t right, you will often choose what seems best in the moment. You forget to think about how the decision might impact you over time. Often that leads to making poor choices. Explain that in your family, the top priority is pleasing God. You hope that it will always be their top priority, too. Ask them to think of choices people make that they might make differently if their top priority is pleasing God.

End your meal and conversation with a pray, asking God to help your family always keep pleasing Him as your top priority. Pray that he helps you make wise decisions by always considering what He would want you to do. Revisit the topic of priorities, short and long term thinking and making godly decisions regularly. Help equip your kids to make godly decisions their entire lives.

10 Fun Gratitude Activities for Your Family

Did you know the Bible tells us to give thanks 73 times? That’s a lot of repetition of a relatively simple command. In addition, the words thanks and thanksgiving appear in another hundred or so verses. Obviously our gratitude is important to God. He wants us to be grateful because it helps align our spirit with His. Arrogance, selfishness and other unchristian character traits are more difficult when one stays in a spirit of humble gratitude. Likewise, service, generosity and faith sharing are easier when you are grateful for the gifts God has given you.

Our world doesn’t encourage gratitude. Oh, we may hear people talk about it from time to time, but it’s really not a priority. Which is interesting. Even from a secular point of view, gratitude has been shown to have all sorts of benefits to physical and mental health.

Just like many of us have gotten into the habit of being ungrateful, we need to help our families develop the habit of gratitude. Thankfully, there are some fun things you can do to put your family in a gratitude mindset. Here are some of our favorites.

  1. Gratitude tablecloth. Find a plastic tablecloth light enough to write on clearly. Place padding underneath it so markers don’t bleed through to your table. Every time your family sits down to dinner (also a great Thanksgiving idea for extended family to join in), have everyone take a marker and write something new for which they are thankful. How long does it take to fill up the tablecloth? To keep from repeating, review previous entries before allowing anyone to write something new. This also serves as a reminder of how much your family has been given by God.
  2. Thanks jar or centerpiece. This is another idea that works well year around or at Thanksgiving. Find a pretty jar or bowl. Place beside it blank slips of paper and pens. Encourage everyone to write something on a slip for which they are grateful. You can make it a regular thing or just remind them when something happens to write a gratitude slip for it. Periodically, read all of the slips in the bowl and pray to God thanking Him for those blessings.
  3. Sidewalk thanks. If you live on a street with a sidewalk, take some chalk and write “Please tell us something for which you are thankful”. Be sure to write a few things yourself to get it started. Then leave a couple of sticks of chalk where people can see them, but not step on them and get hurt. You may even want to put a little container for them in the grass so people will return the chalk where it’s safe.
  4. Thank you treats. Make some muffins or cookies or other treats and bag them up with a short note of thanks. How many people can you thank with them? Can you focus on people who may normally be unseen by others, but should be thanked for everything they do?
  5. Thanks in many languages. This is a way to make saying thanks more interesting, because it can encourage more conversation if you thank someone in Czech! It also can be a way to think about those in the mission field who are often making sacrifices to serve others and teach them about Jesus.
  6. Thanks by color. This is a great way to teach young children how to thank God for His blessings in prayer. Cut out little slips of different colors of paper. Place them all in a little container. Encourage your children to take turns choosing a color and thanking God for something that is the same color as their slip of paper.
  7. Gratitude art journal. For those with young or artistic children, buy a journal that is meant for sketching. Place pencils and crayons beside it and put it where everyone will see it during the day. Encourage everyone to draw either something for which they are grateful or a depiction of their day and everything in it for which they are grateful.
  8. Pinterest thanks. Search for “volunteer thank you’s” and you will get tons of ideas you can use to create little thank you surprises for people.
  9. World record thanks. Challenge each other to see how many people you can thank in one day. It will be hard to keep count, but at the end of the day, celebrate by sharing some of the thank you stories and the reactions you got from people.
  10. Leftover candy thanks. If you are reading this close to Thanksgiving, you likely still have too much candy in your house. Get creative and tape a little punny thank you note to a piece and give it to someone. (ex. Reese’s – There are so many Reese-ons we are thankful for you!)

Have fun with it, but focus your family on gratitude. You may be surprised at the new blessings that come from being grateful for the ones you already have.

Surprising Tip For Getting Kids to Obey

AI can be truly amusing at times. I requested a stock photo recently and typed in “paper turkey”. What I expected to get was this

Instead, what it generated was this

While technically correct, a crumpled paper flag of the country Turkey wasn’t even close to what I wanted or had imagined!

Your children are not mind readers. Nor do they necessarily have the life experience to know what it means to “clean your room”. They may also have very different definitions for the words you use (Not too many years ago, the word “bad” actually meant “good”!). Sometimes their supposed disobedience is actually a breakdown in communication.

The next time you ask your children to do a task, try these tips.

  1. Carefully and fully explain what you want them to do. For example, instead of “clean your room”, try “I need you to pick up your toys, put your dirty clothes in the hamper and make your bed.”
  2. Make sure they know how to do the things you want them to do. My father went to military school, so when we made our beds, the sheets were expected to have “military corners”. That is a skill that must be taught and practiced before a child can do it well independently. Teach your children how you want a particular task done and then help them practice until you are confident they can do it to your satisfaction independently.
  3. Explain terms they may define differently well. For example, “wash your hands, means soap them up really well and scrub every inch of all of your fingers back and front and then rinse all of the soap off”.
  4. Give deadlines. Often the breakdown comes because the parent wants something done immediately and the child thinks he or she has all day to do it. Giving a specific deadline (for little children, you can use timers or things like meals as markers) can help tasks be completed on your desired timeline.

Eliminating communication mistakes can also help you know when your child is truly rebelling against your commands. Otherwise you may be correcting and giving consequences to a child who really was trying to obey you.

Surprising Questions to Indicate the Health of Your Family

As part of the studies I am undertaking for my Masters in Social Work, we are learning a lot about family counseling. Our readings often contain questions they suggest we ask families to get a better indication of the health of the families with whom we are working. There are not right or wrong answers per se, but the answers can point to strengths or weaknesses in a family’s functioning.

These questions are taken from a variety of sources, but would be interesting to discuss as a family.

  1. Do you eat individually or as a family?
  2. What do you usually talk about when eating?
  3. Who does most of the talking?
  4. What adjective would you use to describe your family meals?
  5. If you could change your family in one way, what would it be?
  6. What is happening when you have the most conflict? What is happening when you have the least conflict? (Context – everyone is tired, Grandma is here, etc.)
  7. How well do you know your neighbors?
  8. Are outsiders giving to your family financial, spiritual or emotional support? Do you give back to your community/church/neighborhood?
  9. What are the strengths of your family?
  10. What would Jesus say to your family if he had dinner with you?
  11. How easy is it to tell each other hard, scary or emotional things?
  12. What roles do family members play within the family?
  13. Who is in your family’s support network?
  14. What does your family believe about God, Jesus, the Bible, Christianity, the Church, God’s commands?
  15. Have each person tell a family story that they believe best illustrates your family dynamic.
  16. How does our family solve problems?
  17. What types of non-verbal communication does each family member use to let your know he or she is getting upset or angry?
  18. Is your family more controlled or spontaneous?
  19. How does your family handle conflict?
  20. How does your family motivate its members to learn, grow or improve?

Did family members feel safe in answering the questions truthfully? Did different members of your family have different answers to the same question? Were they wildly different? How do you feel about the answers given to each question? What strengths do they reveal that you can build upon? What weaknesses do they reveal that need to be corrected or improved?

Healthy families take work. Everyone thinks their family is “normal”, but even if that is true, it doesn’t mean your family doesn’t have room to grow and improve. Pull out these questions periodically for quick checks or find new ones to dig even deeper. Having a healthy family will make it easier for your kids to obey God and eventually create their own Christian families.