Teaching Stewardship of Talents

Part 8 of the series on stewardship.

This is a hard one to balance. Children have things that they are good at and like because they are good at it. However, if they are pushed too hard, they will not enjoy it anymore and it won't matter if they're good at it. There may be certain areas that they express interest in but when they find out it takes hard work, they don't want to do it any more. I think this is where using your "spiritual eyes" comes in - so you can help your child stick to it, or let them make the decision to give it up. It's certainly better if a child has ownership of an activity, but if we keep letting them start things and then quit things, they will have a hard time learning to work hard and keep commitments. That's why it's so important to be prayerful about it.

Also, we need to make sure we don't overschedule our kids! They don't need to be experts in everything all at once. It's generally best to work on a few talents at a time.

When we first moved to Utah, we tried to network with other homeschoolers. One of the first activities I noticed on our email list was a theater group. I really felt like this is what we needed to do! I signed up the two oldest (then ages 7 & 9) and they fought me the entire way. They were both shy and did NOT want to do this. I had a newborn and a toddler, but we did it any way. They complained about going to every single practice right up until the performance. We had made the commitment, so we kept attending.

Something magical happened that night. Both kids had caught the theater bug! Right after the performance, they both were already begging me to do another show. From this theater experience, we all made some great life-long friendships as well.

Another example is the story of Oatmeal, who really wanted to learn to play the piano until he learned that it takes hard work of practicing. (I told that story here.) It wasn't till HE decided that he was supposed to be learning the piano and that to do so, he'd have to practice, that his attitude changed. He's like a different kid when practicing piano for the last few weeks. He even made the goal on his own to have a complete piano chart.