I must admit I find it hard to distinguish between these three titles; what is a talent, gift and ability, and what are the differences? I am not going to make those distinctions. When a child has an ability he loves doing that, he learns it easily, he is passionate about it, he wants to do it, in fact sometimes he can’t stop from doing it.
Many children’s activities may lead to a passion in a few years. Many of these activities are the precursor to what we, as adults see as a Talent. Eg. Craft as a girl may well lead to Fashion Design or Interior Decorating as a Talent later in the teen years.
One of the things that creates frustrations for both parents and children is our (the parents) preconceived ideas of what is worth learning, what is worth pursuing. I believe that God does give parents wisdom from their years and broader understanding of life, and that there will be some things that parents need to say are necessary to learn – but there is certainly plenty of room left for interests to grow into passions. We have to give our children time to pursue a variety of things that comes from within their heart.
Each child is going to be interested in different things – I’d like my readers to join me in creating a resource list by adding a comment of the different things your kids have been interested in. I’ll add them to this list. The benefit of this list is to help other parents see value in something that maybe they hadn’t seen before.
How do your kids spend their free time? What are their interests, hobbies, passions?
A list of ideas:
Acting / Drama
Art – Drawing, Painting, Making
Board Games, strategy games
Building / Construction, carpentry
Card making
Cooking
Craft
Dressmaking – designing, making, mending
Electronics – soldering,
Fashion – design, colour, modelling, photography
Gardening – Veggie gardening, herbs, flowers
Gift wrapping
Graphics Arts – Typogrpahy, Learning Illustrator, Learning Photoshop
House renovations and maintenance
Interior decorating
Mechanics – small motors, fixing, fiddling, improving
Metal work, welding
Model making – model trains, armies, planes,
Movie buff – write reviews, learn about story, learn about acting
Music – appreciating music, playing music, teaching music
Organising spaces and organising stuff
Photography
Pottery, Fimo, airdried, kiln dried
Publishing a paper magazine, publishing digital media
Scrapbooking – paper or digital
Sewing – dressmaking, fabric craft, quilting, home furnishings
Sport – team sport, individual sport, extreme sport, sport fandom
Technology – setting up blogs, fixing computers
Thinking – arguing, debating, worldview, philosophy
Writing stories or blog posts
Good enough for me to copying it ngehe
Wow that’s my heartbeat!!!!!
Thanks. Now I have identified a talent that I can work on.
Thanks for this writing! It helped me find my talent which is art!