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