Testimony - Father and Daughter Time

When I first heard about the father-and-child time, I was excited. I was excited because I know this is something I had wanted to do with my daughter for quite some time now. My daughter is turning 6 this year. I remembered reading a parenting article some years back which says that for a child, quality time is spelt as “quantity”. I couldn’t agree more to this statement and it had caused me to rethink about the definition of the quality time for my daughter since then. As much as the quality time is important for my daughter, the consistent and regular time spent with her is equally important to her too. After I signed up for the Fathers Club and attended the first two meetings, I am convinced through Pr. Chris and other fathers’ sharing that I needed to have a consistent and regular time with my daughter.

Being a typical man, my usual first response to solving a problem is to first find the solution “myself” and then only present it to my wife and daughter for acceptance and feedback. Little did I know that I was stuck as I couldn’t seem to figure out a weekly time to spend between me and my daughter! This troubled me for a few days without any solutions.

Because I was determined to have the father-and-daughter time, I decided that I needed help from my wife and daughter. In one family dinner time together, I explained to them that I had been trying to figure out this father-and-child time thingy without much success. To my surprise, just within a few minutes into our discussion, my wife had proposed a weekly timeslot that seemed workable for all of us and without much hesitation I happily accepted it. The thing that amazed me was that what I couldn’t quite figure myself for the last few days was able to resolve within a few minutes with the help from my family!

My first lesson learnt from this experience is that I must involve my family especially my wife when solving family issues although some of them may seem trivial to me.

Later that night after dinner, both my daughter and I decided that we should brainstorm about the things or activities that we can do together during the father-and-daughter time. To show my commitment to her, I took out one new writing notepad and told her that I would write down these ideas on it. Besides, to make it more personal to her I named our father-and-daughter time to Daddy-and-Enxi time and wrote it down as the title to our activity list. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we managed to come out with close to 10 activities in that night. Guess what, quite a number of these ideas were contributed by my wife (lesson #1). My daughter was equally excited about this process. She took out one of her writing notepads and started to copy the list of activities from my notepad. I think she was trying to tell me that she has a part to play to develop the list and share the ownership of the list – rightly so.

Second lesson learnt: Showing commitment to my action either verbally (telling her about the Daddy-and-Enxi time) or visually (writing the ideas in a notepad) is important to my daughter. It shows my commitment to her about our time and at the same time excites her to do the same.

I know this is just the beginning. Having read the Secret 3 on Consistency of The 7 Secrets of Effective Fathers by Ken R. Canfield, I am reminded the key to success to our father-and-daughter time is to ensure regularity and predictability on my time with my daughter. Up till now, my daughter and I were able to spend time doing some of these activities during our Daddy-and-Enxi time and we had also added new activities to our list. In every week, I can tell from her look that she looks forward to this time as much as I do to spend the quantity and quality time with her. Cheers.

Teoh Sing Peng

Wife: Teoh Chiew Chuan

Daughter: Enxi

The Desperately Trying-To-Be Effective Dads

This photo was taken on the last session of our classes.
Those who were absent, we would need to photo-shop you in :)
You can download a higher resolution photo (186 KB) here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/-EePMMtVBVSO4HcObfsfLg?feat=directlink
If you need an even higher resolution (1.8 MB) photo, email me.

And now for the Testimonies! Graduation of 1st Batch.

We have just concluded our 7 weeks for classes for "The 7 Secrets of Effective Fathers" and 7 weeks of small group activities, which we call the Mentoring and Accountability Group (MAG).

I have asked you to write your reflection as a testimony of how you have grown as a father over the last 14 weeks. I am overwhelmed reading your testimonies, which I will post on this blog with your permission. I rejoice with you that your relationship with your wife and children have grown deeper and that you are diligent in wanting to see change in your own life. I am overwhelmed also because I had only wanted to start small and what I am hearing is far far more than I expect. For which I can only conclude that it is God’s work. Can you now imagine with me what other fathers would do when they hear what’s happening? Only an ignorant father could not care less about the testimonies of these men. Our families are at stake here!

Thank you for being such an encouragement! I urge you to write and encourage everyone if you have not done so.

We have just read in our journalling from 1 Thess 1:2-3 and this is how I felt when I read your testimonies:

² We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. ³ We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let me just share some thoughts here:

I am thankful for each of you and it is my prayer that the fruit of your fathering will abound more and more.

Therefore our fathering must be centred on three things: Faith, Love and Hope.

1.       Faith – our work must be produced by faith. We must have faith to believe that God is the Author and Perfecter of our fathering. Faith also means that in our fathering, God must be in the centre of what we are doing, because He is the perfect Father. We must therefore grow deeper in love with our Heavenly Father more each day. This is a non-negotiable and we must continually watch out lest we fall. And we get other men in our lives to watch out for us too. We should never be alone in this journey of faith but to walk together with other men in the Body of Christ.

2.       Love – our labor must be prompted by love. Not a selfish or self-centred kind of love. We are not doing this because we want others to notice how good we are as a father. We are not even doing it because we want to feel significant. We are doing this because we love our family too much to have them experienced the blessings of God less than what they deserved. Our wives and children need our best effort.

3.       Hope – we endure and persevere because of our hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. We long for the day when we appear before Christ and to hear Him say: “Well done, good and faithful servant!” That would be the greatest joy. In fact in 1 Thess 2:19 For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? 20 Indeed, you are our glory and joy. What will be our hope, joy and crown some day? To see our family in heaven together. They will be our glory and joy!