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