Fathers Club Meeting

Fathers Club Monthly Meeting 

on "The Quest for Authentic Manhood"

this Saturday, 30 April 2011, 8:30-11:30 am

FACING THE FATHER WOUND

This session is about how we pick up and carry our

baggages from the wounds afflicted by our fathers.

How do we resolve this issue in discovering our

manhood? How do we forgive our fathers?

Hall 3 

(Simple Breakfast at 8:15 am)

IMPORTANT NOTICE ON PARKING THIS SATURDAY

Please park outside along the road since you will be the earliest to church and there will

ample parking spaces outside. Reason being there will be a fairly big wedding on Sat morning,

and certain area of parking within DC compound will be blocked off in preparation for

Sun afternoon’s largest wedding in DUMC. J

Thank you for your cooperation.

How Does a Father Do It?

Finding the right balance between the work place and home front can be a guilt trip, but it doesn't have to be that way. Look over the list of possible improvements you can make in the way you balance career and family. But instead of viewing this as one more long list of things to do, imagine yourself already doing something on the list. The mind doesn't distinguish between imagined and real success when it draws upon positive experiences, even imaginary ones, to reinforce good habits-in-the-making. Try imagining yourself combining work and family life in the ways listed below.

- Keep it simple. It is doesn't add to the happiness of your family, then change it. 

- Set aside time after dinner to help your kids with their homework. 

- Remember what you were like as a kid, and cut some slack for your kids. Keep important things in focus: family unity, values, fun and education. 

- Listen at all times: to mealtime stories, to the chatter over dishwashing, to bedtime prayers. 

- Create family rituals: Saturday morning pancakes, Sunday night pizza, Monday night health club, Thursday night piano recital. 

- Include children in your planning and decision-making regarding things like weekly chore assignments, summer vacation plans and special monthly events. 

- Hold family councils once a month to discuss pet peeves, rules, rewards and punishments. 

- Be both loving and firm in setting, negotiating and enforcing rules. 

- Let the answering machine take calls during the dinner hour and at bedtime. Or, take the phone off the hook. 

- Loves isn't something you buy. Your kids spell it T-I-M-E and it costs more than M-O-N-E-Y. 

- It's better to play 15 or 20 minutes spontaneously and have fun, then go do chores, work or other priorities, than to spend all day at the zoo (or ballgame or the mall) feeling angry, guilty, or worried. 

- Find one common mission or cause that your family loves to do together, instead of splintering your volunteer activities in several different directions.

This partial list was gleaned from "How Does a Mother Do It?" That's the title of a brochure published by Mars Candy that compiles tips for Working Mother of the Year. We've adapted it. More importantly, what do you believe--and do-

-about this delicate balancing act?

James Dobson, On the Father Front, Spring, 1994, p. 2.

Fathers Club Book Study

Fathers Club Book Study 

on "7 Secrets of Effective Fathers"

this Sunday, 27 Mar 2011, 7:45-9:45 am

Session 3

Room 201 

(Take the stairs next to Dream Cafe and 

go right up to second floor)

Your homework before you come: 

Complete your reading of Chapter 5
Report on your survey with your family
Report on the time slot for father-child time 

What's On in 2011?

Blessed New Year! It is going to be a BETTER year, for those of us who attended our Watchnight celebration in DUMC would know this.

You can download the activities for this year in the Announcement Section on the right. All the topics to be covered can be found in this announcement sheet.

Two urgent things to take note of:

1. Our first monthly Fathers Club (FC) meeting on 29 Jan 2011, Sat. Please register so that I can get a headcount to make sure I get the right room.

2. I will be starting again the Book Study on "The 7 Secrets of Effective Fathers" for which quite a few of you said you were unable to attend the Monday night sessions last year. This time, it will be on Sunday mornings.

Again, please register so that I know how many are interested and whether I should carry on with this run.

Please forward this link to the fathers and men that you know. Remember, we are fighting a battle to restore men to their rightful place as godly and authentic fathers, husbands and men.


Click here for 2011 Program.

Love Languages - Profiling Tool

Fathers,

I mentioned love languages in the way we interact with our wives. Here's the assessment that you can do to improve the way you can show or demonstrate your love in the way your partner appreciates.

http://www.5lovelanguages.com/assessments/love/

Our 5 love languages are:

Words of Affirmation

Quality Time

Receiving Gifts

Acts of Service

Physical Touch

You should do the one on "For Husbands" and your wife on "For Wives".

When you answer the questions, you should pick the answer in the way that you would like to receive love, not what's been done now.

With the results, you can talk to each other about whether you have been using the love language in the way that is appreciated. Give it a go :)

Email me if you need help.

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.