It was great to be together again for Interaction, Encouragement and Challenge!

We started our time with some review and then jumped right into chapter 3 as we considered

the following questions:  1) How will my child turn out?  2) What can I do about it?  3) How can

we lead them to make good choices?  4) What does "train up a child...(Proverbs 22:6) really

mean?  Many thoughts were shared as we worked through Deuteronomy 6 and saw how important

it is for we as parents to be teaching our children "as we go".  We considered the 40 developmental

assets and put them into the context of how this framework helps our children make better decisions.

Below are the highlight notes of our discussion as taken by Judy .

We need to intentionally seek to pass on faith to out children.  This happens as we ourselves love the

Lord with all our heart, soul and mind.  As we "do life" we have the opportunity to demonstrate and

teach these things to our children understanding the faith is more "caught than taught".  This process does

not stop when they grown up.  We can not pass this along if we ourselves have not experienced it. 

When we do not teach our children we allow them to easily move into danger areas.

When we evaluate our children's qualities and character we can apply the principles of Deuteronomy 6

according to their style or bent. The key is to live a life and teach our children in order to impress them or

shape and mold them into children who love the Lord like their parents.  In this process there needs to be

lots of love and forgiveness as we seek to validate and avoid setting up a legalistic structure in our instruction.

Internalization is needed so our children will be able to continue this throughout their lives.  We finished our

time together reviewing the T.R.A.I.N an acronym (page 74) to help us with our "faith-talk". 

Our Challenge questions were:  What am I impressing on my children?  What should I be impressing on them?