CHAPTER 6- Discovering Their Strengths
(Pics are just for fun from a recent hot air balloon ride that we took as a family)
When we asked classrooms of kids, “What defines you?”, we consistently witnessed a response based on the students’ strengths. We saw answers like, “I’m a gamer”, “I play instruments,” and “My love for soccer.” Honestly, these are the kinds of responses that I expected when I posed the question in the first place.
So why is this relevant to our special needs kids and why is it important that we parent this answer in all of our children? I think for our kids from hard places, their challenges are so constant in their lives that it is hard for them to see their strengths. Helping them find their strengths, as a larger component of their identity, is a giant step toward redirecting them to see how God wants to uniquely use them to impact their world.
Fifteen years ago, I worked as a physical therapist at Baylor University. As a member of the Student Life team, I participated in a program to help us find our strengths through an assessment called the StrengthsFinder. I remember when they were introducing it, they used Michael Jordan as the example for why we should focus on mastering our strengths instead improving on our weaknesses. They pointed out Jordan’s failed attempt at playing baseball and how he was better served when he was focusing on his basketball game. It was a memorable example because that scenario had played out in front of my eyes just a few years before when we were all scratching our heads at why the greatest basketball player of all time would bother picking up a baseball bat. The StrengthsFinder helped me appreciate that our time is not best spent trying to become good at that which we were not born to do but instead on perfecting that which we were created to excel at.
Proverbs 22:6 tells us to train up a child in the way they should go and when they get old they will not depart from it. As much as I would love for this to mean that if we teach our children the Bible they will follow it all their life, I believe this verse is most accurately taught as an instruction to raise your child toward their natural bent. I think of this verse when I think of the philosophy that undergirds the StrengthsFinder.
Another benefit of helping our children find and name their strengths is that it frees them to walk in that strength. I remember when I took the assessment; it told me that I had the strength of Ideation. I had never been told that before but was immediately able to look back and see where that played out in my past. I embraced that strength and felt more freedom to generate ideas for programs and find solutions to problems because I recognized ideation as a reflection of how God wanted to use me. I hope that helping my children identify their strengths will give them the same validation as they boldly walk in them.
There are two warnings we need to heed when helping our children discover their strengths. The first is that we have to completely steer clear of what our personal strengths are and what we would hope theirs would be. We must be open-minded to how God uniquely created them. I recently binge-watched The Crown on Netflix. In one of my favorite episodes, Prince Philip insists that Prince Charles attend his alma mater for boarding school. Prince Philip was an athlete and appreciated the physical training that would be demanded of Charles there. In the episode it is clear that the queen disagrees and can see that the school is not a match for the personality of her son. In the end, she lets Philip have his way and sends Charles to a place that he later described as hell. Philip was choosing what Charles would be strong at based on his own experience instead of the personality of his child and it did not go well for Charles. When I was little my mom enrolled me in dance. I think it was the next step (after naming me Virginia) in raising a really girly girl. I sucked at dance. Not only could I not stand still but also I had the flexibility of penguin. It was clearly not my strength and after 10+ years of lessons, thousands of dollars in tuition, and hours of torturing my poor teachers, I still sucked at it.
The second warning is to not let our children find their strengths in places that are inconsistent with God’s best for them or that could be described as more of an escape than a strength. According to CNN, the shooter at Santa Fe High School was described by his mother as staying up all night playing video games. He also had a custom t-shirt on his Facebook page that said, “Born to Kill”. Now I know that is an extreme but clearly this kid found his strengths and identity in the wrong place. Just because he was good at it does not mean it was God given. Another less dramatic example that is tragically humorous and certainly self-deprecating would be a misguided strength of my own youth. When I was in junior high, I knew everything about the soap opera General Hospital. I could tell you the history of the characters and even predict future story lines. To say I was oddly obsessed would be an understatement. Importantly, and fortunately, obsession does not equal strength. It usually just equals a means of escape. We can’t let our kids confuse the two.
So in summary, I want to help my child focus not on their challenges or their weaknesses but instead on discovering and growing in their God given strength as they explore how they were uniquely designed to impact the world.
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