Playbook Challenge

Guiding our children to know their identity, purpose, and direction in life.

We suggest that you challenge yourself to complete the following tasks in the next seven days:

1. Identify three possible reasons for your children’s lack of motivation. What could motivate them? Why are you not able to see the genius in them? List down 10 things your children are good at.
2. Share with your children the top three values in your life and the reasons. Provide specific examples.
3. Discuss your life’s higher purpose on earth with your children. Use this to cultivate the understanding of a higher purpose. Get them to share their dreams. If they don’t have one, share your own and talk about the steps you have taken or are still taking to achieve them.
4. Discuss with your children the type of person they see themselves to be at 25. Run through scenarios by asking questions to help them see how they could achieve being that person at 25 years old.
5. Talk about your strengths with your children and use this opportunity to help them discover their strengths and develop the strengths they want.
6. Start your journey of writing a journal of moments for/with your child.
7. Schedule and start a chit-chat session once a week with your child.

Failure is unavoidable, so we need to instil in our children a strong sense of resilience to face challenges and failures, and develop their character and spirituality.

We suggest that you challenge yourself to complete the following tasks in the next seven days:

1. Think of a recent scenario to practise identifying the motive, action, and result.
2. Play a board game as a family. Let them experience both winning and losing, and explain to them the importance of learning from failures.
3. Take your parents out for a meal this weekend. No mobile phones or gadgets over the meal. Some suggested table topics: how they met, their most memorable holiday, their growing-up years, the next destination for the family holiday.
4. Share with your children your character. Share something you have done wrong and something you have done right at your workplace in the last two weeks.
5. Go hiking as a family at Bukit Timah Hill.
6. Spring clean your home as a family. Donate useful items to The Salvation Army.
7. Watch an episode of Shark Tank on YouTube together as a family.

Raising the confidence of our children by knowing how to listen to them, how to stack up confidence and minimise leakage, and what to say and how to communicate.

We suggest that you challenge yourself to complete the following tasks in the next seven days:

1. Take five minutes to write down all the strengths and weaknesses of your children that you can think of. Then add one strength or positive thing every day, until you see a change in your behaviour and the way you look at your children.
2. Write down 10 encouraging words or phrases that you can use with your children.
3. If you find it difficult to talk to your children without criticising, try holding back for three months. It can be challenging, but the outcome will be amazing.
4. List down five ways of good-versus-good comparison for your children.
5. Invite your children’s friends home for dinner and get to know them.
6. If you have been using negative words, think of how to change them and be the cheerleader for your children from now on!
7. Do you find it difficult to say “I love you” to your eldest child? If yes, try to do it. You may find it hard at the beginning, but after a while it will become easy.

Studying can feel tough to many children. Here we talk about how to teach, how to learn, and how to make acquiring knowledge fun.

We suggest that you challenge yourself to complete the following tasks in the next seven days:

1. Learning is supposed to be fun. Is your expectation too high for your children, especially if they need time to get there? Change your expectation today.
2. Have you overemphasised the importance of school results? List three things to change to make learning fun for your children.
3. Take a recent test paper and go through it with your children the way shared in the playbook, by adding back the marks. Tell your children that achieving 100 percent is not difficult.
4. Think about the areas you can reward your children for — not the results, but the process or hard work they put in. Plan celebrations for small successes.
5. Your children are 5000cc Ferraris, but they are running at the speed of a 1000cc car. List down what has gone wrong.
6. When was the last time you gave your child a big thumbs up? Give your child positive affirmations at least three times a day, starting today.
7. Learn and play a new board game with your children as a family.

To compete in today’s world, our children need to think independently and make use of the vast information available intelligently. We need to cultivate their ability to think independently, creatively, and critically.

We suggest that you challenge yourself to complete the following tasks in the next seven days:

1. Speak to your children about what they want to be in the future, using the technique of asking questions and imagination.
2. Dedicate family time to painting, allowing your children to lead in deciding the theme and painting based on their imagination.
3. List down the possible job opportunities or dreams that may interest your children based on their strengths.
4. Share a problem or challenge you face at work with your children. Get them to help you with possible solutions. It is perfectly alright if they cannot give a satisfactory answer — your job is to cultivate their critical thinking skills.
5. Get your children to plan an outing for the whole family next week.
6. Get your children to share one challenge they faced in school or with friends recently. Brainstorm together to come up with a solution.