Teach Your Children to Give Comments

PERLA from Mexico remembers that when she was a little girl, her mother helped her to prepare brief comments for the Watchtower Study. Now Perla has a five-year-old son. How does she help him? “First I must prepare. When I do so, I look for a paragraph that my son can understand, one that he can explain in his own words. Then we concentrate on what he calls ‘my paragraph.’ I ask him to explain it using day-to-day examples. Then we rehearse the comment several times. We use an object the size of a microphone so that he knows how to hold it when he comments. I am very happy that not one meeting goes by without his commenting or raising his hand. Most of the time, he goes up to the conductor before the meeting begins and tells him which paragraph is his.”

Jens, an elder serving in a Hindi-speaking group, has two sons, two and four years old. When he and his wife prepare for the meeting with their children, they use a method Jens learned from his parents. He says: “We decide which parts of the material the children can understand. We then try to give them an overview of the particular subject or the gist of the article, after which we ask them the questions we have in mind for them to answer at the meeting. Oftentimes we are surprised at the answers they give in quite a natural way. How they express themselves really reflects what they understand. As a result, their answers become a real praise to Jehovah and a personal expression of their faith.”