Confronting Our Vulnerabilities and Insecurities for the Sake of Our Children

Chaim and Penina Rosenwasser* were beside themselves. They ran from expert to expert, lost countless nights’ sleep, and shed endless tears. And still, their Shlomo seemed to be slipping through their fingers. They had such high hopes for him. Shlomo was a great boy, with a sharp, intelligent mind and keen insight. They were confident that he would grow up to be the scholar they so badly wanted him to be. Chaim especially dreamed of great things for Shlomo. 

Chaim hadn’t had it easy growing up. He’d been doing well in yeshiva, the first in his family to pursue higher Torah learning beyond high school. His parents were proud, assuring their young budding scholar that they would support his dream to join the burgeoning kollel movement. And then, tragedy struck when he was nineteen. His father passed away suddenly, leaving a mother with young children still at home. The oldest of the unmarrieds, it fell on Chaim to help his mother pick up the pieces financially. He left yeshiva abruptly and took the first job he could get, bidding farewell to his kollel dreams. 

Chaim had no regrets. He’d gone on to build a wonderful life with Penina, and their beautiful family gave them endless joy. As his oldest grew, Chaim began to see in him the fulfillment of his own unrealized dreams. Shlomo wasn’t only a wonderful boy, he was their only boy. Chaim and Penina cherished their princesses very much, but Shlomo would be their talmid chacham, their masmid. 

They gave him everything, raising him in a home filled with love, making lavish parties at his every learning milestone, hiring the best tutors and helping him grow in his learning in any way they could. 

At first, it seemed to be working and Shlomo was showing great promise. But over the years, and especially during his turbulent adolescence, it seemed that something died inside Shlomo. He stopped caring about learning. He approached his studies dutifully, though sometimes a little resentfully. He acted out in class and often skipped class entirely. His refined character was hardly evident anymore, obscured by a layer of coarseness and disrespect. His parents came to me heartbroken, afraid they were losing him and unable to figure out where they went wrong. After speaking to Shlomo and getting to know him a little bit, I appreciated what wonderful parents Chaim and Penina were to him. They invested their hearts and souls into their child, going beyond anything imaginable, just so that Shlomo would grow to reach the greatness they envisioned. And they did it all for Shlomo’s good. They oh, so desperately wanted him to reach those beautiful heights. The problem wasn’t that their dream was mistaken or misguided. The problem was that there was a child with an entire inner world that needed all the things that children need. He couldn’t be forced into reaching their dream because he was a person unto himself that needed to be nurtured as all children do.

Sometimes improving our parenting is as simple as a pointer here, a trick there, and sometimes it requires an entire paradigm shift. Sometimes we need to take a giant step back and reevaluate how we are raising our children. We need to take ourselves and our struggles, our biases and prejudices, our wishes and dreams, our own insecurities and ego, out of the picture and see our child for himself. We need to be prepared to take in the big picture, to see the child’s whole world, as we’ve discussed in previous articles, and figure out how to best help our child within that world. 

We often make the mistake of viewing our children as an extension or reflection of ourselves. We might have certain expectations of the outcome, as was the case with Shlomo, or we might be watching them go through struggles we’ve endured and swore we’d never let a child suffer that way. We might see them through the lens of a specific diagnosis, eager to name it and understand it so that we can treat it and thereby “fix” our child. 

These are just some of the limiting ways we might see our children in our quest to help them. 

We run the risk of getting stuck in our viewpoint, missing underlying causes and big-picture perspective. 

If we really do want to help them, we need to remove these limitations and take our children out of the boxes we’ve created for them. It’s our awesome responsibility to help them thrive and facilitate their growth by taking the whole person into account instead of trying to push a certain outcome. 

Because what happens when we push an outcome, as Chaim and Penina saw, is that we often achieve the opposite results. 

The things we want most for our child don’t come true because we’re not working with the child, we’re working on the end result that we want to see. We’re so focused on getting xyz out of him that we miss the signals, we miss so much of what is going on within him. And we end up pushing our square child into the round hole, leaving him with the resultant bruises and dents. 

We get on top of our overeater, remembering how much we suffered as an overweight kid, and we’re willing to move worlds to spare our precious child that pain. But we’re so stuck in our own past that by pushing our child to eat better we neglect to pay attention to the factors that are behind their emotional eating, the stress they are experiencing, the social issues that need to be addressed. Even worse, our approach is causing more problems than it’s solving. Our focus on their food intake is causing them to despise themself and spiral even further into disordered eating, the exact opposite of what we intended to begin with. 

Or, we have a child who is not socially adept. So we work to fill that lack, investing in social-skills training for our child. But we’re so intent on fixing the social problem that we don’t see what is behind it. We don’t see that our child is experiencing a trauma that is causing him to shut down. He is suffering from anxiety, perhaps, that is affecting how he interacts with his peers. Without taking a step back and looking at the big picture, we’re just putting a Band-Aid on an ear infection. We’ve taken a diagnosis and run with it, forgetting about the rest of the child’s world. 

One of the first things we need to do for our children is to step outside of ourselves and see them as a whole being. This applies both in general parenting and in dealing with struggles. We need to make the chinuch of each and every one of our children not about seeing a specific outcome or solving a specific problem, but about helping to guide and to build our child to become the very best version of himself he can possibly be.

As we’ve mentioned above, all we as parents can do is facilitate growth to the best of our ability. We can’t force outcomes because we are never in control of any outcome. What we can do is work to facilitate growth instead of forcing growth by taking a step back and focusing on what our child needs instead of our dreams or fixing problems. And then we can daven to the only one who is truly in control to help guide our children to become the best that they can possibly be.

*Names and details have been changed to protect strict patient confidentiality.