How Not to Raise Children 

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

 

Psychology Magazine of December ’04 has a very important article entitled A Nation of Wimps, by H.E. Marano. It seems all of the care parents lavish on their children has backfired, producing record numbers of broken children. This coincides with a recent article, in Scientific American, that shows how wrong we were to encourage self-esteem, for its own sake, in our children. Such “self-esteem” can make things worse! Then, there is Bill Cosby telling it like it is to black kids, and despite his courage, nobody expects things to change very quickly.

 

What these articles have in common is the failure of American parents, schools, and social leaders to provide a living wage for children. The kids can’t take it. We break them. Remember what I said. Kids are not broken. We break them. That is the importance lesson of Psychology Today, even though only someone as uncouth as I am would say it this way.

 

If you save up your pennies to send your child to college, consider this, from the Psychology Today article: “The mental state of students is now so precarious for so many that,” says Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, “it is interfering with the core mission of the university.” Translated, American students are too sick to study. What makes them think kids are sick? The article suggests, “binge drinking and substance abuse, self-mutilation and other forms of disconnection.”

 

The article explains, “much of collegiate social activity is centered on alcohol consumption.” After you read this article, what will you do? Will you shake your head in disbelief? Will you faint? Will you cry? Let me tell you what you will do. You will send your child to college. And when you see what that got you, maybe you will try the bottle. After all, as the article tells us, “it’s an anxiety reducer and demands no social skills…It provides an instant identity; it lets people know that you are willing to belong.” You want to belong, so you send your child to public school and then college. You want to belong. So you let your kid buy the music, watch the movies, and you are so cool. In my house, if anyone is cool, they will hear it from one very hot blooded father.

 

Newsweek had a front cover a while back of a tiny young mother staring up, up, up, at her giant son. He towered over her because modern parents are terrified of their children. A nurse in a doctor’s office once made small talk with me, and I talked about my children. She turned very sad–I was shocked–and said, slowly, “I will never have children. I am afraid what they can develop into.”

 

That’s America, taking care of women, just the way they take care of children. Yep. Blacks, of course, have so much help. Should they get more?

 

The nine informative pages of the Psychology Today article concludes: “There are kids who are worthy worry about—kids in poverty…” That is a punch line. I would like to punch that punch-line into some inner city sewer, like a public school or a college. Some people just won’t learn. They need to feel that they are needed, by those whose vulnerability makes them material for conversion, for progress, for etc.

 

If nobody needed them, how could they change the world?

 

The Talmud tells us that a little child is an “ox.” “Stuff him,” says the Talmud. A child has tremendous energies. I used to teach little children in the afternoon, until about six or seven o’clock. All of us had been going an entire day, and it was time to quit. In honor of that, the school gave a fifteen minute recess during the afternoon. My pupils would not go to recess. They wanted to do their work. If your kids like fun more than studying, you have failed. Of course, you have to shake up the muscles and nerve endings once in a while, but a kid who is into learning is in a trance. Bug off and let him do his thing. And remember this, Stay Out of the Way.

 

What I did was to fall asleep in class. The principal would come by the class, and watch me with my head down, and the kids burning away the pages, writing, working, writing, working, with no noise. Every single kid.

 

Secondly, I had a system whereby I encouraged the students to fail. If a kid got all of the examples right, I was devastated. I would  groan. I had a whole show for them. I wrote a tiny “100%” somewhere on the page. But if a kid got it wrong, wow, did he get special attention. I was so thrilled and happy. Hurray!

 

Sounds nuts? A child wants to know if you want to control him, or if he is going to control you. There are no compromises. If you want to control a child, the child senses that you will break him, and he resists. A parent may overwhelm the child, but the child won’t go peaceably. Furthermore, the child will pay back, with interest, all of the pressure of the parent. It can take years, but all debts are eventually paid.

 

Now, the child is sitting in a class with David Eidensohn. David Eidensohn says, “I hope you fail.” Now, the game of being forced to succeed and the child resists is over. Succeed without the teacher, because you want to succeed. If you do, you are great, you are an “ox,” you are independent. Fail, and you fail alone, and the teacher thanks you. Now you are playing the hated game of doing what the teacher wants, by “failing,” and you don’t want to do that!

 

A parent or a teacher is playing with people who have much more energy than they do. They are playing with people who don’t have the brains to know they lost. They are playing with jihad. There is only one solution. Don’t mess with their systems. Get out of the way. But, and this is the critical thing, before you get out of the way, you have to create for the child or pupil an opportunity to be an “ox,” to do something heroic, to succeed in learning, to write an entire page of numbers, letters, or words,  at their own pace.

 

The kid wants to be an ox while you are aware, but not when you sit on them. You are there, but don’t stick your face into the pie. Be bored with the class, go to sleep, let the kids fight their way, example by example, task by task, through the hour, learning more and more and more.

 

Recently, in Israel, students who spend all day doing secular studies were compared with students who spend most of their time in religious studies. The students who spent little time in secular studies outperformed the secular students. It sounds ridiculous, but I remember when I was in high school, and some of us had very definite ideas of what we did not want to spend our time learning.

 

The principal told me to take a certain national test for honor students, but I protested. With the time I spent on those subjects, what kind of score could I make? He insisted. I scored in the top one percent of honor students in the country in English and reading subjects, and the top 13 percent of math students. Please, don’t get me wrong. I am not bragging. If those students couldn’t do better than me, there is something very wrong with their school system. What is it?

 

The American school system is designed to get children to think, and this means, think correctly, out of the box. Anyone who teaches or raises children knows that such a goal destroys children. Children, until the teens, at a minimum, should never be exposed to changing their traditions. A child may be the Talmudic ox, but only to take in material, like a funnel, and not to entertain intellectually ideas beyond the pale.

 

Of course, Talmudic teaching is all about arguing, studying texts, mastering abstract ideas, much of it very deep. But all of this offers the student a stable environment and process of thinking. To take a young child and teach him to “think” for “himself” when the teacher can’t do such a thing until he reads the New York Times, is to teach a child frustration. Thinking as a negative process, destroying tradition and what people must have to be secure, is a game for professors who get paid to do it, and is no pastime for children.

 

Of course, what was good for my students, is appropriate for my children. When my daughters turned twelve or such, I began asking them, at the Sabbath table, “When are you leaving?” They turned pink or whatever, but were they thrilled. Remember, every child is scared silly about leaving home. They are even more scared of parents who interfere with leaving home. I wanted my children to know how interested I was in them leaving.

 

I know people who are so concerned about not controlling their children they have nothing to do with dating and marriage. Let’s not talk about those people. I can intellectualize about a lot of things and suppress the pain, but adults who miss the marriage boat because of their parents are not included.

 

Little children begin to worry about their inner forces. They have to have answers. A father who is going to solve their problems at the appropriate time is what they need. Some parents raise children to do their own thing, to experiment with sex, to go to high school and college and have the boys rape them, because, that is exactly what happens. I was once on television with a state senator. A young woman had just been murdered in Central Park by a man she met in a bar. I said, “If you want my daughter, you will get down on your knees, and never get up.” The secular producer lady came over to me and said, “We want to hear more.”

 

40% of women in college suffer from anorexia or bulimia, eating disorders, thought to be rooted in a need to control one’s life. A woman who fears being raped every time she goes out with a boy can need some control in her life.

 

Psychology Today’s article criticizes college students calling parents constantly about every problem, at least, the ones they are not embarrassed to talk about. This is seen as a lack of child development, an attachment to the parents that must be severed. Such a critique may be technically justified, it may be, as the article frames it, The Eternal Umbilicus. But if you look at it another way, think of young boys and girls going to a college whose major function is to destroy their ideas learned from parents.

 

Your parents taught you not to have sex, and you go to college and do what you want. Your parents taught you not to drink, and you drink. Your parents taught you not to have drugs, etc., Your parents taught you, etc. Can we blame children who realize that all of their life is going down the tube? They must give all to be accepted by an American society, that demands college and all accoutrements of college. Can we deny them the relief of talking to parents, whose influence college erases? That happy and secure child who went to college now needs therapy to survive, and even so, who knows?

 

The past century is about bright ideas, ideas based upon science, logic, rationality, social needs, and they produced Communism, Hitler, Maoism, and many horrible wars. Today, in the interests of science, logic, rationality, and social needs, we ruin children, women, blacks, and if there is anyone I left out, it was surely in error.