Rabbi Binyamin Yuhanan - Parenting Part 2

[Music] do [Music] good evening today we're continuing learning about parenting and again i'm going to show you the book with we are using spare the child by rabbi yakuza and we are on page 10 page 10 of the book and to quickly review i'm gonna go one paragraph back we first of all spoke about the the proper way to learn this book that this book is a textbook it's not an easy read it's not a novel but rather it guides you step by step explains to you proper techniques what to avoid and also this book will teach you mainly two things the difference between the which means education and control and what is education what is control and when to use education and when to use control both education and control are important control is more at the younger stage of their life and education is for older stage you cannot have one without the other and you need to understand both in order to use them properly now in the middle of page 10 he says this is the basis for our essential definition of toward what is proper education things that we do that cause our children to experience joy and pleasure in spiritual activities to desire spiritual activities and to learn how to achieve them so again these are the main goals of our education for jewish education that our children should enjoy spiritual pursuits they should want it and they should have tools knowledge how to achieve it that is what's going to give us the greatest um happiness as parents when we see that our children are following on the way of torah they are strongly committed to hashem and at the same time they are happy people because we know that happy people achieve more in life and they're easier to deal with they hurt less people and they help out and inspire many more people and they stay religious longer and stronger as opposed to people who are religious unhappily anything that does not connect a child to the joy and pleasure of hashem cannot be defined as education so again these are such important words that we have to repeat it again and again and remind ourselves anything that does not connect the child to the joy and pleasure in serving hashem is not education you might think it's education i'm going to train my child i'm going to guide my child i'm going to instruct my child but if instead of pleasure they get turned off then you're not educating them then you are taking them away from hashem anything that can conflicts with this goal is the exact opposite of education even if it relates to the child's torah and keeping them it's vote so you might say yes it's important for my child to say because amazon it is true but how do you go about educating your child to saber-cut amazon and the answer is in a way that will make the child happy to do it receive pleasure when he's doing it want to do it and know how to do it and so once you know this principle everything else is easy you will be able to figure out what to do just by following this principle the way i talk to my child about mitzvot or about learning torah about character traits will that give them pleasure in following my advice will that give them desire to do what i say and will that give them tools how to do it if the answer to all three is yes then what you are teaching your children is good but if you answer one of these questions in the negative and you'll say for example you know what i'm angry i'm frustrated with this child why they again don't want to do it why they're lazy and so i'm going to let them know and i'm going to scream at them or i'm going to uh push them hard to say because amazon to wear kipat without thinking how will they react will they be upset will they have negative association with wearing kippah putting on succeed saying and therefore it will distance them then it would be better if i didn't say it because it would be better that they should stay where they are rather than being more more distant so if a parent regularly causes his child to experience negative feelings when he makes him do something related to torah he is actively ruining the child's education and the same is for a teacher or a rebbe in a classroom setting to be very careful how they encourage people it should be encouragement and not pushing not enforcing not jean-darming not policing punishment and force may sometimes be called for but in such a case it's not defined as education but rather as control and that's something we have to remember that punishment consequence and force are necessary ingredients in successful parenting but they don't fall under education they fall on their control and as we said control is necessary when you know how to use it and when to use it otherwise it should be sparsely used because as we're gonna learn control means that i get done what i want to get done but it does not bring the child to desire to like to get pleasure from the task which means by definition that's not education and that's why it's only at a young age to actually train the child to make the first step so that the child gets the the the technical knowledge of how to perform the task that's when we uh exercise control and force the child to do it but after that there must be a there must be education and control has to finish at that point there are sometimes neces they are sometimes necessary to stay to stage to set the stage for the true education okay and at this point i would like to give an example that i experienced firsthand from my rabbi my rabbi uh was in a wheelchair and he used to travel from his house he would get into his car bring his wheelchair into his car drive to the yeshiva where i used to learn and take the wheelchair out of hit the car bring himself down from the car into the wheelchair and ride his wheelchair into the bed midrash into the yeshiva where he would pray minha and people were surprised and they asked him you are handicapped why are you doing so much in order to pray minika afternoon service why don't you pray at the synagogue which is right next to your house which both the house and the signagog have handicapped ramps so you can roll down in your wheelchair down the ramp and right away go into the ramp of the synagogue it was right next next to each other and you don't have to climb out of your wheelchair into the car drive from the car into the wheelchair and then reverse to go back home why why don't you pray in the synagogue why do you come to yeshiva to pray and he said that he grew up in yerushalayim and being raised by the old style family who valued prayer and who would force their children to pray he developed a distaste for prayer he says whenever i open a sidhu i right away remember my father telling me to pray i right away remember screaming and the punishments if i don't pray and i can't pray i open the siddur i get on the into that negative state of mind and that's it i cannot pray i found that the only place where i can pray with desire is when i come to the yeshiva where the boys are baleti shiva who boys that come from non-religious backgrounds and they chose to be religious and they want to pray not because their parents tell them the opposite their parents might tell them why are you praying so much why you're not studying for college why are you learning and they go and they pray against their parents wishes he says when i see a room full of such boys i have desire to pray also they inspire me nobody is forcing them must be prayer is something beautiful praise something important so he says if i don't come to this yeshiva i will not be able to pray in any other synagogue so he was already in his 60s and the childhood trauma still affected him and because the parents used control and not education he until old age was not able to pray in any other place except in ballet yeshiva he was trying to get what his parents didn't give him the love and desire to do meets vote willingly so he told me always he said binyamin when you have your children never force them to pray don't drag them to synagogue unless they want don't tell them to pray unless they want show them example inspire them tell them stories but don't be on top of them don't turn pages for them and don't say why you're not praying now we're on page 11. we are not going to prove that this is the true torah approach to hinok that is beyond the scope of this book this is not a philosophical book it's a practical book anyone who doubts it should consult with a torah sage and they will see that that is the proper way and i just gave a real lifetime example that when we only use control it has short-term effect to forcing the child to do what we want but not long-term effect and as we quoted the verse hanok even when he grows up becomes older he will not depart from the path that you set for him and you see that in the case of my rebbe the path that his parents wanted him to be on in to to pray he only prayed when they were on top of him but as soon as he left their home he stopped praying and he had to encourage himself and re teach himself how to pray again that's the danger of of control that it will force the child to do what we want temporarily and that's it but education requires that the the love the desire and the skill that we give our children should last them beyond our control of them when they are in yeshiva when the parent is not there and later when they are in the synagogue when their rebbe is not there and later when they are at home saying birkat amazon when nobody is there they should be able to have the the love and desire to pray or to do any mitzvah just as if somebody is standing on top of them that's the that's the beauty of judaism and uh to give you another practical example rabbi levi who always looked to say good things about the jewish one erev people a few hours before passover he went into the jewish village and he stopped every jew and he said do you have any comments i need some comments do you have any comments and every jew said god forbid shalom no we don't have any comments and then he did the same experiment and he said oh do you have this contraband do you have this forbidden item do you have this illegal substance and everyone said yeah if you for the right price i can get it for you and he turned to hashem and he said master of the universe look at your children how precious they are you told them don't eat comets and leaven should not be found in your possession and i try to find even a crumb of comets and no one has it and there are no policemen there are there is no security no one is standing on top of them they are doing your will willingly as opposed to look at the king the russian king he decreed this is illegal and this is forbidden and this is contraband and nobody cares even though they are policemen and even though they are jails and fines no one listens to the king this is the the proper way that the jew should be doing hashem's will without any force without any control from outside just from his desire and that's our goal in education in to give our children this love and pleasure from doing mitzvot and learning torah that they should be eager they should want to learn they should want to pray and we don't have to push them when they graduate high school the goal is that the children should tell us i want to go to great midrash i want to go to seminary i want to remain religious i want to marry someone who is religious how do we do it by giving them pleasure desire and knowledge about mitzvot and this is what this book is about to illustrate how this principle works in real life now an example from the book an accomplished taurus scholar talmud was devastated his teenage son would no longer pray and the father couldn't understand it he had always put a special focus on training his son to dawn properly here's how he described it i always insisted on praying shakharit with my son i would pray at minyam minyanim that were not convenient for me in order to be with my son to supervise him i made sure that he sat at my side through the prayer i made sure that he prayed from the open sedur during davening i would watch him carefully and make sure that he remained focused if he ever began dreaming i would immediately snap him back to attention in short i put all my energies specifically into his prayer and this is where i failed worst how did this happen was he exposed to some other negative influence that overcame all my efforts the father wondered but the boy's own answer to this painful question was not surprising i hate praying with my father more than anything else for years i've been dreaming of the day when i'll be big enough to skip prayer just entering the synagogue makes me sick i'm sure it's because my father was so on top of me all these years it made my prayer so oppressive that i just can't stand it i hate sinning for so long and i hate thinking about god and gay nam all the time this goes so well in line with the story i told you about my rabbi exactly the same experience and the same result this poor father did everything he could to teach his child to pray everything except for the main thing education according to our definition education means to cause the child to experience spiritual pleasure and joy to cause the child to enjoy praying and to want to pray on his own how do you do that first of all the father should have offered encouragement and compliments i remember when i was just beginning to pray just beginning to become religious i visited the synagogue in philadelphia on torah and this was one of my first times in synagogue on holidays and uh i was not so familiar with the siddhur i knew how to read hebrew but that's about it and so when i came to the to the synagogue they gave me this and slowly slowly i tried to read as slow as i could one paragraph while they went pages and pages and at the end of prayer a man in his fifties came up to me and he was smiling and he said you know prayer in hebrew is called avodah sheba the work in your heart which means it's work it's hard work labor and he told me i noticed that for you it's real i saw how you were working hard to pray i saw how you were concentrating trying to read the words so i want to compliment you on fulfilling what prayer really should be it should be work and i felt very good about it i said okay you know without knowing i did something good and that stayed with me that one compliment that that man gave me in that synagogue in philadelphia stayed with me for the past 25 years and it gives me constant inspiration and and strength because i remember every time i feel down and say oh i don't i don't have desire i don't have energy and i say i know i can because that man said that prayer is hard work and i did it i can do it so this is the power of encouragement so the father should have offered encouragement and compliment he should have told his son how proud he was to see him doverning so seriously he should have told him how much hashem loves him for it he should have made a big deal about it at home in front of the whole family he should have done anything else that would associate prayer with feelings of warmth love pleasure and fulfillment only things that cause the child to like the experience of prayer can be defined as education towards prayer but sadly this father did the opposite instead of drawing his son close to prayer he actively pushed him away far away from it for this boy prayer turned into a source of guilt as he expressed himself i hate thinking about hashem and gehinam all the time since the boy wasn't naturally interested in prayer his father had to make him do it through strict supervision scolding and criticism darwining under his father's critical eye made the experience a tense and miserable one for the boy each day so he started to hate it for him prayer became associated with stress and misery the father raised the issue with a known educator and uh he gave him the same answer as we gave in this book and uh while the father was speaking to the the the rabbi something happened that illustrated to the father this point a four-year-old daughter of the rabbi was about to eat candy and she didn't want to make a blessing that's a common scenario what do you do we just said you have to make the child feel good about making blessings and here you have a four-year-old who doesn't want to make a blessing what do you do the the rabbi turned to his guest and asked what would you do now how would you get her to make a blessing the father said i would take away the candy the rabbi replied taking the candy away is not education toward making blessings is just a preventive measure will manage to stop her from eating without a blessing but but but the father answered but if she wants the candy back she'll make a blessing so we'll train her to make blessing if she wants food true agreed the rabbi but that's still not training her to make blessings this is exactly the point we've been discussing i can get a child to pray and make a blessing but if she makes the blessing just so she will not lose the candy i haven't successfully motivated her to make blessings okay respond to the father go ahead why don't you show me how you would handle the situation the rabbi turned to his daughter and said hashem loves us very much that's why he gives us a lot of good things but we can't eat them without a blessing that's like not saying thank you if right now it's hard for you to make a blessing and tell hashem thank you then put the candy away and eat it when you're ready to make the blessing the girl agreed to make the blessing when she finished her father enthusiastically launched into a dramatic description of thousands of angels in shamim singing the most beautiful songs to hashem using very dramatic terms which were clearly beyond the young girl he described the grandeur of the scene and the breathtaking beauty of the songs he then lowered his voice dramatically suddenly the singing stopped everyone was quiet why because they heard a sweet little voice coming from down below everyone listen carefully and what did they hear your voice they heard you making abraham hashem was so excited to hear you he loves to hear you so much that he quieted all the millions of angels your blessing came all the way up and the malachi excitedly tied diamonds to it and hashem was so happy that his daughter who he loves so much is making a bracha to him the girl got so excited that she ran to the kitchen to ask her mother for something else to make the bracha on this was obviously extreme to illustrate the point but it illustrates true education it is a classic example of a measure taken to make the child experience pleasure and satisfaction from abu dhab hashem and this is a specifically good um example because it shows both control and working together the father exercised control the the rabbi the father of the this girl in saying that let's put the candy away until you're ready to make a blessing and say uh thank you to to hashem which he did in a more positive way not saying you cannot have it until you make the blessing but rather saying it positively i want you to have the candy and hashem wants you to have the candy yes have the candy just make the blessing first instead of saying i'm not giving you the candy until you make the blessing which is a negative way so he used control in a positive way and then as soon as the daughter made the blessing he jumped at the opportunity to now do education to inspire her make her feel good make her proud he praised her he showed her how important and beautiful her action was so this is a very very good example so now someone asks what if the daughter still refuses so that's very simple because you phrase it in a positive way you make it up to her not that i'm not giving you the candy until you make the blessing which puts the control in me and makes her feel like she's uh subservient to you and makes her resist rather it's your candy hashem wants you to eat it i want you to eat it we want you to enjoy whenever you're ready make it and that's it you can have it and even though she will not eat it until she makes the blessing because again the father has this control he can say yes we're going to put the candy away when you're ready when you want to eat it just make a blessing you can have it so if she doesn't want yes you would still keep the candy away once you started this as we gonna learn that uh whatever you say you have to stick to it in the future maybe you will decide that your daughter is not old enough yet it's questionable at four years old if you have to insist on them making blessing but once you told them to make the blessing you have to stick to it your words have to have value they have to carry weight so once you entered the discussion and told her that she can eat the candy once she makes the blessing you have to stick to it okay now we're on page 14. an important side point if we want to motivate the child through such friend measures we must also be aware of the difficulties that the child faces and counter them with a well-fitted compensation which means you have to also consider the point of view of the child maybe they really do have a valid concern difficulty a problem can't just be a tyrant and say that said you have to do it otherwise you're not getting in other words if we want to encourage a new behavior then apart from finding ways to cause the child to enjoy and appreciate what he is doing we need to also be aware of the difficulties it presents him and find ways to counter them the continuation of the above incident illustrate this the this this uh father with his son who he wanted to force to pray tried to use this approach with a younger child prayer had become a major struggle with this child as well now we're talking about the second child he failed with the older child now he wants to encourage the younger child and he's going to try better with the knowledge that he has the father had been dealing with it only through force the father now changed his approach and tried to get his child to like the prayer by means of praises and encouragement but it didn't work as soon as the father eased his strict supervision the child took advantage of the freedom and ran away from prayer even though he clearly did enjoy his father's new way of relating to him after some time passed and the father felt that no progress was being made he returned for advice after discussion it turned out that the father simply had no idea what a challenge prayer was for this particular child the father's regular seat was near the back of the synagogue it was near an area where a group of children hung out and they laughed at anyone who prayed too much too much of its addict the adults sitting in that area also behaved in a way that provided a very negative example for the children sitting around them the more this father strictly enforced his son's prayer the more the other children made fun of both of them so the pa the father put his child in a great challenge under normal circumstances it's it's it's difficult to encourage your child to pray but putting him in an environment where people are making fun of him is is making it impossible ordinary encouragement is not enough to counter this sort of situation so this called for a more extreme form of bribery it does not create enough of a positive experience experience to compensate for the misery and difficulty that prayer involved in order to effectively fight with the reality that his son was facing the father was advised to find ways to ease his difficulty and to enhance the compensation to find an extraordinary form of positive reinforcement and this is what the father did this is an extreme example but again it's to in order to illustrate what lengths we have to go in order to teach important values to our children in order to make it easier for the child the father moved his seed toward the front of the synagogue where the atmosphere which was much more serious in addition to enhance the compensation the father talked with the rav of the show and they decided on the following on shabbat after prayer thereaf announced that a special kidush was going to be held only for children all the kids were excited as the children dug in the rav spoke you must be curious about why i made you this kidush let me tell you a story once there were few a few children who were invited to the palace of a king they were taken to a spot on the palace grounds where they were given bags and told to spend a certain amount of time gathering stones the children didn't realize that these stones were actually diamonds they wasted their time playing around gathering just a few stones here and there but one of the children a serious and responsible boy worked as hard as he could trying not to waste a minute he kept it up even though it was hard to be the only one working hard while the others not only took it easy but also made fun of him the rabbi described in detail how they made fun and how bad he felt and how hard he worked to keep up his efforts anyway the rav went on to describe what happened when he when the time ran out he described other children's regret when they realized what they had missed and how happy this one boy was that he had managed to overcome and ignore the ridicule not only that said this boy was especially lucky because not only was he allowed to keep everything he had collected but he was given everything that the others had collected as well when the king found out that they had all made fun of him he took everything that they had collected and gave it to this boy when he finished the story the rabbi walked over to the the boy placed his hand on his shoulder and said it is very sad that such special boys like you should lose the great treasure that hashem wants to give you every word of governing is gold every sentence is a diamond isn't it a terrible shame to lose this if you want to know he continued i am jealous of this boy do you hear that i the old wrath of this show and very jealous of this boy he told the boys about this this boy because even though the other children made fun of him he just kept governing seriously the rav then shook his hand and the boy almost burst into tears about half a year later the father wrote it is difficult for me to come and thank you in person but i am endlessly grateful to you i can barely recognize my son i never dreamed that a child could love governing so much this demonstrates the way to compensate the child in proportion to the difficulty he faces the more difficult it is the greater measures he we must take to counter it and of course helping him around helping him with it again simple or you're such a good boy or you're praying so nicely was not enough in this case the child needed help to ease the situation to ease the challenge moving the the the seed and he needed encouragement in this case not only from the father but for the rabbi of the synagogue in front of everyone now and at this point i would like to pause until next week hashem we're stopping on page 16 on the bottom and we will continue with another example and next week present hashem we will go on to chapter 2. thank you for listening have a great night