Rabbi Binyamin Yuhanan - Parenting Part 3

[Music] good evening today we're standing we're continuing our class about parenting using this book again for those who are newcomers spare the child uh and we continue our discussion about encouraging children to do mitzvot and we gave an example when challenges before in front of children are great the encouragement has to increase as well and we gave an example of a boy who had very difficult time praying and his father was giving up but then rav gave him advice that to check what is the surrounding and he found out that there were boys in the synagogue who were making fun of anyone who was praying seriously and even though the father following advice of the rav encouraged the boy and praised him it was not enough and the rav of the shul designed an event at which he spoke to the boys who were doing trouble and pointed out the greatness of this young boy who is trying to pray and from then on it it it got better because the boy felt that it is worth it even though the challenges are so great but the praise and the attention that he got made it worth his while so we not only have to make demands of our children but we also have to see are they capable of delivering if we ask something from our child that is impossible whether physically or emotionally socially then we are putting a stumbling block in front of our child they will not be able to do what we are asking because the challenge is too great because of peer pressure or again other other reasons and we are damaging our child of course you have to find that balance because if you don't demand anything or you demand very little the child will not develop his or her muscles the muscles of hard-working the muscles of resisting the the the pressures from society but if you demand too much that carries another issue now okay we are continuing and we are on page 16 of um of the book and after telling us this story and how hashem it helped to increase the reward in the form of encouragement to the sun he continues this anecdote demonstrates the idea of finding the way to compensate the child in proportion to the difficulty he faces the more difficult it is the greater measures we must take to counter it a confused now a new example a confused father consulted with an educator with a mechanic about the following for months i've been dedicating an hour a day to learn with my son as we mentioned the in the last class very often the area in which parents put in the most effort that's the area that the child does the most poor in why because if the parent does not have the proper method then the more they push the child the more the child will resist if parents have the proper method then of course the more effort you put in the better it's going to get but if shalom your method is not good then it's better not to do anything than to use improper technique and such parents who recognize that yes this is an important area prayer learning doing mitzvot saying blessings so they put pressure on the child but they do it in the wrong way so the child hates it he resists it and that's the area where the child fails in the most and the parent asks how's it possible i dedicated so much time and effort to this area so this father is the same story he spent one hour every day learning with his son did this help and he continued his story this involves a lot of sacrifice and inconvenience on my part but i keep it up because i realize how important it is so i was shocked to hear recently in a roundabout way that my son hates learning with me i try to talk to him about it but i couldn't get anything clear out of him my sense is that he himself doesn't exactly understand why he feels that way the rabbi asked the father to describe the learning session the father was surprised by the question what's there to describe i sit at one side of the table my son sits at the other side of the table he reads and explains the gemara that they learned that day in school i listen make sure he has it right and correct him when he doesn't at the end i asked him a few questions on the material and that's that do you enjoy it the rabbi asked the father said enjoy what's nature to enjoy i'm obvious i'm obviously not learning with him at my level besides my time is very tight and the whole thing is not very convenient for me so why do you expect your son to enjoy put yourself in his place imagine that you're doing something that you find enjoyable and important like playing outside and someone pulls you away from it right in the middle and make sure it makes you sit down with an impatient tense irritable person and in who intimidates you he wants to test you on everything you learn that day and scrutinizes and critiques everything you say the father said but i have to help him get ahead in his learning well your current approach is not only failing to get him ahead it is actually going to prevent his progress you are causing your child to view gamora as stressful and unpleasant experience do you want him to start hating gamora why should he hate gemara even if you're right it's i who am causing the problem not the gamora and he knows it he isn't stupid the rabbi answered the question is not what he knows but what he feels the fact is that he feels stress and discomfort when he learns with you even if he understands that it is you and not the gemora it makes no difference if when he sits down to learn gamora by himself it invokes unpleasant memories this will in turn cause negative feelings this again reminds us of the story that i told you last class about my rebbe who could not pray whenever he would pick up a sidor he would remember how his parents pushed him to pray and how they were on top of him and how they punished him if he didn't pray so he couldn't pray anymore he wasn't just upset at his parents he also couldn't pray so the same thing here not only the child will hate the the study session with his father but he will also have a negative feeling towards gamora because that is what they were doing when they were together and whenever he will open gamora he will remember his father and his mood will go down and he will be depressed and scared and irritated maybe someone is going to test me now maybe someone is going to be upset at me maybe what i'm saying is not 100 right so he will not be able to sit and enjoy while he's learning because the memories of his father are going to be bothering him now returning to page 18. that will sabotage his learning even if he is able to understand the reason for it he understands that it's not gamora's fault just like unfortunately many children do what we call go of the deader they live the religious way of life why do they do it every case is different but often when parents don't give them a pleasant feeling about being jewish there is stress in the house there is stress in their relationship and whenever they are supposed to do a mitzvah or whenever they are doing a mitzvah there is constant criticism parents are always looking to correct and the parents uh mean well i want my son i want my daughter to be at sadiq to be at sadeket i want them to be righteous i want them to be great i don't want them to be to make mistakes that i made when i was young so we try to encourage our children to be good but in turn what our children feel is that they're never good enough their parents don't like it and who is at fault religion because if i didn't have to say birkat amazon i would be a good person so birkat amazon according to my parents causes me to be a bad person my inability to do well in the gamora class or in the synagogue or in any area of judaism reflects badly on me and therefore i have a negative association with it so just as the the doctors have a rule do no harm before you heal a patient make sure you don't make his situation worse and uh many of us saw an example of that yesterday when unfortunately we there was a stabbing and we saw a soldier with a knife in his back and he was sitting and no one was taking the knife out and beca that's because they were following this rule even if there is a knife in in one's back don't take it out because you might make it worse it's better to stay with a knife in your back instead of hurting the person even more so too if our children are already four and five and six and seven and they still forget to make a blessing on food and they still don't say a shariat and they're still not uh behaving with derek edits first we have to find out how to address it if we don't know how it's better to leave it alone don't say anything because there is great danger that you will make it worse now he continues the child probably will not even remember that it was you who who caused those feelings in most cases is the feeling that surfaces not the reason and causes of those feelings and it's very hard to differentiate and that is why many people as i explained go of the data nowadays or they stop being religious after the holocaust because the germans mistreated me because i'm a jew therefore being jewish has a negative connotation negative feeling and even though it's the german's fault it's the nazi's imam fault not judaism's fault but because the nazis said we're killing you because you are jewish many jews felt a bad emotion bad feeling towards judaism and they couldn't be jewish anymore they had to hide they had to run away now he continues on page 18. in this case two motivating the child to want to learn would have to include being aware of the difficulty that the learning poses for the child not only say you have to do it why don't you do it but put yourself in your child's shoes think about the difficulties he is going through the need to interrupt his play in order to engage in learning which he finds boring and finding the way to counter it what can you give to the child that will make it worth his while to stop playing and start learning and this is called shillolishma doing something not for the right reason but our sages say that every beginning okay so we have to find a way that a child should want to do the right thing even if it's for wrong reason because our sages say that every beginning should have a shalom aspect to it every beginning should have a reward that the the the person will say even though i should be doing it for the sake of hashem for the sake of torah for the sake of me earning gulamaba but it's far away i don't feel the connection to it so i will instead encourage myself by telling myself it's worth it for me because i will earn money or because i will get um praise or because i will get pleasure in the form of a candy or or ice cream or trip and as the person grows in his um intellect maturity connection to hashem he will slowly start doing things even though there is no reward even though nobody is watching nobody's going to praise him even though he's not getting paid even though there is no social social pressure for example so it's important to start at the young age by rewarding our children um with material um benefit by giving them praise after they do an action every time we notice our children do something good we have to praise them so that in their mind next time they're going to say oh i liked it when my father or my mother praised me i enjoyed it so let me do it again so that they praise me or we have to give them points or we have to give them a candy or after they finish learning give them a snack but again praise is the best and most powerful um element there is no um age that you stop rewarding the child it depends on their maturity but the good thing is that eventually you will notice that the child does things on his own he likes to go to synagogue he likes to go to yeshiva he has a havruta he talks about it he even calls him and learns on the phone he makes blessings on his own he remembers to say birkat amazon or shema he comes back and says that he forgot to make a blessing and you will be proud of your child and at that point you will understand that he doesn't need um the material reward as much now let's continue we are in the middle of page 18. since the difficulty is not as drastic and unusual the compensation would not have to be as extraordinary if it's a simple thing the compensation is small praise should always be the encouragement happiness on the other hand in the previous case the difficulty was the prayer itself was not the prayer itself but the specific problem in the surrounding circumstances the child was not against prayer he understood it he wanted it but the children who made fun of him made it difficult in this case the compensation had to counter the difficulty inherent in the learning itself in this case it was the the learning that the child didn't want to do because he had to drop his playing and he had to sit in front of his not so pleasant father in such cases which are of course much more common a one-time compensation would not be enough the father would have to provide an ongoing form of compensation now i'm reading note 7 the ongoing compensation would not have to be as dramatic dramatic as a one-time compensation needed to overcome an extraordinary difficulty as in the previous case which means you don't have to make a great party and invite the whole synagogue to it like the rabbi did in the previous case but in this case it is the consistency of the compensation that provides the desired effect rather than the intensity he calls it quantity over quality small increments over a period of time instead of a large dose of inspiration at once now what did the rabbi advise the father to do in this case whether the father was demanding perfection in learning from his son and the son didn't want to learn with his father the mechanic advised the father to replace the critical and tense atmosphere with a warm and friendly one he advised him to sit next to his son rather than opposite him to listen to him affectionately with a smile rather than critically to take special notice of any points that the boy does explain well and to enthusiastically express how much he enjoys it and how happy it makes him the father was concerned that such an approach would compromise his son's learning level but he came to understand that if the boy remembers the learning as a warm and pleasant time spent with his father the educational benefit will well outweigh any possible decline in terms of the actual studies that's what we have to remember that it's not that right now the child must do the job well but rather as we said the word means inauguration starting it out well we are concerned that the child should like it and should pursue it himself and as such the child doesn't have to perform well right now the child must have a good feeling right now and that good feeling will encourage him to continue and to do more and more now note 8 on page 19 states and doing well in studies are not synonymous teaching the child to learn and for the child to actually learning well is not the same thing means causing the child to connect to learning internally not necessarily ensuring that he knows the material he's currently learning well so again you have to keep in mind that when the child is in the first second third fourth fifth sixth seventh and even eighth grade the emphasis is not on high achievement because it is in the later years in high school and in bid midrash that the child learns majority of his knowledge and understands because until high school the child's brain is not mature enough to understand it deeply he may remember information but still late in life he will have to review it and learn it more deep just because he learned humas or gamara in elementary school doesn't mean that he'll become great but what does matter in elementary school is the the attitude that the child develops towards learning so if the child is not so successful in in learning in elementary school it's okay focus on his love of yeshiva his love of his rebellion of his teachers his love for knowledge in general and the when he matures grows up his uh brain develops he will still have the love for learning and then he will apply the tool that he has to actually sitting down and learning but if shalom we do the opposite we force the child to memorize to study to sit still to be quiet to behave in class and we prevent him from playing outside then they will develop negative feeling towards learning and even though during the elementary school we force them to memorize a lot to read a lot to do a lot of homework exercises when he goes into high school or ben midrash and he will be more independent he'll say i don't want it i don't like it now that i don't have anyone on top of my head telling me what to do i'm not doing it i don't want it and so we exchange the temporary gain for long term benefit hashable about two months later the father called to express his gratitude not only do i now enjoy learning with my son he said my son is actually making significant progress in his learning his rebbe is thrilled with him the way i see it it's a miracle of course there was no miracle all that happened was that the father who had first been focused only on control which we mentioned briefly and we will speak more more about means focusing on the right here and right now the performance of a command or proper performance over mitzvah right now that's control and if i can force my child to do it i may feel good yes my child did it but we see that it doesn't work it's only the very initial stage where you want to start the engine you apply more force but then the education has to kick in so the father instead of using the control way of uh making his child learn now began engaging in as well it was the hinuk effort the measures taken to cause the boy to enjoy the learning experience that brought about this change we will elaborate on this point as we move along and now we turn to page 20 chapter 2 developing the points um just to summarize again we see that we should not panic if a teacher calls and says or your son or your daughter are not doing so well in school you should tell yourself okay they're still young maybe they're not yet mature maybe their brain is not yet developed it's okay i will watch my child i will help them i will try to do a little bit homework with them but mainly i will encourage my child i will praise them i will tell them that i believe in them i trust them they can do it and i will point out whenever they made a smart decision i will tell them you're smart look you figured it out whenever they do something that required thinking i will tell them oh you thought about it well i see you use your brain well you have good safety you're smart and i will praise them whenever i see their reading even for a few minutes even when they're doing a little bit homework i will praise them if it just happened so that they got a good mark on one of the tests even a minor test i will emphasize and say yes you can do it you're smart and don't don't um make the mistake of taking the teachers or the rabbi's words seriously and start pushing your child oh what's going to be with you who's going to marry you you're not going to get a job you're going to fail shalom we should never say such words to our child okay and the one more point to to uh review is that we are not thinking about um immediate results but rather we're interested in long-term behavior of the child recording stopped now recording in progress okay good so let's continue chapter two developing the points having illustrated the idea in practical terms we now move on to define the two basic concepts of our discussion and control more precisely again is education proper education something that will cause the child to want to do voluntarily what we want them to do and control is when we focus on immediate results when we want the child to do something right now and sometimes it is necessary ironically it is the more familiar term which needs to be well explained even though in the jewish world the word khinuk is very often used education but we may misinterpret it in this work the the term is used differently from the way people generally use it the word is commonly used as a general term for anything related to parenting child rearing from expressing affection to criticizing which means everything is called hinuk commonly by people from teaching to lecturing from punishment to reward from discipline to encouragement however the author the author of this book would like to use the term differently the term hinukh here is used only in its narrowest and most precise sense based on that definition the term includes only measures that contribute to the child's development over the long term means initiation the beginning of a long-term reality that is how rasheed the commentator explains the word in the passoog he says it is a person's or objects initial entry into a profession that he will remain in as in train the youth so that even in the old age he will uh not depart from the correct path now we're on page 21 take for example a family separated we're celebrating he is trying to explain to us though the term hinuk what is hanukkah khalokatabad is when the couple starts their life in the new house they make a celebration and they learn torah we say prayers say blessings in order to start the life in this house with the mitzvah so when we celebrate we're not celebrating the fact that we are using house now that right now we are in a new house and we're happy but rather we're celebrating the fact that we are beginning our usage of this home we're celebrating that we moved in and we have a happy long life in this house ahead of us the main reason for celebration is the expectation that they will continue to use this home far into the future long after the celebration ends similarly of a child is something that marks the beginning of a pattern of good behavior which can be expected to continue far into the future long after the hinuka has finished and the child is under his own jurisdiction this brings us back to the conclusion we reached in the previous chapter that positive motivation is an act of force is not an act of renewal if a child prays because he feels motivated to do so it gives him a sense of fulfillment because he he's doing it by his own choice when that is the case we can assume that this prayer is the beginning of a long-term reality we can expect that the child will continue praying happily aft even after he leaves his parents jurisdiction however when the child prays only because he is forced to or because he is scared of his father it is not the beginning of a long-term pattern but rather the child is only doing it now there is no reason to assume that the child will continue to pray once his father can no longer force him to do so force only affects the here and now it does not create permanence and we have to remember that hashem created people as free beings hashem did not force us by putting a hammer on top of our head and if we desecrate shabbat or if we look at the wrong thing or think a wrong thing or say the hammer will come down and and smash us because then we would be forced and there is no point in creating such a world it says that hashem created the world with midad hadin with the attribute of strict justice and he saw that it will not endure it's not worth it to keep such a world around if people will be forced and otherwise they will be punished and hashem added and middata gave people freedom to choose because if there is no punishment in sight there will certainly be reward and punishment at the end but hashem is patient and there is no punishment right away hashem hopes that even if we make a mistake we will mature and we will regret it and we will fix our ways he does not force us he does not exercise open control he does control everything and he can guide us so that we are encouraged to choose right but he does it in an educational way no threats no fear because if we are forced it's not worth much just like a robot just like an animal that you um hit and it does what you want we don't praise the robot we don't praise the computer and we don't praise the animal it's only the human being who voluntarily chooses to do good and we have to remember that if we want our children to be great we have to allow them to make good choices voluntarily we cannot always be on top of them control them make sure they do everything correctly because even though temporarily yes they will achieve more than other children but in the long term they will fail miserably yes there will be a students and they will say all the blessings in front of you but once they leave your control everything will come off and this is uh also the reason why judaism is not a missionary religion why judaism in judaism we don't force people to convert we don't force people to do mitzvot because it's worthless if i force you to do a mitzvah but you really don't want and your intent is not to do mitzvah you're just doing because i'm moving your hand to put on tephylline then it doesn't count you have to want to do a mitzvah only then it counts so we have to remember that it's not the obedience that we are looking for right now but rather it's the attitude that the child is developing that we want to improve okay now we continue on the bottom of page 21 so focuses on the future it is something that we do now to influence the child's behavior now and into the future whereas control focuses on the here and now it is something that we do to influence the child's behavior only in the present without a lasting effect control includes influencing a child's behavior by for example threatening to punish exerting authority or even offering prizes to a certain extent offering prize that the child can't say no to is a form of control if we do it in a smart way it will learn how to do it then it will move from control to education if we make sure that the price is not only a payment but rather it's it's presented in a way that gives a good feeling to the child because that good feeling will stay with him in the future even if you don't offer the price next time but still the activity will remind him of the good feeling he once had so prizes can fall in the category of control but if done properly they can fall in a category of proper education these measures may influence the child's behavior in the present but not in the long term once the child is on his own he will not have to worry about punishment he will not be subject to the same authority figures and will not anticipate a prize for good behavior once there is no prize nothing is forcing him there will be no reason for him to decide to continue the behavior that was forced on or squeezed out of him um and one um illustration how prizes are not uh the best way of encouraging the child is very often as the child grows his ability to earn money grows as well so even the beginning a few cents half a dollar a quarter will encourage a child because he knows oh i can buy a snack i can get something with this money and it excites him when he will reach an age where he can get a job for a neighbor and the neighbor will give him five dollars then all your prizes are going to be not important in his eyes why should i do mitzvot why should i pray why should i learn for mere quarters or uh very little of money when i can get a job by the neighbor and i will be able to get right away a large sum of money and so too with every price a price has a limitation and so we should learn how to use prizes correctly and how to present them that it's not a bribe it's not a payment but encouragement hashem we will continue next week we're stopping on page 22. thank you for listening have a great [Music] night