Rabbi Binyamin Yuhanan Parenting Class 41 What is the goal of Parenting 1

Good evening. Today we're starting a new part in the book on parenting by Rabbi Yakobson, Spare the Child, part three, which is we spoke about general um rules of parenting. We spoke [clears throat] um a lot about the system of punishment, the system of consequences. We explained uh what punishments are good, what punishments are not good, shouldn't be used. uh we developed a a system how to create authority of of a parent in the eyes of children. And now we're going into the positive aspect of kinuk the uh punishments and the the um consequences concentrated on the uh control aspect of of uh parenting. Now we're going to focus on the positive on educational aspect of hook of parenting. We are on page uh 273 general pre preface um to this part. The subject of part three of this book is active. By active active parenting we we refer to our our direct efforts to cause the child to internalize the values we are trying to instill. As we said before, there's uh uh there are two parts to education to to parenting. control where you establish your authority and you prevent child from doing what is bad through various techniques and education or in Hebrew that means preparation of the child to continue living his life independently from you but the way you want. uh whereas just control is limited. As long as you're there, as long as you apply the force, the child will do what you want. However, once the child leaves the parents um domain, whether he goes on the street or to school or to camp, he will not um do what parents want without education, without the is you start the child on the path and he happily continues. That is the second part of this uh the active again to cause the child to internalize the values we are trying to instill. Although we will define what we consider to be acts of direct, they're not enough on their own for successful education. They will succeed only if they are directed toward the overall goal and done with the right touch and done in a conducive [snorts] environment. There are three um factors. These three factors the goal has to be clear, the touch and the environment are prerequisites to our efforts. Of course, we're going to explain what each one means. They have to be well understood and practiced before we can move on to direct activities. Again, kinuk means education, the positive aspect of parenting where we put the values that we want in our children forever so that they continue on the path without us being there. They become independently mature and serious and good. The first section of part three will introduce the prerequisites to our kinuk activities. The over goal, the overall goal of our kin, the right touch for the activities directed toward that goal and creating the environment necessary to accommodate our efforts. That's the first section. The second section will intro in introduce the essence of all of our activities which is positive reinforcement. Again in the first section we will learn about what the goal of parenting is the right touch for the activities and the right environment. The second section is positive reinforcement. A wonderful tool that is to be used all the time. Positive reinforcement is not a prerequisite for education, but rather positive reinforcement is education itself. It's not about creating a positive environment nor setting stage for education but rather it itself is education. If someone asks you what's education, it is number one positive reinforcement. Because how do you inspire a child to do what's right? By making him feel good about doing what's right. And therefore, every time you notice that the child is doing something right, you have to point it out, praise him and create a happy environment in the house so that he associates doing good with feeling good. And then even when you are not there, he will do good because it will make him feel good. Positive reinforcement is the factor which actively moves the child toward the desired goals. It is positive reinforcement that shapes the child himself as well as the way he will relate to himself and his surroundings. We give the child a perspective. We tell him this is good because you feel good. How do you feel good? Because we praise you. And that perspective will stay with him forever. And he will not need positive reinforcement in the future because he is programmed already to feel good when he does these things. It constitutes the groundwork for all of our other educational efforts. Once you create a good feeling inside of the child, to be good means to feel good, [snorts] to do good deeds in the eyes of people and to do good deeds in the eyes of Hashem will make him feel good. It will make him actually happy because we instilled these values through happiness and feeling good. That is the second section where we will learn the tool the main tool for education and that is positive reinforcement. And the third section will introduce the final active ingredient of our full rounded kin program and that is personal example. Personal example before setting the stage before prerequisites and before learning positive reinforcement is not enough. personal example is good. But if we make a child feel uh bad about doing mitzvot, about being a good person, then our personal example will not help. They will look at us and they will feel bad for us. Look at this old guy. he's doing all these things and he's not happy and I'm not happy and it's not a good uh way of life. He's going to look at us and the more he sees our personal example, the more he will be turned off. That is why personal example comes after [snorts] um positive reinforcement. Only when the child feels good about mitzvot, he feels good about helping others. He feels good about serving God and then he sees that you're doing it. That will be very powerful. He'll say, "I want to do it because it feels good and I want to do it because my parents are doing it and I see they're happy." personal example, whether it's positive or negative, God forbid, has a critical impact on the child. as a decisive contributor to our education. It is a subject that needs to be studied carefully in order to understand it clearly and learn how to avoid creating a negative example and most importantly to learn how to utilize the immense influence of the positive personal example to aid our educational efforts. together with positive reinforcement, personal example will create a very powerful system of education. The way to utilize the principles of personal example is discussed further in the third section in the chapter of real life kinuk. It is an approach to translating the principles of personal example into practical steps. That's going to be at the very end of the third um section. Okay. Now, section one, fundamental preface pre uh prefaces. We are um in chapter one on page 277. That's right under right before page 278. Setting the goal. Now, what is the goal of education? What is the goal of parenting? Now, first he puts uh he he brings a few quotations. The first one is from it is not the study that is the main thing but rather the practice. And the second um quotation is from the book that explains this uh Mishnavod the study should be put into practice. If you just study and don't do then it's worthless. It's like going to medical school and never healing anyone. like going to law school and never helping anyone with a legal advice. For as long as it has not been put into practice, it has not been fully integrated in the mind either. You might say, okay, I'm not going to do, but at least my mind will be purified. And he says, no, you're not going to understand the material until you put it in practice. We begin our discussion of active hinuk by setting down the goal toward which our process must be directed. No long-term process can be successfully navigated or even studied before its goal is clear. In a note he writes that in order to properly understand and implement the acts leading toward the end, one must first have a full understanding of the goal and how these acts lead toward that goal. Then he can approach the acts themselves. This is very similar to what Mislad Sharim says about our own life. Before we embark on successful life, we have to first think why am I created in the world? What is the purpose? What does Hashem want from me? And what is my greatest uh expectation of myself? What is my goal? And then to do two things. Number one, to evaluate your general path in life and see if it's going to lead you to your goal. And if not, you adjust your general path. And number two, you look at every action that you take and check that is that in accord with my general path. Is that bringing me closer to my goal? And the same thing is here. Before we can become successful parents, we have to understand what is parenting, what is education, what is the goal of having children. This may seem obvious, but we reiterate it here in order to emphasize that having a general idea of the goal is not enough. Generally, I want to be a good parent. Generally, I want to have good kids. Our understanding of the goal must be crystal clear. [snorts] And we must be constantly conscious of it. If we're not aware of the goal even for a moment, the next action might not bring us closer to the goal, but rather take us away from the goal. The goal is the premise underlying all the practical approaches and ideas. It must be the very clear focal point of all our kinuk efforts. Otherwise, our efforts will frequently be misdirected and we will miss important educational opportunities. If we don't know what we are here for, then when opportunity arises to bring ourselves closer to the goal, we're not going to use it because we're not aware what the goal is and how to get there. [snorts] So what is the fundamental premise of our and this is something we should um remember write down and keep in front of us always. The premise of uh the correct educational goal is education is about shaping who the child is in real life not just providing him with knowledge or skills. Education is not only teaching him math or computers or even science but rather education is shaping the child to become a good human being in real life. In other words, education does not mean scholastic achievement. Our goal is not the child's mastery of the knowledge that we teach or the development of his mental ability and learning skills. It is also not to teach him how to act correctly. Etiquette that is superficial outer behavior. It does not make a person a good person. If a person says thank you to a waiter, that's good. But that doesn't mean he's a good person. If a person says thank you to a taxi driver, that's very good. But that's not an indicator whether he is a good person. [snorts] What is an indicator? If he says thank you to his parents, if he says thank you to his spouse, if he says thank you to people that are close to him who he feels are obligated and he still says thank you. That shows that he is a good person. He is good not only when it feels like it, but even when he's tired, he behaves properly. Even when he's hungry, even when he's irritated, that is the um the barometer. So again, our goal is not the mastery of knowledge that we teach or development of his mental ability and learning skills. All those are are good as a foundation in order to become a good person. You need to have a sharp mind to be able to learn and the learning is in order to do all the good things that we're learning and not to teach him how to act correctly because acting correctly is only superficial. As important as it is, it is not the main point. The main point is for our values to translate into practice to develop the child's real life performance. Going out to a restaurant and being polite and holding the fork and the knife and saying thank you to the waiter. That's not real life. Real life is sitting at home when kids are screaming and when your spouse is uh not exactly on their best behavior and you're still calm and polite and respectful and helpful that is real life performance. Even when it comes to total learning, Hazal tell us the learning is not the main thing but the practice is the main thing. If this point is not obvious in its own light, it certainly should have emerged from our previous discussions. Yet we find it necessary to hammer it home even further. Ironically, even this premise uh remains in the realm of learning and not practice. Somehow the fact that education is primarily about real life and not about learning and academics passing the test and then forgetting it remains in the realm of understanding but doesn't make it into the realm of real life. We might have heard about it. We might have learned about it. But in our day-to-day life with our children, we forget it. In reality, the lion's share of our educational efforts are invested in areas of teaching and learning in school, in yeshiva, and so on, but not in real life, at home. This has become such an ingrained reality that for many parents education is mainly about scholastic studies. That is making sure the child is doing well at school along with some troubleshooting to deal with problems as they arise in school or at home. And as we mentioned before um when necessary the me measures of control can be used but they cannot be used by themselves. They have to be along with educational matters. If a child is not doing well at home or in school our our first reaction and unfortunately our our last reaction is to punish him, give him consequence and that's it. But where is education? Now on page 279, he quotes uh brings a quote. I think it's time to tell it as it is. We're all just paying lip service when we say that education is mainly at home and that it's our main function as mothers. In reality, our involvement in education is minimal and infrequent. And if you think about it uh as we we mentioned a study done before that a mother as well as a father they studied how much time in a [snorts] regular week parents spend talking to a child and they found it's on average about two minutes a week of talking to a child. [snorts] And that sounds very surprising. The mother or the father are constantly talking to the child. Do this, don't do that. Why didn't you do that? When are you going to do this? But they define talking not as commanding, not as control, but education, which means the child the the parent, the father or the mother are actually having an intelligent conversation where parent is talking and the child is answering. where the child is talking, the parent is answering. Not just a one-way command and the other party is quiet. Where a child is demanding from the parent, give me this, give me that, when you going to do this for me, and the parent is just quiet and trying to get rid of him. Or the parent is is pestering the child, when you going to do this, why didn't you do that? How come this happened? And and so on and so forth. And the child is quiet. That's not called talking to the child. And unfortunately in majority of cases only one to two minutes of intelligent conversation went on in families between parents and children. And that's what we say here. Our involvement in education is minimal and infrequent. We engage in in education only when we are suddenly hit by guilty feelings. after we've heard a lecture or after some something happens that shakes us up. Otherwise, we just go with the flow. Children go to school, they come home, we feed them, they play, we go to sleep, and in between we ask them to do a lot of things and we demand and we criticize. But where is education not there? We might as well stop talking about something we don't do anyway and just face the fact today's is in school. We hope that it is the teachers, the educators who are telling our children about real life, who are inspiring our children. And a parent is helpless. They don't know how to do it. They give the child off to school and they don't have any say in the matter. If it happens that the school is good, that the teacher is good, they're lucky. And if not, they're lost and the child is lost. And of course, that's not how it's supposed to happen. Um if you if you put all your eggs in one basket that's risky. If you rely only on school and it so happens that that particular year the relationship between the child and the teacher is not so good then it may be a disaster for the rest of the life of the child because he doesn't have the support. He doesn't have what to lean on in the family. It's only the school and the school is not the best for that year. We we can insist that the school and the teachers fill their true role and engage in true hin instead of just teaching. They should be the ones teaching our children how to act instead of wasting most of their time and efforts teaching academic material. [snorts] But that can only happen when we acknowledge And the what the goal of is it's the preparation for real life and then we can see whether or not it happens. But if we don't even know and we say as long as you get good grades and your behavior is good that's fine. That's good. That's not good enough. Um, in fact, my wife told me that surprisingly, it's the best girls in school who get married last. Why? Because they're good in academics, but when it comes to real life, they don't know about it. And it's the the average or struggling girls in academics they perform well as mothers and wives. So of course we don't want uh our child to fail in academics but um at the same time we cannot devote all our efforts only to uh knowledge. We also have to teach the child about real life and and inspire them about real life and show them real life example. Now this is um end of the quotation and now the the author continues this writer assumes that the school can theoretically constitute the main venue of kinuk and that the program is only that the schools and the problem is only that the schools are not properly filling their role. In her view, this could be achieved if the classes would focus more on real life behavior and values than on academic information. And again, that would be good, but that would again be putting all your eggs in one basket. If the teacher is charismatic, if if students happen to like the teacher and the subject matter and the principal and their classmates, they may do well in school. But what if one of those is not perfect? So often students are bullied and then the school is of no use or the the teacher doesn't find common language with the student or the pre principal or the whole atmosphere. One of the things is not perfect and that's it. It's not a good environment. So you cannot take that risk and give up your responsibility. This is a fundamental error. The best educational institution is still not the natural realm of real life. Any school, any college is not what real life is. Real life is at home. Real life is with you with with your siblings. Real life is with your parents which prepares you for real life with your spouse. Therefore, schools simply cannot be the main educational venue. A high quality educational system can enhance our education, but it can never replace the main thing which is at home. And by the way, in the olden [snorts] times in uh the Jewish world, there were no yeshivas. Not for girls and not even for boys. Every father learned with his uh boys. Every mother learned with her girls. And they um learned from real life. What do parents do? They would ask questions. Parents would answer. They would read the books. Parents would explain. And it was handinhand with real life. Learning and practicing was one and the same. And then later because some families