Dear Rav Levy, shlit”a
Q: I’m married and a father of 5, kein yirbu. For a very long time, I’m been wondering about my relationship with my eldest son. He’s what they call leibedige, or to put it bluntly, a difficult child, often bringing me to the point of anger and deep frustration. Recently, I decided to try using positive reinforcement to encourage good behavior, offering him expensive prizes if he’ll just behave, but even that didn’t accomplish what we set out to do. If anything, it made things worse.
I’m at a loss, and the older he gets, the more I’m concerned that his behavioral problems are only going to grow along with him. How can my wife and I help mold him into a mentch?
Hagaon Harav Dovid Levy replies: Between the lines of your letter, I discern one of the most painful aspects of parenting—the sentiment that my kid is “doing it on purpose” or doing it “just to get me.” The more I try to control myself, the more I try to give in and help him, the more I invest into him, my child inevitably acts out, and always at the worst times.
This sentiment rattles our confidence as parents and brings us to deep frustration and concern for our child’s future. What will become of him? Will he always be like this?
The first point I want to mention—which is one of the positive aspects of this challenge—is that such a situation often brings us to better understand our role as parents.
Let’s begin by clarifying the 3 primary goals of parenting:
*Satisfying the child’s basic needs
*Fostering a healthy emotional, mental and spiritual base that allows the child to succeed in life
*Positive chinuch
The first aspect, which is self-understood, means providing our children with food, housing and protection from danger.
The second aspect is just as crucial, if not more so, and strongly correlates to the third aspect which is chinuch.
An essential facet of any child’s life and the prerequisite to emotional and mental wellbeing is a loving, trusting home. A child who grows up in an embracing environment perceives the world as a place where he can contribute and also receive, and perceives himself as a person who is able of progressing, creating and giving. Authentic chinuch (to distinguish between chinuch and training) is transmitted in this fashion. A child who is privileged to receive solid chinuch learns to want to please his loved ones; to follow and make choices based on the values that he absorbs at home; to appreciate his parents and value their opinions; and thus perpetuate his family’s derech and our precious mesorah.
In contrast, a child who feels unloved and mistrusted will, chas v’shalom, react in the opposite way.
A point to bear in mind is that it’s always easier to love a good, well-behaved, obedient child, a child who is kind, intelligent, talented and successful, a child who brings his parents nachas and expresses love and warmth. On the other hand, a child who is undisciplined, unruly, tough or given challenging middos often places his parents in a difficult position.
There are parents who affect a harsh manner or avoid displaying love to a misbehaving child because “he doesn’t deserve it.” Instead of stirring the desired effect, the opposite occurs and causes a vicious cycle in which the child fails (in behavior or learning, etc.), the parents demonstrate less love and appreciation, the child feels unloved and disconnected, the combination of which discourage him from trying any harder. With each progressive stage of the cycle, the child finds it more and more difficult to work toward a goal, let alone achieve it, and this causes additional downfalls which lead him to earn even less respect and appreciation from his environment and instigates the cycle all over again…
As parents, we have the potential to change this vicious cycle into a positive, upward spiral in which our child benefits from love, warmth and closeness that encourage him to invest greater energies in order to improve and draw positive reinforcement and praise from his environment. The encouragement motivates him to continue striving, and thus the successes, praises and good feelings all increase in quality and quantity, spurring even better results.
It’s important to remember that specifically the struggling children are the ones who really crave extra expressions of love and closeness. Children sense when their behavior causes pain or upset to their environment; they know when their behavior is undesirable and detrimental, and when they are the subjects of cold, aloof behavior they absorb the feeling that they are unworthy of love and tenderness. It is impossible to describe the damage that such low feelings inflicts on a child’s self esteem and the potential long-term ramifications. When children feel unloved, unappreciated and unworthy, they lose what they feel is their right to closeness and warmth, which are unalienable rights of every human being who is created in the tzelem Elokim. How can a child in such a low state find the inner strength to modify and improve his behavior in order to extricate himself from negativity?
What can we do?
Our role as mechanchim is to serve as the pinprick of light illuminating the darkness of a child’s negative behavior. We must search, point by point, for all the special and beautiful facets inside of him, focus on them, highlight them, praise them, and celebrate them. We must serve as the kli machzik brachah for our child, retaining and preserving his special traits and the positive characteristics that Hashem granted him which he is currently incapable of seeing. We must continually repeat and stress all his positive points, elaborate upon them and call attention to his strengths and talents—even when it’s hard for us to do so.
These discussions will imbue our child with motivation to do good and continue doing good, and b’ezras Hashem, within a relatively short time, the pinpoints of light will spread, expand and merge into a giant torch of brilliant light that will allow him—and us as parents—to reap Yiddishe nachas!
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