Dr. Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, spent 15 years as a child psychologist in Los Angeles. The families she served were mostly well-educated and financially successful, with parents who were deeply concerned about their children’s well being and who made significant efforts to be involved and supportive. Yet, despite all these advantages, the families were not functioning well. The kids were anxious and fragile at best, and at worst, “petulant, obstinate, rigid, greedy, cowardly, lethargic, and imperious”. Everyday life became unmanageable as children and parents argued about clothes, mealtimes, homework and bedtimes. The kids withdrew and became non-compliant. School and social life suffered. All this misery, Mogel realized, was not the result of psychological pathologies in the children. Rather, it seemed to arise as a response to an environment where parents were over-invested in their children’s “success” and “happiness”.
This is certainly counterintuitive. Doesn’t every parent want their child to be happy and successful? Should we want for them to be miserable failures instead? Of course not. But we can do them great harm if we think that our role as parents is to propel them into the Ivy League with a busy schedule of activities and tutors while at the same time being very concerned that they not suffer any discomfort along the way.
Mogel and the teachers she spoke with saw many parents with “Lake Wobegon syndrome” – if their child wasn’t above average in everything, it was perceived as a problem to be fixed with a pedagogic or therapeutic intervention. Boys and girls today are also frequently burdened with unrealistic expectations regarding their innate differences – boys are sometimes expected to act like girls and girls like boys in situations where these behaviors might be difficult for them. The challenges for the child (or any person) facing unrealistic expectations are many. No one is above average in everything, even bright children from loving, stable, prosperous homes. We all have varied talents and interests and competencies. This is especially true for children, who are developing in so many different dimensions at different rates. When a child (or any person) is burdened with unrealistic expectations, they often react by getting depressed and by adopting self-defeating coping strategies such as avoidance, self-sabotage, defiance, lack of effort, and cheating.
The solution for parents is to become more attuned to and accepting of each child as they really are. We shouldn’t expect our three-year-old to read or ride a pedal bike, even if we know of three-year-olds that do. We need to understand and appreciate their dominant temperament – cautious or bold, quiet or excitable. By listening to their teachers and other parents whom we respect we can find out more about what expectations are reasonable. Not everyone is destined for the Ivy League or the NBA or the Forbes 400. Also, not everyone gets to those places on the same path. By seeing and accepting our children’s uniqueness, we not only remove unrealistic pressure to succeed, we also can focus our energies on supporting the enjoyment and development of their one-of-a-kind talents and gifts.
With regard to wanting our children to be happy, Dr. Mogel of course is in favor of safe, happy kids. However, she writes that she saw many parent-child relationships marked by “fearfulness in children and intense protectiveness in parents.” She comes down particularly hard on parental worrying. ”The parents I listen to worry a lot, and not just about the big scares like illness, abduction, or car accidents. They are highly creative in coming up with things to worry about and loyal to the worries once they’ve birthed them.” This constant worrying takes much of the joy out of parenting, and causes us as parents to take steps in the name of protecting our children that end up stunting their development, whether it’s doing their homework for them or not letting them climb trees. The unhealthy lessons our kids learn from parental over-protectiveness include “the world is dangerous”, “I can’t do it on my own”, and “it’s not OK to make a mistake or be hurt or unhappy.”
As parents, the healthier path is for us to allow kids to develop their mental and physical capabilities by providing age-appropriate challenges, risks and decisions. Mogel urges us to let them make “cheap” mistakes. If they skin their knee falling off their bike, they’ll find out that skinned knees heal pretty quickly, and that learning any new skill includes encountering difficulties, and that these difficulties can usually be tolerated and overcome with patience and persistence. If we as parents don’t know if our child is ready for a specific skill or situation, and we’re worried about it, before we simply let worry win the day and say “no”, Mogel again recommends checking in with other trusted parents and teachers. We may find out that our fears are over-blown and that it is time to let our children take additional developmental steps on their own. The payoff for everyone is that our children become more resilient, gaining greater mastery of themselves and their environment while learning to trust in their capacity to handle challenges. We saw this play out recently with our 3 year-old son at a playground. He wanted to slide down a pole, and asked my wife to physically help him get from the high platform to the pole. Instead, she talked him through the process of reaching over with one hand, then two, then hold on tight while he stepped off and put his legs on the pole. When he did it, he was thrilled, and he spoke excitedly and very proudly of doing it all by himself.
The subtitle of the book is “Using Jewish Wisdom to Raise Self-Reliant Children”. In the first chapter Mogel discusses how she and her family moved from an entirely secular life-style toward one that embraced the traditions of her Jewish heritage. Her transformation was driven in large part by the disillusionment brought on by the failure of her clinical training in psychology to help her family and the families of her clients thrive. She found that the traditional wisdom and rituals of Judaism provided a framework for family life that directly addressed the problems she had been experiencing as a mother and a therapist.
The Ten Commandments are an important reference point in the book. We must be consistent and clear about our parental authority (“Honor thy father and thy mother”). We can reduce family stress and improve relationships by taking time out for rest and play (“The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shall not do any work…”). Mogel also delves into centuries worth of Jewish teaching on human nature and relationships to cover areas such as the importance of gratitude, the value of work and ordinary chores, the multi-dimensional gifts of eating, and the critical skill of self-control. She repeatedly emphasizes three ideas that Jewish traditions offer to build happy, successful lives and communities: moderation, celebration and sanctification. She shows how putting these ideas into practice can reduce family stress while strengthening bonds of connection and respect. She provides lots of practical examples for dealing with everything from the kindergartner who is defiant to the grade-schooler who is a picky eater to the teenager coping with homework stress and electronic distractions.
One chapter I found particularly helpful was the chapter on self-control. The Jewish tradition identifies two complementary aspects of human nature, the yetzer hara (“evil inclination”) and the yetzer tov (“good inclination”). The translation, however, is imperfect. The yetzer hara is more complex than the word “evil” implies in English. Yetzer hara is more accurately understood as the drive for excess selfish gratification. It perverts our natural drives, such as those for sex, food, material comfort or pleasure, and tries to convince us to overindulge these desires. Jewish tradition teaches that the yetzer hara is in fact a blessing, and without it the world would end because procreation would cease and no one would bother to work. One of our key challenges as we develop as human beings is to learn to recognize and overcome our yetzer hara. Can we savor a good meal without falling into gluttony? Can we industriously pursue business success without becoming so focused on money that we resort to fraud?
Dr. Mogel advises us to re-vision some of our children’s “misbehavior” as a manifestation of their yetzer hara. Our job is not to use shame or punishment to suppress their natural drives. Our job is to strengthen the yetzer tov so that our children choose and act in ways that are moderate, healthy and appropriate. Our primary tool for strengthening the yetzer tov when our children are young is through the practice of establishing and maintaining limits. Importantly, these limits are not subject to negotiation. We don’t need to rationalize and explain or “prove” to our kids that the limits we’re setting are perfectly constructed or “fair”. That doesn’t mean we’re not open to considering information our children might provide about a limit we’ve set, but it is the nature of the yetzer hara to argue any point to get what it wants, and we must be firm on the items that are important to us. Dr. Mogel makes an additional subtle point about the yetzer hara. Some of the tools that the yetzer hara uses to get what it wants – persistence, cleverness, arguing, creativity, rationalizations, desire, and physical strength – can actually be positive traits if they are disciplined by the yetzer tov. So when our children whine for an unhealthy snack, or persist in an activity that troubles us, we can appreciate that they are showing their capacity to yearn and to strive and to achieve and to influence others and that these are necessary skills for a good life when properly directed.
Dr. Mogel also offers good ideas for supporting our children’s spiritual development. She points out that the common strategy of “pediatric religion”, where we send our kids to religious classes but don’t incorporate religious ideas into our home life, almost never succeeds. The key, Mogel says, is for us as parents to work on our own spiritual life, and incorporate those rituals, habits and beliefs into the daily routines of our family. Dr. Mogel gives helpful suggestions for talking to our kids about God in ways that are age-appropriate, including providing good answers to some of the questions that all people, including our children, are bound to have as they get exposed to spiritual concepts.
I should add here that, although Dr. Mogel has based her book on Jewish teachings, the concepts in the book are applicable to every family, regardless of faith (or lack thereof). Ideas such as providing consistent discipline, making time for rest and play, channeling children’s energy, and fostering self-control are universal. And although she bases her case for the benefits of a family spiritual life on her own experience of Judaism, the blessings of meaning, reverence, connection and celebration are not unique to any one religious tradition. Dr. Mogel doesn’t appeal to religious authority as the basis for trying these ways of parenting. It’s not “Here are some ideas; use them because they’re based on the Torah.” She says, “Here are some ideas based on the Torah; use them because I’ve seen them work.”
The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, by Wendy Mogel Ph.D. 258 pages, not including notes and study guide.
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