I had promised a follow-up to my previous blog….but I hope Pesach was a good enough excuse to push it up for so long!! So many parenting moments came up over Pesach, but first I must address the 10 letter word: punishment.
As various incidents came up with my kids over Pesach, with relatives looking on (which always makes me more self-conscious about my parenting and my kids!), I was very much aware that I never had any reason to even consider punishing my kids. Is that because my kids are perfect angels who never hit, talk back, grab toys or slam doors in anger? Of course not! (And if yours are, you can stop reading this post!)
But I don’t punish because of the reasons I mentioned in the last blog, and I have found other ways to help my children learn to do the right thing and grow into self-disciplined human beings and Torah Jews. Without punishing them for their transgressions, how do I help them learn and teach them right from wrong?
Number one, by example. I work on treating everyone with respect, sharing, using kind words, regulating my emotions. And when I mess up, I express my regret. As Rav Moshe Feinstein points out, Avraham was not doing real chinuch when he told Yishmael to bring food for the guests: real chinuch would have been doing it himself! The way we act is the number one way we teach our children!
But when our children misbehave, what should we do? Of course we need to teach them right from wrong! How can we do this in a way that helps them to really learn? One thing I learned from Laura Markham and others is the principle of “connect and then correct.” If you connect to your child’s neshama, by displaying empathy and resonating with who they are and what they feel at that time, and then give them the reprimand or correct their actions, they are much more likely to absorb what you are teaching them.
For a younger child, they may just be swooping in with a hug and kiss while removing the toy they were banging over the head of the baby; for a preschool child this can involve empathizing with how they feel while holding their hands to keep them from hitting ("I know you are so mad at Ema, and we can’t hit Ema!").
For older children, who may not respond as well to you verbalizing their feelings (which may involve some guesswork!), it takes more skill to resonate internally with their feelings while giving them mussar. But if you can try to take their perspective for just a second, and realize that their rude comment or dishonest statement was coming from some place of disconnect, sadness or anxiety, we will be able to give them rebuke with empathy. As Gordon Neufeld says so poignantly, the real “power” we have as parents is in our connection to our kids.
Will this be foolproof? No, of course not! But even if your child doesn’t “listen” to you perfectly all the time, by giving empathic limits you are building your connection with them, while at the same time, teaching them that life has limits and they can follow them!
And most importantly, you are teaching them that HaShem understands them and loves them, is compassionate when they make mistakes, and, at the same time, has high expectations for their behavior. What a powerful message we can give our children, something that can never be achieved through punishment.