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Rosh HaShanah 5763: “Indulging Our Kids”

(by Rabbi Howard L. Apothaker)

This sermon is copyrighted to Rabbi Howard L. Apothaker, Ph.D.

NO REDISTIBUTION OR REPUBLICATION IS PERMITTED.

I was having a conversation with a couple this summer. Both had been brought up in, to put it generously, modest financial circumstances. By the sweat of their brows, and the exercise of their innate mental abilities and personal qualities, they could be said, by any reasonable financial barometer, to have made it.

Comparing their challenges to those of their children, one of them wondered aloud if somehow their ability to indulge their children as their parents had been unable to indulge them, would somehow affect their ability to make it in the world ... or at least make it with the same kind of work ethic and values that they themselves had developed — not their success, but by the process it took them to achieve, and to no small extent, is still taking them to maintain, their success.

We justifiably worry about such things. A true story: A high school senior in a boarding school copies a paper in a history course off of a paper-writing service, but insists that he used it only for information. The teacher asks the student to produce the informational paper or the books and articles he used. The kid says that he cannot because he got everything on-line and did not save it on his computer. (Later, to a school psychologist, he admits that he lied.)

In the meantime, the parents are called and the dad says indignantly: “If this was a criminal case, it would never come to trial. Whatever happened, ”his dad asks, “to due process and burden of proof. Don’t they teach about those kinds of things in that history course?”

It is of course a parent’s instinct to protect his/her child. To what end. According to the mother, she wants her child to be “happy,” and the school “could be ruining his life.”

After the horrible incident in which Abraham withdrew the knife from his son, we are told in the midrash how much Abraham began to indulge his son. The signs were there. Sarah, childless and presumably beyond child-bearing age, had arranged with the concubine, Hagar, to help Abraham have a child. Later, when Sarah had miraculously born Isaac, she successfully sought — and Abraham agreed for the sake of domestic tranquility — to send Ishmael and her mother away.

And so the cycle of indulgence began. A disabled Isaac suspected in his blindness that he might be indulging his younger son, Jacob, who stole his brother’s birthright. And Jacob indulged his younger son, Joseph, by giving him a special coat, causing his older brothers’ a resentment that eventuated in their abandoning him to — what they thought at the time to be — certain death.

Indulgence cannot buy happiness. It can protect from ruin. But happiness as adults is largely dependent on the tools we give our children; tools that will allow them to develop emotional maturity — to be honest with themselves, to be empathetic, to take initiative, to delay gratification, to learn from failure and move on, to accept their flaws, and to face the consequences when they’ve done something wrong. Indulgence does not buy character.

If we don’t want to be like the parents who show up at PTA meetings under an assumed name, then we must concentrate on our children’s inner lives, as individuals who take responsibility for their actions. We can do this in part by giving less and expecting more.

Yes, our children are precious to us. We hover. I come from one of four children. My parents, my mother-homemaker did not hover. With little in the way of financial resources — certainly no money to send me to even the most modest camp — I remember in the summer, my mother would say to me, “No TV. Go out and play. Be home at 6 pm for dinner. Amuse yourself.” If you calculate that it now takes more resources to amuse your children than it did to fully educate yourself, and some of you may find this to be surprisingly so, then let’s continue to explore.

Someone once said that their children run everything around the house except for errands. Hear this school psychologist: “Avoiding discipline is endemic to affluent parents.... We become the devil, the one who did not step up to the plate. In defending their child, they give the message that the child need not take responsibility for his/her actions. That’s the message we are giving to our children.”

A Case: A headmaster at a private school in Manhattan had disciplined a teenager for sexual harassment — touching and making lewd comments. The father invites the educator over. Barely had they said their “hellos” when the father flips on the speaker phone. He introduces him to a high-profile defense attorney on the other end, who says, “You go another step with this sexual harassment bulls--t and we’ll get six lawyers and shut your school down.”

The overprotective, overidentified attitude of parents is pervasive today.

• We are driven. And our kids feel driven — driven to get good grades, get into the right college, get a good job.
• We are indulgent. And our kids also feel indulged; adrift in a world where the lines between childhood and adulthood are blurred.
• We are consumers. A highly sophisticated and manipulative advertising apparatus targets our kids as consumers with their own discretionary incomes.
• We try to set standards of morality for our children while the media sexualizes them for profit.

Rather than looking to a common culture of shared values to help us raise our children, we feel challenged, even alone. We are failing to protect our kids from the mini-adulthood conferred by the world around them. Amid this confusion, we often hope to be friends with our kids and fear abnegating our authority. We are less strict than our parents were a generation ago because we have chosen to be that way. And somehow we have communicated to our kids that they can “get away” with stuff because we are afraid of losing them as our parents lost us.

But the desire to form a close bond with children should not come at the expense of setting an unyielding limit or rule when a child needs it. At the extreme are parents who smoke pot with their adolescents, or buy beer for them. Some of us swear or are unguarded in our speech around our fourteen-year-olds. Others of us blur the distinction between friend and parent and feel rejected if their child prefers to be with contemporaries, and even their parents, rather than with us.

Sometimes we buy their time and attention. But if we ply our children with gifts or fail to set appropriate limits out of fear that they will withdraw their love or be upset, we have thus burdened them with protecting US from unhappiness. Too often we fear NOT for them, but for US, that somehow in our own imperfection with shall have traumatized them, but more importantly OURSELVES. It is not easy. We face challenges:

• Balancing the emotional closeness to our children and with the setting and painstaking and pain-producing enforcement of limits.
• Protecting without being overly-protective, leaving them without future resources to take responsibility.
• Being an authority figure without being authoritarian
• Tempering entitlement when we have what to give them.

Examine this statement from the Talmud: “Who is rich. One who is satisfied with his lot.” And think for a moment: Have my own feelings of having what is adequate been sabotaged. What is enough? And when moreover is enough enough?

When I began college in 1970, the most important reason stated for going to college was to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life.” Today, 74% of college freshman believe that the reason to go to college is to become “very well-off financially.”

Here’s a college freshman speaking of a classmate: “She’s not concerned about money. I don’t think she understands the value of money because she gets a brand-new car for her birthday. She has no concept of how money works or how you earn it.... Just like water. You turn on the faucet and out it comes.”

Our children have lost the sense of purpose and principal for which they should be living. For whatever reason — too much homework, no galvanizing social issues, apathy — students seem less interested in saving the world than they once were.

One of the most consistent findings about happiness — and this is a very important areas where parents can have some influence over their kids — is that people report being happiest when they are absorbed in a challenging activity. Too many of our kids are unable to be engaged because no dalliance is quite good enough for them. They flit from activity to activity, later from career path to career path, never fully investing themselves.

Sometimes this occurs because parents do not push their children hard enough to give them adult skills that will enable them to immerse themselves fully in an activity. They don’t make them practice the piano or stick with their skating lessons. Affluent parents have to work especially hard to give their children the ability to derive pleasure from the self-motivated and sometimes grinding pursuit of non-material incentives.

Social scientists tell us that self-esteem, that sense of worth and well-being that keeps us happy and productive, is tied to having a sense of personal control and competence — a feeling of self-efficacy. Healthy self-esteem in a child depends on the belief that s/he can accomplish important tasks “by myself.”

An awareness self-sufficiency is important throughout life, for adults as well as children. Here’s a healthy teenager explaining how she, as opposed to her indulged friends, learned to handle things: “Like if something gets out of control and no one’s going to come and save your from it, you have to save yourself. Like if you have a job and your boss accuses you of something you can’t just call your parents and tell them to come in and talk to your boss. You have to learn to deal with people yourself. And my parents were never like that anyway. My parents have always told me, like, even when I was little and had projects, if you don’t have it the day it’s due, sorry. You deal with it.”

If we do not do as this parent does then we have robbed our children of the life skills and the drive to self-sufficiency, assisting our child and debilitating them all at the same time. We may be creating indolent, anxious and dependent children. Parents cannot let their own fears rule their children’s lives — whether it is fear of their child’s social rejection, school performance, inadequate athletic skills, or other common measures of achievement.

A child, like our stomachs, does not need all we can afford to give it.

We need to teach our kids frustration tolerance. And the only way to do this is by allowing them actually to experience frustration and stress — even if it is painful for him or her, and for us as parents, to witness and suffer. Just as exposure is the only way to build up the immune system, so we can teach coping skills only by allowing our children to work themselves out of difficult social situations. And I am not talking about choosing between two luxuries, but between luxury and desperate necessity. Just as I am not talking about a choice better two kinds of uppers, but no drug at all.

While we should not be introducing trauma, we should also realize and repeat this mantra: stress builds character. And it is the only way to build character. So, in the words of one observer, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

What to Do?

1. Delimit Self-Centeredness: In a recent study, those who were less self-centered had more contact with their fathers than those who did not. The best thing to spend on your children, it is said, is time. Fathers who indulged themselves at the expense of spending time with their children taught that skill to their children.

   Furthermore, those children who had regular and regulated chores around their house, including but not limited to keeping their own rooms straight, tended to be more giving to others. Doing chores connects the adolescent to the welfare of the larger group and associates his/her actions with the common welfare.

   In the literature, it is shown that teens who don’t do chores are more likely to see themselves as spoiled. They sense the lesson (And they are right!!!) that they’re getting something for nothing.

2. Monitor Inner Rage: Strike a balance between giving enough time, understanding, attention and love while maintaining enough distance to encourage independence and self-sufficiency. Kids, I think, sense how much effort it takes to be a good parent. They know when you care enough to create a structured family life that provides a regular, ritualized forum for closeness and intimacy — the family dinner, the shared vacation, participation in their interests and activities.

   In a recent study, and, friends, I am citing the study now, “There is less likelihood of an angry, mean, or depressed teenager in families that regularly have family dinners or attend religious services together ... if they can enjoy spending time together, and if they feel comfortable talking about things that are important to them.” If this doesn’t sound like your household, then schedule regular activities: family dinners, Sunday lunch ... together, walk-and-talks, even watching a weekly TV program together. Set aside a night — a predictable day and time — for pizza and a video. Take each of your children out for a special time.

3. Don’t Keep Up With the Cohens: The tenth commandment warns against envy, but we violate it to the degree that sometimes we do not genuinely rejoice at the good fortune or accomplishments of others.

   So we ratchet it up, asking our children to be super-productive. And when they cannot meet the standards, they may feel anxious and driven — so much so that, to keep up, they engage in lying, cheating or forsaking their health. Our children need to feel free ... free to derive pleasure from their own accomplishments and from the accomplishments of others.

4. Froth and Sloth: Some kids have the opposite reaction to wealth. Millionairess Christina Onassis squandered her life in excess, dying in what an acquaintance called “a pathetically wasted life,” from a heart-attack, induced from drug use. Far from being driven, the privileged often take the attitude of one eighteen year old: “Look when grandpa dies, I come into two million, so why do I have to push myself?”

   The syndrome has been called “Affluenza”: a general malaise and sometimes dangerous disconnect from the needs of others. According to one: “Precisely because they have no needs, no desires that could not be instantly gratified, they also came to have no hope. Hope and longing are founded upon unrealized desires, on wants for which effort and energy must be expended and luck implored.” They lack hope, because there is no need for it. This loss of hope produces kids who seem overwhelmed by lassitude and consumed by aimlessness. Psychopathy is not uncommon.

   Happiness, on the other hand, emanates from having goals and working toward them. When I was in college, I did the famous rat lab.... Lab rats, used to getting bigger and bigger rewards, run harder through the maze. When fat they stop ... or even when the reward is smaller, they may practically starve rather than seek the life-saving, but less remunerative reward of their effort.

5. Don’t I Look Marvelous: Children are under incredible pressure to fit an image: girls to be very trim, boys to be buff. Girls, by far, feel the most risk of social disfavor, an incredible 61% saying that they feel pressure to lose weight, with many using fasting, vomiting, diet aids and laxatives to help them do so.

6. Delay Gratification: Adult Jews who have put their children through Hebrew training in preparation for Bar/Bat Mitzvah know that they give their children at least one great lesson in life: delayed gratification.

   Psychologist Walter Mischel did an experiment with four-year olds in which he made an M&M available for eating, but, he told the child, that he was going to leave the room. If the M&M were still there when he got back, the child would receive greater rewards. Following these very children later on in life, he found that there was almost a perfect correlation between the child’s ability to wait longer periods of time for the candy at age four and the child’s SAT scores at age sixteen or seventeen. In these surveys, they were also rated by their parents as better able to cope with stress, effectively pursue goals and resist temptation.

   Even accounting for genetic predisposition, ADHD, etc., and other causes celebres for justifying away irresponsibility, according to the latest science: those who help children wait their turn, delay their gratification, resist temptation those actions train the brain. Yes, after all groups with disabilities are heterogeneisized, such discipline effects changes, yes, alter the neural circuitry responsible for self-regulation.

   The most straightforward way to help our children develop self-control is to exhibit it ourselves. Every parent should remember that one day his child will follow his example instead of his advice.

   This means that, even if we have the pull to get us to the front of the line, literally or figuratively, we should not use it, at least routinely. This means that, just as we teach children that they must scrub their teeth to prevent or to delay cavities, and there is no other way, we must teach the child, for example, to clean his/her room to prevent a cavity of coping-with-responsibility-and frustration skills. If a parent insists on firm, but not harsh or arbitrary rules, the child’s conscience will internalize not only the habits of action, but more especially the habits of mind necessary to gain self-discipline and thus self-respect.

   Wealth, my friends, statistically, puts your child at a higher, not a lower, risk of drug and alcohol problems. And why? Is it because the child knows that, when a problem arises, the parent will provide a good lawyer, a good therapist or a bed at the Betty Ford Clinic?

   And let me add quickly that wealth is not the only measure. Whether rich or poor, parents may not fail to teach their children self-control, the ability to tolerate delay and how to deal with boredom.

   Permissive attitudes signal approval. That children experiment should not mean that a parent throws up his hands in self-protective laxity. Parents must be vigilant about helping their children avoid situations where it will be difficult for them to resist temptation — and to examine our own habits and medications for the messages that they may be sending to our children.

7. Child in A Bubble: Most of us want to keep our kids away from psychological and physical pain, exposing them sometimes unwittingly and incautiously, not only to no-pain, but also the privilege of no-risk. A parent, self-conscious of her own indulgences for her daughter, goes to the information on a “mini Outward Bound” overnight. When it came to the Q&A session, she got up and asked in all seriousness, “But what if my daughter doesn’t like what they serve for dinner?”

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In a recent survey of 639 upper-middle class teens, 81 (13%) did not display the following teenage syndromes: they didn’t drink, smoke cigarettes or marijuana; they weren’t depressed, mean, spoiled or self-centered; they didn’t suffer from eating problems; they said it was wrong for thirteen-year olds to engage in any form of sex; and they felt they worked to their potential without being overly driven.

What distinguished these too-good-to-be-true teens from their peer counterparts? Five things:

1. Their families frequently ate dinner together
2. Their parents were not divorced or separated
3. They had to keep their rooms clean
4. They did not have a phone in their room (cell or otherwise)
5. They did community service

Yes, were are concerned that our children clean up after themselves, maintain healthy personal care and dietary habits, speak civilly to us and to others, of us and of others.

We fear the psychiatrist’s couch for them and for us. We fear their loss of love for us and us, perhaps, for them. We fear constricting our child’s spirit and crushing his/her creativity. Our own memories of our own childhood — perhaps our parents’ rules, tone of voice or abandonment, makes us overcompensate.

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So here’s the holy trinity, these three things upon which the parenting world is to be established: TLC, that is, Time, Limits and Caring.

• Time: just being there for our kids, being around, being present, being available, investing time
• Limits: being able to say no, being willing to incur our children’s wrath, and to push them to do things that are often difficult for them to do.
• Caring: taking an active interest in our children’ lives, being willing to listen to what’s on their minds and participate in their activities, even if they’re not inherently interesting to us.

Now I know, as someone once said, that children raised by the book are probably a first edition/addition. Still, research shows that children in families that eat dinner together at least a few times per week tend to be less depressed, have less permissive attitudes toward sex, are less like to use drugs, and are more likely to work to their intellectual potential in school.

These shared meals, especially when they permit open communication and mutual enjoyment, can be the glue that holds families together and that provides children with a sense of security and belonging that reduces dangerous risk-taking and promotes better mental health.

We all need limits, adults and children. We need standards: laws, vows, grades. So when a child tries to get your okay to do something that you really think they’re not ready for by saying, “Don’t you trust me?” say, “No, and I wouldn’t have trusted myself at your age either. Part of my job as a parent is to protect you from dangerous situations.” When the predictable rejoinder, “How am I ever going to learn if you never let me do anything?” follows, reply in effect, “I’ll have to be the judge of when you are ready.”

Those responses may anger our children, but our firmness also sends them the message that we care enough about them to hold the line, hazard their displeasure, and create conflict and friction. They know it would be easier for us to give in. They are testing us.

Caring for children consists partly in taking their interests seriously. This is sometimes easier to do when they’re toddlers and want us to listen to what their teddy bears are telling them than when our adolescents want us to attend to a disquisition of why members of one musical group are cuter than another. But their motivation is the same. To have their interests taken seriously is a validation of their worth as people. And our teenagers are often more sensitive than we realize about needing the kind of validation that only we, as parents, can give them.

Caring or compassion vs. direction and strictures — we should not be afraid to switch hats or to be inconsistent. One minute we can be a playmate and the next the voice of authority. Our children can easily make the distinction when we have switched over to “parent mode.” When simple mischief breaches certain boundaries of decency and respect, then the voice and mannerisms change.

That being said, limit the limits. Establish a limited number of limits, write them down and agree to them with your parenting partner. Agree also and in advance to the consequences of non-compliance.

While I would heartily recommend praise and other methods of positive reinforcement and the principles of behavior modification, realistically we have to use punishment/consequences. Drugs and sex pose particular difficult challenges: physical danger, psychological dependence and confusion. Teens go over board. Our messages have to be clear, stern and above board.

Discuss the limits and consequences with the appropriate kid. Change as frequently as the situation demands and discuss all changes. When and only when successful with certain limits, add others, if more limits be necessary.

And remember: parenting is oligarchic; meetings are not democratic. While we should listen carefully to our kids’ opinions, the final word is ours.

The children of this century will face heavy challenges, more competition and higher expectations. They will be even more likely than we have been to switch jobs, to change careers and to relocate. Distance from family and transience in friendships will require greater personal resources — character and coping skills ... to compensate for the breakdown in social cohesion and support in a world without borders, without social norms, and without a stable, reliable and remembered past from which to draw strength (HHD point.)

More than their job skills and opportunities, we as parents must help our children develop the essential traits of character that will help our kids adapt to stress and to transcend adversity — to instill in them a healthy respect and honest appreciation for the privileged world into which they were born and, at the same time, to enable them with the psychological tools that will give them purpose — to thrive and to hope, and enable others to thrive and hope, in it.