We have a short staircase that connects two levels of our
house. The builder could have provided a wall between the
stair and the room below. However, that would have been a
classic case of overkill. Instead, he put up two vertical
metal poles, one towards the bottom of the stairs and one
near the top, and then screwed three wooden planks to the
poles.
The planks, which were later sanded down and finished nicely
with polyurethane, act as a barrier to safeguard anyone from
falling off the stairs to the floor below. They also provide
three separate bannisters to support people of all ages and
heights as they climb the stairs.
When my twenty-month-old granddaughter goes up the stairs,
she holds on to the lowest plank. The middle plank is handy
for my cheder-age grandsons. My husband and I and our
adult children make use of the top plank.
As we go through life, each of us needs something to hold
onto to help us go from one level to the next. Very young
children need parental rules. When a toddler raises his leg
to climb over a railing, his mother raises her voice slightly
and declares with conviction, "Ima doesn't let!" he gets the
same reaction when he reaches out towards the hot oven door
and a little later in the day when he shleps a chair over to
the pantry and tries to get the Shabbos treats down from the
highest shelf.
If Mother is firm and consistent, and doesn't provide too
many "no-no"s, the young child learns his boundaries and
grows up in a safe and secure world.
School-age children need the type of rules and guidance that
are provided by our Torah educational system, with a strong
dose of back-up in the home. That is the middle plank in our
system.
If older children run free without rules and supervision, we
find our neighborhoods plagued by unruly nine-year-olds who
destroy the saplings that were planted alongside our
sidewalks (put there with the hopes that they would grow into
stately shade trees), set fire to garbage bins and torment
stray cats.
When we grow into adulthood, we need yet another plank to
assist us in our climb up the staircase of life. That is the
set of rules and guidance encompassed within our Torah-based
Halocha and Haskkofa.
If we have been conditioned throughout our lives to accept
the rules set down by our parents and teachers, we grow up to
accept the Yoke of Heaven. But woe to the person whose
weltanschauung (worldview) is a defiant, "Nobody tells ME
what to do!!!"
In the Western world, there has been a trend for many years
to avoid imposing restrictions on children. Parents are
supposed to stand by and watch their children develop,
without interfering. Some call this attitude "permissiveness"
and one proponent of the "system" entitled it "benign
neglect," but however you slice it, it comes down to a matter
of parents shirking their responsibility to establish order
and set limits for their youngsters.
Our cities are now filled with teenagers whose lives aren't
structured in the least. We see them on buses. They wear
outlandish terribly immodest clothing; their skin is
decorated with tattooes and then further mutilated to allow
them to wear `earrings' everywhere from their noses to
whatever..., and their faces wear a look of defiance, if not
outright menace.
However, it is difficult to adequately describe the facial
expressions for you, because one can't always see the faces
under their bizarre hairdos.
These sad outcasts from society are also the result of the
breakdown in the world's public school systems. Rabbi Zev
Leff often quotes a survey that was taken in America about
fifty years ago. Public school teachers were asked to list
their most difficult disciplinary problems with the children.
High on the list were running in the halls, chewing gum and
passing notes in class.
I have a friend who recently took a substitute teaching job
in an American inner city. She was instructed: 1. not to turn
her back on the class, 2. to carry her car keys and driver's
license in her skirt pocket and to avoid bringing money,
valuables or a pocketbook to school, and 3. to leave the
building as soon as classes let out. All of these
suggesstions were ways to avoid being mugged or attacked by
the students!
As Jewish parents, we see a need to provide our children with
the guidance that they need in order to grow into responsible
human beings.
First of all, we need to network with our spouses, parents
and anyone else who has a steady influence on our children.
We must work together to establish reasonable rules, with
firm guidelines on implementation. However, we don't want to
make everything that is fun or interesting off limits. Too
many rules are confusing, as well as confining. Furthermore,
a child who spends a good part of his/her day sitting in the
corner, serving `time-out' in his room or even worse, being
hit or slapped, is not going to be amenable to family
rules.
Listen in on your young children when they are playing house.
If they are constantly telling their dollies that they can't
do this or that, and if potches are given out freely,
then you know that you have been creating too many
restrictions and that punishments are too frequent.
I once took a parenting class where the teacher began by
writing the word "discipline" on the blackboard. She asked us
what that word meant to us and we went around the room, with
some of the mothers offering the following input: punishment,
training, obedience.
Next, the teacher wrote the word "disciple" and again we went
around the room to elicit: student, follower, helper. The
remainder of the class was devoted to showing us how
discipline and disciple come from the same root, and that our
system of parental guidance should be geared to turning our
children into our disciples.
If our rules provide smooth, comfortable planks to hold onto
as our children ascend the stairway of life, then our
parenting efforts will succeed and we will create successful
and enduring truly Jewish families.
