I’m not sure that there are simple answers to Aaron Ross’ query about the role of the year in Israel in making graduates better Jewish parents. There are simply too many variables involved in the development of one’s religious identity to tease out just one of them and point to its longterm influence in one particularly complicated domain such as parenting. So much happens to students after the year in Israel, the full onset of emerging adulthood, the changes after Israel that come with returning to one’s community or starting college, the person one marries, the parenting styles of one’s own parents when one is growing up and the list goes on.
Nevertheless, I thing Rabbi Ross is right that as educators we need to always assess what, if anything, is different about the current generation in our schools and I would agree with him that parenting plays a significant role. Indeed, the research shows that family environment is the most influential factor in the religious development of children and adolescents and so it certainly behooves us to pay more attention to changes that are taking place. Simply stated, I think that parenting religiously is more difficult than it used to be. To cite but one example (borrowed from David Kinnamen’s You Lost Me): the challenges presented by technology are huge in terms of changing what it means to submit to authority and hierarchy, the focus on individual expression, choice and tolerance, and the like. How is a parent (or teacher) supposed to help kids navigate this? Add to that the other challenges in our community such as materialism, homogeneous communities in which parents always feel the need to move together, a focus on halakha and externals which many bemoan has left them bereft of a sense of the inspiration and spirituality which halakha is supposed to engender. Here too, the list goes on.
I have come to believe that parents don’t always know how to parent religiously. Witness the parent who recently wrote an essay entitled “Should I push my kids to daven?†Or the ones who ask, “How can I get my child to come back to the table to bentch?†“What can I do when my child seems so uninspired?†“How can I prevent my child from going off the derekh?†Often there is more insecurity and anxiety here than lack of knowledge about what to do, but that too indicates a desire for direction. I stumbled upon this need when I innocently wrote an email to the parent body about this issue and got deluged with emails by parents asking for more advice and wanting to just share their frustrations and concerns. That one email turned into dozens more, as parents shared them with parents around the country resulting in a very special virtual conversation. (At the risk of sounding self-promoting, as it turns out this past week I began a revival of that forum which the OU has kindly agreed to post, called The Soul of Parenting). The bottom line is that rather than ask ourselves the very interesting question of what happened to all those kids who graduated programs in Israel once they became parents, we might stand to gain more if we instead ask what can our schools do to help them become a better version of the parents they want to be?
We owe Rabbi Ross our thanks for bringing the issue to our collective attention.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/16/2018 07:00AM by mlb.
