How To Make Sure Your Child Goes Off The Derech

New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  This is one of the most painful subjects in our community. It is also one of the most misunderstood. When a young person walks away from Torah and mitzvos, most people look outside the home for the cause. They blame bad friends, a phone, or the culture all around us. Those things are real, and a wise parent does not ignore them.

It may not be politically correct to say it, but a not insignificant part of the time, however,  a child who leaves is reacting to something inside the home, not outside of it. [Please note: This, of course, does not apply to all cases – as there are many other factors – trauma, school environment, social influences etc..]

Teens who reject their family’s way of life are, at times, reacting to hurt and fights with their parents, and the parents do not see it. They are not reacting to some flaw they were born with, or to the outside world.

There is also a second concept, a scientific one, that helps explain why the damage goes so far. Deep in the brain is the amygdala. It is the alarm system that warns us of danger. It does not care about hashkafa or theology. It cares about safety. When a child spends years in a religious setting feeling like a failure — or worse, feeling neglected or abused — the brain starts to connect things. Slowly, the symbols of Torah, like Shabbos, or the Gemara, or shul, or Tzniyus, get tied to pain. An effective moshol is an electrical outlet that shocks you every time you touch it. After a while, your body screams at you to stay away.

Looked at this way, “leaving” is often not about beliefs at all. It is a way to survive. A life of Torah is supposed to calm a person and make him feel steady. But when it does the opposite and fills him with stress, the teen runs in order to feel safe.

Here is the hopeful part. A parent cannot change a child’s nature, and cannot block out the whole world. But a parent can change the relationship. And that relationship, more than anything else, decides whether Yiddishkeit feels like safety or like pain.

So here is an article written backwards  It does not claim to have all the answers. But it is a suggestion that may open up our eyes. Imagine someone wanted to push a child to leave. Suppose that was the actual goal. Here is how to do it. Read each one, and the right thing to do may become more clear.

Turn The Home Into a Courtroom

Make the house a place where the child is always being judged. Let every talk come back to grades, behavior, and what he or she did wrong. One Torah educator asked a set of parents to record everything they said at home for a few days. When they listened to it later, they were shocked at how often they criticized their children. Most parents who do this have no idea they are doing it. Too much criticism is the number one thing that breaks the bond between parent and child. A child who feels the home is a courtroom will stop showing up to be judged.

Build A System That Values Only One Kind Of Child

Set up a system where only one thing matters: being smart and able to sit and learn for many hours. Make sure any child who does not fit that mold knows he or she is worthless.

Picture the boy in the back row who kept drumming on his desk. The teachers called it a problem and wanted to punish him. Then a teacher named Mr. Johnson did something different. He handed the boy a pair of drumsticks and told him he was made to be a drummer. That boy did not have a behavior problem. He had a talent waiting to come out, like a statue waiting inside a block of marble. When a school treats one kind of child as better than the rest, it turns into a prison instead of a place that helps children grow. A child who is told that who he is just isn’t good enough does not only leave the school. He leaves the system that he thinks approved of that rejection.

Treat Every Question As Rebellion

When a child asks why, treat it as back-talk instead of curiosity. Shut him down with “we don’t ask that.” The Sefer Chasidim teaches that the mitzvah to respect parents also places a duty on the parents. They should not be so harsh that the child cannot hold himself back and rebels. A child who is not allowed to ask his questions at home does not stop having them. He just takes them somewhere else, to people who are happy to answer.

Make Yiddishkeit Joyless For The Child

Take out all the joy and leave only the rules. And make sure the joylessness lands on the child in particular. Let the adults enjoy their friends, and their lively Torah talk. Meanwhile, the child’s whole experience of Shabbos is being corrected: sit still, stop fidgeting, why aren’t you bentching. Yiddishkeit is passed down through the generations, and parents are the ones who pass it. If the relationship carrying it is broken, what gets passed down will be broken too. A child who only tastes the rules, while the warmth happens over his head, has been handed an empty box and told to treasure it.

Make Kedusha Sound Like Nothing But A List Of No’s

Turn a holy life into a cold list of rules, especially about closeness and marriage. Fill the child with the fearful, and often simply wrong, messages about these things that push so many people away. This is actually a twisting of the tradition. The Holy of Holies was the most sacred place that ever existed. Inside it were the Keruvim, two figures shown in a loving embrace. The Gemara tells of a student named Kahana who hid to learn even how his teacher Rav acted with his wife, saying, “it is Torah, and I must learn.” Real closeness in Judaism is built on being open and a little vulnerable, not just on following rules. Take the human warmth out of religious life and leave only a wall of no’s, and you have removed its soul while keeping its rulebook.

Compare, Constantly

Hold up the neighbor’s son, the cousin in the better yeshiva, and the sibling who just gets it. And get the child wrong while you do it. One father complained that his son never opened a sefer at home. But that same son was learning hard at an out-of-town yeshiva and only came home once a month, when he naturally needed to relax. The father read it as laziness. A child who is always measured against others, and against a false picture of himself, learns he will never be good enough. And a child who decides he can never measure up eventually stops trying.

Choose Shame Over Guidance

Answer every mistake with a label and some embarrassment. Be the father who calls his daughter with a learning disability “lazy” or “a manipulator from day one.” Shame tells a child that he or she is bad. Guidance talks about what the child did. Only one of the two lets him stay in the room.

Make Love Depend On Being Religious

Show the child, in a hundred small ways, that your love goes up and down with how observant he or she is. Rav Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg pointed to exactly this as the root of rebellion. If there are rebels, he said, it is because they were never given real love. The trap is the gap between loving and accepting. Almost every parent loves his child. Many find it much harder to accept the child as she really is. And a child can feel the difference.

Never Apologize, And Never Go First

Hold the line that a parent is never wrong and should never have to make the first move. Use the easy excuse: that you can’t be expected to change while the child is still acting up. But a parent and a child do not share the relationship equally. Most of the responsibility sits with the parent. It is the parent’s job to build something warm and steady, no matter how the child is acting right now. A parent who can never say “I’m sorry” and never goes first teaches that the system is stiff, harsh, and not worth staying in.

Treat A Struggling Child As An Embarrassment

Care more about what people will say than about the child in front of you. Think of the father whose sad, withdrawn son left the Shabbos table in the middle of the meal and went to his room. The father was not worried about a clearly hurting boy. A child who feels he has become an embarrassment to the family has already started to leave.

Model Bullying, Then Call It Religious

Teach a child that pushing people around is how strong people act. Teach him that connections to great rabbis are tools to use, not relationships to live. Picture a father who builds a close relationship with a great Rav. Then he uses it as a weapon. He drops the Rav’s name to win arguments, to pressure a neighbor, to lean on a rebbe, and to shame anyone in his way. The whole time, he acts like the Rav’s most devoted follower. The child sees all of it. He learns two things at once: that bullying works, and that religion is just the costume it wears. The same thing happens at home when a parent puts down a spouse at the table or picks on the weaker child. Often, mean behavior is a cry for love that never came. A child raised to bully in Hashem’s name usually sees through it in the end. When the child rejects the bullying, the Yiddishkeit it was wrapped in is also rejected.

Now Do The Opposite

Read the list backwards and the way home appears on its own. Stop criticizing, and mean it — a put-down said with a smile or “for his own good” is still a put-down. Put the relationship ahead of the behavior. For a while, be willing to overlook the late mornings and the hanging around so you can rebuild the bond underneath. Do not use every right you have just because you have it. A rule that makes a child angrier costs more than it is worth. Notice small progress as it comes, instead of holding back your approval until the child is finally perfect. And change the belief at the bottom of it all. The child is usually not acting out of meanness or laziness. She is acting out of a real pain that can be reached.

Under every one of these is a single idea. It is not observance. It is attachment — a safe, loving connection. The opposite of a child disconnecting is not a stricter standard. It is the unconditional love of a parent. The day a child pulls up to the house in a car on Shabbos, or shows a tattoo —is a huge crossroads. The parent’s own dream lies shattered on the floor. Every instinct says to set a hard boundary, or to cut the child off to protect your other children or your values. But the lifeboat for that child is the parent who chooses the child over the broken dream. Real safety is what finally lets a stressed-out heart relax. Only from a place of safety can a person ever come back and see Hashem as a reason to celebrate instead of a reason to feel ashamed. When a child feels loved no matter what he has chosen, the pain slowly loses its grip.

None of this is meant to blame parents. Raising children is some of the hardest work there is, and most parents are doing it while carrying heavy loads of their own. It is meant to show how much power a parent holds. The same power that can drive a child away is the power that can bring her home. In any home where a child is struggling, the most important sentence may also be the simplest. Make the child’s happiness, not your own nachas, the goal.

The author can be reached at [email protected]