Your authority as a parent doesn't hinge on your children's obedience
Prepared for print by Rabbi Eran Feintuch
Parents today struggle to establish authority in the home. In the non-Jewish world, parental authority mostly involves getting the kids to behave nicely. Don’t hit. Don’t shout. Clean your room. But in the Jewish home, parental authority has much more significance. It’s the single greatest influence on the spiritual path our children will take in life.
Our role as parents is to prepare our children to live a life of Torah and mitzvos. We introduce them to the mitzvos, teach them what it means to live as a Jew, and do our best to make them feel at home in Yiddishkeit. We can only do that if we have authority in their eyes. They have to take our guidance seriously. Otherwise, even if they follow the rules at home, as soon as they walk out the door, they’ll shrug off our influence like a winter coat.
How do we establish authority in the home? To answer that, first we need to clarify what authority means.
Authority doesn’t mean obedience. This is one of the most common mistakes in chinuch. We tell our child, “You need to daven,” and he doesn’t. We say to ourselves, “He doesn’t listen to me — I have no authority!” That’s not true. Yes, he defied our demand. But we can have authority at home even if our children don’t always do what we say.
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