How do you help a child go far in life without pushing them?

Rabbi Landau teaches with the picture of a bow and arrow. “You don’t push a child into greatness. You hold them close enough that they can launch from there.”

A bow, he explains, has a strange rule: “The closer you pull it to yourself, the further it travels outwards.” Children work the same way. “You don’t push them out. You don’t first force them forward. You pull them close. The closer you hold them, the further they’ll go in life.”

That is why closeness should not be mistaken for holding a child back. “What looks like restraint is actually the launch.” He quotes the verse “Like an arrow in the hand of a warrior, so are the children,” and draws the lesson: “The warrior doesn’t throw the arrow. He draws it close and from that closeness it flies.”

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

A child is not pushed into greatness. The closer a parent holds a child, the further that child goes.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

Isn’t holding a child close the same as holding him back?

Rabbi Landau answers that what looks like restraint “is actually the launch,” just as the arrow is pulled back before it flies.

Deepest human truth

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that King David chose the arrow as his picture of a child, and that an arrow’s power “does not come from pushing.” From the bond between parent and child “will come the strength to take off and fly.”

More questions from this teaching

• What does “like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children” mean for parents?