What’s wrong with pushing my child to achieve what I never did?

Rabbi Landau teaches that many parents are not really raising a child. They are raising “your own unfinished life, your failed dreams, your old wounds inside your child.”

You see it all the time, he says. A father never made it to the top school or the top yeshiva, so now his son must get into the places he never reached. “Not because the boy needs it, but because the father needs redemption.” That, he says, is not parenting. “That’s pressure masquerading as love.”

He quotes the verse: “Discipline your child because there is hope,” and explains its warning as “don’t carry your own life into him, because that’s what will destroy him.” So the danger is not being too strict. “The danger is you’re living your story inside his story until he forgets he even has one.”

“A child is not a second chance at your past. He’s a first chance at his destiny. Stop parenting your wounds. Start parenting your child.”

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

Surface claim

A child is not a second chance at a parent’s past.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

A father who never reached the top school can push his son there to heal his own disappointment.

What may be behind it

Why does the verse say “do not carry your soul”?

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau reads it as: do not take your own self, “your old dreams and the wounds you have carried,” and bring them into your child’s world. That is how a child’s spirit is crushed.

Deepest human truth

Every child has his own story and his own destiny. The parent’s job is to parent the child, not the parent’s wounds.

More questions from this teaching

• What does “discipline your child, for there is hope” really warn parents about?