Parenting That Gives

The Bible says: “Whom Hashem loves, He corrects, just as a father corrects the son he cherishes.” The verse ties correction to love. But a simple question keeps nagging at us. Who loves more, the father who is strict or the father who gives in? And a deeper question: when a father says, “I love my child,” what exactly does he love? The child, or what the child gives back to him? This is not a question for philosophers. It is a practical question, a living question. It touches the most sensitive nerve of every young married man who has been entrusted with a soul. Two Approaches: Taking or Giving Our Sages teach: “Any love that depends on something ends when that something ends.” Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi explains in the Tanya, his classic book of Hasidic thought, that true love cannot depend on what the loved one does for the one who loves. If it does, the one who “loves” really loves only himself. These are sharp words, and we need to fix them firmly in our minds. There are two approaches to raising children. The first approach is the approach of taking. Without noticing it, the parent asks deep inside: What will this child bring me? Joy and pride. Approval. Fulfillment. Respect. The feeling that I have succeeded. This approach is wrong, but not because it is “selfish” in the crude sense. It is wrong because it changes the whole picture of raising a child. The child becomes a tool. A pure soul becomes a vessel for filling the parent’s own inner emptiness. The second approach is the approach of giving. Here the parent asks a completely different question: What does this soul need from me? The parent is a channel, an emissary, a vessel. His job is not to take. His job is to give. The question is not “What will I get out of this?” The question is “What will he become?” Throwing Your Emptiness onto Your Child And here is the high point. A parent who looks to his child to fill his own inner emptiness is not raising a child at all. He is throwing his emptiness onto the child. Every soul is sent into the world with its own unique mission from Hashem. This parent takes that soul and uses it as a tool to solve his own personal problems. The Talmud describes a father’s duties toward his son as a list of things he must give: “to circumcise him, to redeem him, to teach him Torah, to find him a wife.” Every one of these duties is directed toward the child. The list does not include, even by accident, a single duty of the child toward the parent. A person who truly gives is not busy keeping accounts of “What will I get back?” Setting the self aside is the main thing. This does not mean patience, and it does not mean weakness. It means setting the self aside at its very core: “I have no interest in the question ‘What do I need from my child?’ The only thing that matters is what this soul needs from me.” Love Is Not Giving In Here we need an important clarification. Without it, everything said so far could be understood as its exact opposite. Setting the self aside does not mean giving in. Just the opposite. The verse says: “Whom Hashem loves, He corrects.” Correction comes precisely from love. Limits, order and authority come precisely from setting yourself aside completely for the child’s good. The goal is the child’s mission, and a soul cannot fulfill its mission without structure, without direction, without a guiding hand. A parent who gives in on everything “out of love” is not setting himself aside. He is setting the child aside. He chooses his own comfort in the moment, the comfort of not being the “bad guy” in the child’s eyes, over the real need of the soul in his care. This is the exact reverse. It is not the self stepping aside. It is the self ruling, dressed up as compassion. An Example: Jacob and His Sons Let us bring an example from our forefathers. Jacob loved all his sons, every one of them, the tribes of Hashem. He loved even those who caused him deep pain, like Joseph’s brothers, who brought on him twenty-two years of mourning. His love did not depend on the joy he received from them. It was not conditional on how they behaved. He saw each of them as something Hashem had placed in his trust, a soul with a mission. His job was to help that soul bring its hidden potential out into real life. This is the love of the father of a nation. It is not a love that depends on anything. It is a love that comes from the very fact that this soul was placed in his trust.