The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Timeless Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children

your main focus should be on short-circuiting arguments, letting go of your wish to reach consensus, and taking advantage of opportunities to let your child practice honoring you.

You, the parent, are the most important adult in your child’s world. When it’s time to leave a party, begin or end a play date, do homework, go to sleep, or get up, your child has a chance to demonstrate how much she honors you by cooperating promptly and without a fuss. If you are always casual and friendly, you’ll unwittingly turn these moments i

Too many parents want everything fixed by the time their child is eight. They want academic perfection, a child as capable as any other child in the Western hemisphere. Children develop in fits and starts, but nobody has time for that anymore. No late bloomers, no slow starters, nothing unusual accepted! If a child doesn’t get straight A’s, his par

If boys risk getting their spirits crushed in early elementary school, girls face a different challenge—fulfilling impossible expectations in adolescence.

Opportunities to practice derech eretz include greeting people, inviting them into our homes, and speaking about other people in a respectful way whether or not they are within earshot.

the prohibition against startling another person.

I once read a beautiful teaching attributed simply to “a modern educator.” It read: “Try to see your child as a seed that came in a packet without a label. Your job is to provide the right environment and nutrients and to pull the weeds. You can’t decide what kind of flower you’ll get or in which season it will bloom.”

Parents cannot and should not try to eliminate longing in a child. Instead, we must teach our children how to redirect their longings, accept “no” graciously, and appreciate the blessings they do have.

A problem can be fixed, but a true limitation requires adjustment of expectations and acceptance of an imperfect son or daughter. Parents feel hope if their restless child is actually hyperactive, their dreamy child has ADD, their poor math student has a learning disorder, their shy child has a social phobia, their wrongdoing son has “intermittent