And it's true! Lately I avoid going to my daughter's soccer matches, because it's too silly to watch the field flood with doctors, lawyers, and therapists every time a kid makes contact with the ball!

The author of this very useful book offers wonderfully concrete advice about finding a way to lovingly reassert our moral authority and spiritual mentorship over our children. As a mother of four, living in the same city and cultural/religious milieu as the author, I am impressed with her thoroughness in covering this topic, her compassion for both parents and children, and her knowledge of ancient and contemporary Jewish parenting literature. But most of all, I am impressed by the frank, realistic, and practical steps she offers parents (Jewish or not) for helping their children find strength - true moral, spiritual and psychological strength - in who they are as individuals.

By the way, though only one percent of the Israeli population lives on a kibbutz (community farm), the kibbutzes regularly produce about 80 percent of the country's military and political leadership. Seems those tough farm kids know a thing or two about resilience!


Back to the bad old days   October 7, 2005
 70 out of 124 found this review helpful

I suppose it was inevitable in an era of neo-cons and Jewish Republicans that someone would write a Jewish "spare the rod, spoil the child" book to stand alongside Babywise and James Dobson. Mogel is more nuanced than the previous generation of authoritarian authors, but her message is the same. It's all about forceful control of behavior, under the misapprehension that an obedient child is a healthy child. In one passage on establishing parental dominance, she draws an analogy between children and dogs, suggesting that parents should intimidate children into submission the same way a dog trainer does with animals. Suggested punishments consistently lack a compassionate sense of proportion. How can threatening to put your child outside and alone in the dark possibly be an appropriate response to a kid refusing to brush her teeth at night? (I kid you not - this is exactly what she suggests on page 149). Parents terrorizing children keeps the therapy biz thriving, but you'll find examples every 20 pages or so in this book.

There is a place for tough love. The challenge of parenting is knowing where and when to apply it. Wise parenting is a balancing act, but this book pushes all the weights to on one side of the scale with no sense of when it's gone too far. Smart, loving parents learn when to stand by their guns and when to compromise. But this book is all about the guns with no compromise in sight. Negotiation, the ability to parlay a difficult situation into a livable compromise, is presented as a liability rather than an essential life skill (i.e. if you negotiate with your kid, or vice-versa, you must be doing something wrong).

The Jewish content was also disappointing. I borrowed the book hoping to find some insight into the difficulties of raising religious kids. How do you bring children to love Torah and tradition, even when the tradition is sometimes difficult? But this book is not about raising Jewish kids (per se) at all. The author uses Judaism only as a kind of folklore, a database of quotes to add some color to the text. The Judaism I love involves Jews who argue with God, who ask the difficult questions--smart, restless, kvetchy, inquisitive. You won't find those kind of Jews in this book, unless they're on the receiving end of a punishment.



One Excellent Conceptual Framework for Responsible Parenting   October 20, 2005
 67 out of 68 found this review helpful

I just finished this last night, and I plan to go back through it again. It's one of the better books on raising children that I've ever read. Mogel is a child psychologist with a definite slant--for her, a lot of the answers to parenting problems lie in encouraging spiritual growth, in ourselves and in our children. You don't have to be Jewish to find great material in this book--I'm not--but you definitely need to accept the premise that human beings are happier in a spiritually enriched environment.

I have already started implementing some of Mogel's suggestions for fostering responsibility in children and encouraging them to be grateful for what they have (as opposed to constantly needing more to be satisfied). Moreover, I mean to stay mindful of her emphasis on a parent's need to accept a child's basic nature. If you can name the personality trait in your child that drives you insane, Mogel says, you have already named his greatest strength. Helping to raise him to his greatest potential involves teaching him how to utilize his nature, not how to subvert it. Unlike some modern psychological parenting texts, _The Blessing of a Skinned Knee_ doesn't pretend that children are blank slates to be filled with whatever we please. Instead, Mogel offers practical suggestions for working with the material we're given.

One of the elements of the book that I would most share with my friends involves discipline. Mogel breaks down transgressions by intent and offers concrete ways to deal with them compassionately and calmly. She several times references Biblical exhortations to discipline--not in a pro-spanking stance, but in reminding parents that this is a responsibility that comes with the territory. I wish that some of the more stern parents of my acquaintance would read her arguments against shaming children. Mogel does not believe that discipline requires humiliation. Those who swing the other way--me included--could benefit from her section on restitution. My 8-year-old suffers an overly developed sense of guilt, and I am hoping that following her suggestions for restitution will allow him to feel a healthy sense of closure and relief.

While every reader of books of this type needs to exercise discretion in determining what will work in his or her household, there's a lot of solid advice here. It doesn't address every situation or every concern, and I don't believe it intends to. What it does is provide a framework for a new way of thinking about parenting which might be useful when you encounter those situations not covered.


very mixed feelings   January 2, 2004
 59 out of 72 found this review helpful

I had very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I agree with the author's premise that parents should be parents, and not try to be their child's best friend. On the other hand, some of her other arguments were very troubling to me. Among these were the idea that you should never be an advocate for your child, and that you should allow him to handle all his problems himself. The author fails to account for the fact that young children lack the experience and the skills necessary to cope with every situation; that's why they HAVE parents! Not every bad experience is a "learning experience," and I think some of the advice in this book advocates a parenting style that borders on neglect. Perhaps this is because Dr. Mogel is a therapist in an affluent Beverly Hills neighborhood, and she simply doesn't see kids with "real problems."

Additionally, she states that parents should not expect their children to be good at everything. This is obviously good advice, but then she goes on to talk about how terrible it is that girls in the modern era are supposed to be good at math and science. Exactly what is she trying to get at here? That girls shouldn't be encouraged to do well in "non-traditional" subjects? Indeed, this does seem to be what she is saying.

Finally, one of the most disturbing anecdotes in this book is about a young girl who is so anxious about going away to camp that she repeatedly throws up all night long. Dr. Mogel holds this up as a great example, because the parents make her go anyway. If you are making your kid so anxious and stressed that she throws up all night, YOU ARE NOT DOING A GOOD JOB AS A PARENT. THIS IS NOT OKAY.

In sum, I would say that her underlying message, which is to parent your children and not let them run the show, is a good one. But many of her examples are distressing to say the least. And finally, she never gives any advice as to how to implement her philosophy. For example, if she says, "don't let your kid do X," she never gives any strategies for how to deal with it when your kid inevitably does X.

In my opinion, if you want some real "no-nonsense" parenting advice, call up Grandma. There's not much here that's useful.


A Bad, Bad Book   February 16, 2002
 41 out of 67 found this review helpful

This book had been recomended to me by many people. I was shocked at how biased it was and how it used the most anecdotal evidence to support its views. The author points out that there are gender differences between boys and girls and then uses that to support her contention that girls shouldn't be encouraged to excell at traditional "boy" things, like science. Yet, real educational studies show that girls who are encouraged in these areas do very well.
The author brags that at the Jewish Day School her kids attend the conferences with parents last only seven minutes and that the teachers don't praise kids to their parents. Why she thinks this is good I have no idea. After months of interacting with a child a teacher surely has found more than seven minutes worth of stuff to say about a child. And many children (maybe not the authors) are worthy of praise. Indeed, as most educators know, children often exhibit good behavior with their teachers that they don't around their parents. The author seems unaware of this and implies that if a teacher praises a child it is done simply to make the parents feel good. I feel sorry for the author's kids if she really believes this.