When I was a kid, our phone would ring Sunday morning at about eleven. My mother was always on the other line, and she would always say the same thing. “Five-minute warning.” That was our cue — we would collect the rest of our siblings, put on shoes, and trudge outside to bring in the groceries. It wasn’t a chesed. It was an expectation.

When I bring in the groceries on Thursday evening, I’ll hoist them up to the porch. For a long time, if a child opened the front door for me, it felt like they’d done enough. A friend recalls that all it took was a honk from her mother before they were running out, bringing in the groceries without a second thought. With her children? Sometimes she’ll ask them if they don’t mind helping. Once in a while, they might even say yes.

Yeridas hadoros, we concluded with a shrug, but the more I consider it, the more I think the yeridas hadoros is ours.

I’m a millennial who grew up in a world where everything was instant. Cell phones were proliferating when I was a kid, and my parents were always reachable. By the time I was a teen, most of my friends had them, too. I grew into adulthood during the dawn of Amazon, when everything I’d ever needed was immediately accessible, right from my living room.

Everything in our world is comfortable. Everything is so available. Just a glance at the aisles of a kosher supermarket makes that clear. When’s the last time we had to run from store to store, trying to find something specific and elusive? When’s the last time we had to wait for something for more than a couple of days?

This instant gratification, I’ve come to believe, has fostered my generation’s parenting. I’m a teacher as well as a parent, and I’ve been on the other side of this equation.

About five years ago, in the midst of our Shakespeare unit, I got a call from a parent. “Tirtzah is shy, and she’s nervous about performing a soliloquy in front of the class.”

It wasn’t an unusual call. I’ve had many shy girls nervous about the assignment, and I assured the parent that it would be okay. Dozens of girls had managed to read their soliloquy, and every now and then, there would be one who couldn’t do it. I didn’t think Tirtzah would have an issue; she was on the quieter side, but she was also bright, well-liked, and had spoken up in class before.

“I let the girls read it privately after class if they freeze up,” I assured the mother. “I just want her to get up in front of the room and try. Public speaking is a good skill to practice, and what better place to do it for the first time than in eighth grade, surrounded by your friends, with a paper you can read off of?”

The mother disagreed. Rather than encouraging her daughter to try, she pulled her out of my class. She had a tutor who wanted that time slot for Tirtzah anyway, and this was the excuse to remove her from the situation.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a parent opt out of something to spare a child discomfort. “Can you just give her a modified test? She isn’t a studier,” was the response, more than once, when I called a parent about a girl who had the capacity to do much better. Last year, a parent spoke to me for a half hour, furious, because her daughter had said something inappropriate and I had said, verbatim, “We don’t use that word in class.” Her daughter had been uncomfortable. I was bullying her.

As a teacher, I can preach about letting children do hard things, about how good it is for them to learn to work hard and take responsibility for their actions.

Because who are you really helping when you enroll your daughter in an easier class so she doesn’t have to work so hard? I know, I know. She isn’t academic. You just want her to make it through school and feel good about herself, because it isn’t going to affect her real life. She isn’t going to go into some rigorous, academic field.

And she probably won’t. But as a teacher, I see how stifling this attitude is. There are skills your child will pick up by applying herself to her schoolwork. She’ll learn discipline and responsibility and the value of hard work. Discomfort makes kids grow and develop. Conscientiousness is something that will make her a more thoughtful and mature person.

But as a parent, I understand exactly why it is that so many of us recoil at the idea of pushing the kids too hard.

It’s just so annoying.

The real reason we avoid making our children uncomfortable? The real reason we don’t push them to try harder, to do more, to take responsibility?

It’s because we can’t be bothered to put ourselves in an uncomfortable situation. Because fighting with our children to sweep the floor or clear the table is a headache, and training kids to be disciplined is work with no instant gratification. Because reminding our children to do their homework every night is a pain in the neck and pushing them to study for tests creates agonizing friction. We want things to be easy, and it isn’t easy to teach kids discipline or responsibility.

I learned this from my husband. He works from home, so we usually eat dinner as a family. More than once, he’d mentioned his irritation that the kids didn’t clear off their places, and I’d shrugged it off. “Honestly, is it really worth making a big deal about?”

He felt that it was, and I left it to him, unwilling to put in the effort for something that felt so much easier to do myself. And he went even farther. He assigned each child a night to clear the mats, the serving dishes, and the water pitchers. He pulled them away from phone calls and homework to do it when they forgot. And he continues to push, every single day.

The kids forget sometimes, but once they’re reminded, they run to do the job without complaint. They don’t get accolades for it; it’s an expectation, set clearly, and once we got over the initial challenging period, ensuring it was consistently followed through, it’s worked.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the challenge today isn’t the children. It isn’t their much-maligned entitlement. Children are wonderful, are malleable, can be taught and learn with remarkable ability. Children have boundless energy and curiosity and can find founts of effort and sensitivity within them. It’s so much harder to change as an adult, once you’ve picked up bad habits that have solidified.

The challenge is us.

That entitlement is our flaw. We don’t teach our children to develop grit because it means more effort on our part, more friction and discomfort. We want a smooth road, but it means we leave our children out in the cold.

There’s a lot of chatter and mockery of the push for safe spaces in the wider world, of those Gen Z young adults who always want things to cater to their personal tastes. Who never want to feel unsafe, regardless of how many people are inconvenienced and even hurt by the selfishness that might ensue. But I don’t think my generation is doing much better. We have the same sense of entitlement, of our comfort superseding anyone else’s well-being. In this case, it’s the well-being of our children.

We aren’t doing our kids favors by protecting them from the world. We’re doing ourselves a favor because we’re just a little too lazy to help them grow as little people. What will become of them when they’re older, when they’ve never developed the skills that they need for life? When we’ve made sure that everything is so easy for us and them alike that they’ve never dealt with a mild inconvenience on their own?

My daughter Chana has selective mutism. It took years with a para before she was able to even respond to an authority figure, and she still can’t initiate conversation with them — she writes them notes instead. She didn’t speak directly to my father (a rav and thus an authority figure in her eyes) until she was seven. I got her help as early as I could because I’d seen so many children move through my class with the same condition, stifled by their inability to speak up. But still, it’s been many years, and it gets only marginally better every year.

I tell my coworkers not to give Chana special treatment, though I do make sure that they’re aware of her condition. It’s not that I want her to be uncomfortable. But she will be. Every single incident — every oral quiz, every read-aloud, every time she’s called on in class — is going to be uncomfortable for her. And it’s heartbreaking for me, just as much as it’s difficult for me to talk her through the hurdles as they come up. But it’s what she needs. One day, I want Chana to be an independent adult. One day, I want her to be strong and confident and able to speak up when she needs to. And if I smooth the path for her all the way through, she will never learn to walk on rocky ground alone.

As parents, we desperately want our children’s lives to be easy. We love them and we want them to be happy. But we have a greater duty to them than just happiness. We’re the most important teachers that they’ll ever have, and we can’t be lazy. We can’t decide that it’s too much work, that it’s too annoying, that we can’t be bothered.

The mountains are looming, whether we can see them yet or not. And one day, our children are going to have to climb them without us.

Chana was in my class last year, which I thought would be good for her. She has no issue talking nonstop at home, which meant that it would be a classroom without an authority figure —just me and her friends and classmates. But selective mutism is an odd kind of thing to shake, and when I would call on her, she’d still be unable to answer questions that we both knew that she knew. Sometimes, she’d mumble something that would sound vaguely like the answer. Sometimes, I’d have to go to someone else.

When she reached the Shakespeare unit, Chana asked me if she could just do her soliloquy with me at home. I knew how difficult it would be for her to speak up in the classroom. She would freeze up. She wouldn’t be able to speak.

“You’re going to do it,” I told her. “I’m going to be sitting right next to you, and you’re going to go up there and be fine.”

She got up there. She couldn’t speak. I waited.

Slowly, after several minutes of silence, Chana began to read her soliloquy. It was inaudible, of course, though I had heard her recite it by heart at home. I glanced around the room, ready to glare down anyone who might start whispering to a friend, but the girls were still silent, waiting for her to finish her mumbled speech. Her eyes were fixed on the paper, her face tight, and I watched her lips move to track what she was up to.

And then she was done. My heart was full — of the pain that always came with each hurdle, but also relief and an overwhelming sense of pride in what Chana had managed in front of the class. I saw the smile on her face as she walked back to her seat, the pride in her eyes at what she’d accomplished.

She had made it.

The Skills No One’s Grading

Devorah Avrukin

Last year, while I was preparing my midterms, a student from my honors class came to me with an unexpected request. She wanted a modification; specifically, extended time to complete the exam.

In my teaching practice, I’m always asking how what we do in school translates to real life. That mindset comes from nearly 20 years of hearing the same question: “When am I ever going to use this in the real world?” So I answered her honestly. Shabbos comes when Shabbos comes, every week. Hashem doesn’t give us extended time. Learning how to meet a challenge within fixed parameters is a real-life skill.

This student wasn’t failing. By any reasonable measure, she was doing well. She was a solid B student who had been steadily improving week after week. It was an honors class, intentionally rigorous, focused on critical thinking, and designed to push students beyond their comfort zones. We could both see her growth, and it was directly tied to her effort. I’d told her that. So why was she sitting in my office two weeks before midterms, asking for extended time?

I believe this reflects a general trend: parents and educators rushing in to rescue children from anything that smacks of challenging or distressful. By doing this, we’re actively helping children avoid the moments that could build them. Most of my day-to-day conversations with fellow principals and my own school staff circles around how to push the students to grow without pushing them too hard. The problem is that a life without discomfort isn’t a life that builds strength. And yet… nearly every parent I speak to asks for the same thing: “I just want my child to be happy.”

When everything is made easier, students don’t develop confidence, they become dependent. The question isn’t whether to support children. Of course, we want to support them. Some accommodations are essential for success. The real question is whether we’re actually building skills by teaching to avoid discomfort instead of learning how to move through it.

The Skills We Must Grade

In school, we give grades. These benchmarks are necessary; they allow teachers to assign grades and provide structure and feedback. They’re necessary, but they’re insufficient. Many students who are “successful” on paper are actually unprepared for real life. The skills that matter most, like managing pressure or tolerating discomfort, rarely appear on a rubric. But these skills aren’t extra; they’re the essentials that set people up for success. They will shape everything that comes next. These skills are what allow learning to endure beyond a single test or grade.

Academic success without emotional regulation leads to burnout, conflict, and fragility. If a student leaves school with As but no emotional skills, we’ve failed. If a capable, improving student asks for extended time, not because she lacks ability, but because she lacks confidence under pressure, we should ask ourselves a harder question: What exactly have we been teaching her?

In my experience, there are four social-emotional skills that come up again and again as necessities: emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, boundaries, and communication.

Emotional regulation is the ability to manage frustration when receiving feedback or to recover smoothly from embarrassment or conflict. The student who is weak in this cries after one negative comment in the margin. They’ll often experience peer drama, power struggles with teachers, and shutdowns when challenges arise.

On one memorable occasion, I came across a tenth grader begging to have her math test back after class. Girls had compared answers after class and she realized she had done an equation completely wrong. When the teacher stood firm that she couldn’t make the revisions until the test was corrected, the student began to hyperventilate. She nearly hit panic attack mode before we were able to calm her. It wasn’t the math that overwhelmed her, it was the inability to tolerate the feeling of being wrong.

Cognitive flexibility is the mental ability to switch between tasks or concepts. Students who have this skill can problem-solve, reframe, and try again. The child lacking these skills is the child who falls apart when the schedule changes, who’s described as “rigid,” “having difficulty transitioning,” or, most disruptive in a classroom, “having trouble working with peers.” Intelligence without flexibility becomes fragility, because real learning requires a growth mindset.

Once, I was subbing for a fifth-grade class, and I chose a random girl to lead the davening. One of the students (no special diagnosis or IEP, I found out later) began yelling at me that I was “doing it all wrong and had ruined davening for everyone.” She had no ability to adjust expectations, not even for a substitute who didn’t know the usual routines. Ultimately, she had to leave the classroom and finish davening in the principal’s office.

The next important ability a child needs to learn is boundaries. Boundaries are the parameters of what is acceptable in any interpersonal relationship, whether between peers, student and teacher, or child and family. A child with this skill understands what is healthy in a relationship, can manage peer pressure or influence, and is able to separate feelings from behaviors. The child who lacks boundaries overshares, then feels rejected when peers pull away. They may struggle with authority figures, both intentionally and unintentionally.

I once saw this play out quite awkwardly in a sixth-grade math class. While working through a word problem about buying pajamas, a student suddenly announced to the class that no one in his family slept in pajamas. The room erupted in laughter before he could clarify what he meant. What he experienced in that moment wasn’t a math mistake, it was a boundary misstep. He hadn’t yet learned which thoughts belong in your head, which can be shared privately, and which are appropriate for a group setting.

Finally, communication. Communication is the ability to express oneself, verbally and nonverbally, to build relationships, share meaning, and connect with others. For a well-adjusted student, this looks like asking for help appropriately and expressing disagreement without escalation. A student who struggles with communication may experience frequent peer conflict. Many behaviors we address as discipline issues can be traced back to struggles with communication. Where communication skills are weak, conflict fills the space.

The biggest discipline issues I face in school are with students who don’t know how to communicate properly. This leads to tear-filled conversations at my desk with a child hiccupping through a simple sentence like, “I was really annoyed at her, so I kicked her.”

The Improvements We Must Make

The issue is that we don’t name, explicitly teach, or assess these skills at all.

Teachers and principals understand that emotional regulation, boundaries, communication, and cognitive flexibility aren’t supplemental; they’re foundational. They work on inculcating their students with these four skills, in school, but informally, inconsistently, without being guided by a curriculum and without a means to assess development and progress.

When we don’t grade something, we implicitly signal that it doesn’t matter. Imagine a report card that didn’t just measure output, but growth, persistence, flexibility, and the ability to recover after feedback! Instead, we grade the product, not the process. The essay, not the perseverance. The test score, not the regulation required to sit through it.

Furthermore, without a clear way to assess these skills, we can’t properly chart progress.

Parents, teachers, and students need a common language around these skills so expectations are consistent across settings. Schools can’t do this work in isolation. To set students up for success, parents and schools must be partners, not parallel tracks. Teachers must clearly name and explain the tools being taught in the classroom. Parents must be empowered to reinforce the skills taught in school and model them at home.

Until we do this, parents should ask child’s teacher what language they use for skills like flexibility, regulation, and communication, and mirror it at home. They should praise stamina, not just scores, and coach the child through hard moments instead of rescuing her from them.

Some students genuinely need accommodations, and extended time can be appropriate. But what my student needed most wasn’t more time, it was more confidence under pressure. The tragedy wasn’t that she asked for extended time. It’s that she didn’t realize how capable she already was without it.

In short, if our goal is to prepare students for the real world, then these core competencies cannot remain secondary outcomes, sitting on the sidelines — social-emotional growth must have the same visibility as academic growth. We already know how to grade what students know.

It’s time we start grading who they’re becoming.

An (Adult) Child’s Perspective

As told to Raizy Jotkowitz

IFyou looked up the term helicopter parent, you’d see my mother’s picture. When I was growing up, she always hovered overhead, ready to swoop down and rescue me if I gave the faintest nod in her direction.

No, maybe she wasn’t a helicopter mother — she was more of a snowplow, frantically clearing away any obstacle that might stand in my path, lest I get wet, feel cold, or have to take the longer route somewhere. Or maybe she was the concierge parent, making my appointments and chauffeuring me to them, wondering how she could provide better service, make more dinner even more delicious, the temperature in the house more comfortable.

I truly don’t mean to be obnoxious. And no, I’m not judging her. My mother got married late, even by the standards of the outside world, and her first child was stillborn, something she never fully recovered from. It was just me and my older brother, and she viewed us as little miracles she just couldn’t get enough of. Her parenting philosophy was that the more she did for us, the better a parent she was, and the happier and healthier we would be.

I don’t think I was spoiled. My mother was careful not to allow that to happen, particularly about good manners and us doing chores. We had to earn our big and expensive toys with good behavior — we didn’t just get what we wanted when we wanted it.

But from a young age, I was afraid of my own shadow. The message I imbibed was that the world was a dangerous place, life was demanding, and I needed my mother to protect me and help me navigate it.

When I reached high school, I still didn’t know how to study for a test on my own; I needed my mother to help me review the material and make me practice quizzes. I was too shy ask the teacher to change my seat because the girl in front of me was blocking my view of the blackboard; my mother had to come in to school and talk to the teacher. I was terrified of taking a bus to the mall with friends — what if there were creeps on the bus or we missed our stop or got into an accident? — and needed my mother to drive me there and back.

In 12th grade, when I was elected to GO, we ran a bake sale as a fundraiser, and divided up the baking between all the GO members. My mother was all enthusiastic about the project and stayed up the whole night making cupcakes topped with chocolate ganache and whipped cream. Naturally, they were the hit of the event.

I was torn between feeling resentful that she’d taken something that was supposed to be mine (however amateur it would be) and made it hers — and guilt for my lack of gratefulness. But my mother (and even some of my friends) thought she deserved the “Mother of the Year” award. I just wanted her to leave me alone so that I could enjoy the prestige, responsibility, and fun of being on GO.

Then I went to seminary. It was a traumatic experience. We didn’t have cell phones back then — if I wanted to call my mother I had to do a reverse charge phone call from the payphones in the lobby. I that did plenty. But outside, in the big wide world of Yerushalayim, I had to manage in a language I didn’t speak. I had to figure out where to get on and off the local buses. I had to make Shabbos plans for myself and get there and back on my own. I had to work out an issue with my chesed lady without my mother marching in and speaking for me.

I spent the first few months of seminary shocked and shaking. Most evenings found me on the phone, weeping to my mother. My mother, in turn, was so distraught that if not for the fact that her elderly mother lived with her, she would have gotten on the first plane out. Being pulled between her daughter who needed her in Eretz Yisrael and her mother in New York nearly tore her in half.

But somehow, I began to work it out. I tagged along with friends when they went away for Shabbos. Then I started calling potential hostesses on my own and bringing friends along. I wrote my own essays, studied for tests with my friends instead of with my mother, and even submitted my own college applications.

Each time I tackled something on my own, I felt a rush of empowerment. Of confidence. Like, “Oh, maybe things aren’t so bad out there after all. Maybe I can handle it.” It was an addictive feeling; I wanted more and more. I started to compare my own confidence and functioning with that of my friends and roommates. I also observed the laissez-faire way most Israeli families I went to for Shabbos parented their kids, and I slowly started to realize that my mother’s heroic dedication to me and my brother had actually stifled me.

When I came home from seminary, I could see how hurt and bewildered my mother was by my newfound independence. I didn’t ask her to book driving lessons for me; I found my own teacher. I didn’t ask for her help in finding a part-time job through her friends; I responded to an ad I saw in a local circular. I didn’t want to cause her any distress, but I knew that when I got married, the best thing I could do for myself, for her, and for my marriage was to live far away from her, at least at the beginning. Otherwise my family would become hers, instead of an extension of hers, and I’d be so incapable of coping with marriage and motherhood and all its challenges, I’d have to join her in a retirement home when she got to that stage.

I also realized that, as hard as it would be, I’d have to parent differently from her. I’d step back to give my kids a sense of their own competence and capabilities. I didn’t want to raise children frightened of their own shadow.

After I got married, we moved out of town, where my husband joined a kiruv kollel. Twenty-five years later, we’re still there. Those early years managing with just my husband for help when I had a house full of little children were brutal. I nearly broke and packed us all up to go back to Brooklyn so many times. But then I’d remember that heady rush of empowerment and tell myself, “You got this. You can do it.”

It’s often said that you end up parenting the same way you were parented even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t. I don’t think I’ve done that. I think I’ve gone a bit too far in the opposite direction. Because I don’t have a more balanced method to model, I sometimes wonder whether in my attempt to raise resilient, self-reliant children, I haven’t been nurturing or supportive enough, or if I haven’t always been “adult” enough when they genuinely needed a grown-up’s guidance.

But I’m doing my best. Just like my mother did.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 984)