Once, I gave all the kids ice pops, and she wanted another one. When I said no, she began screaming, “You’re the worst mother! You never give me anything I want! You give everyone except me!”

It was no use pointing out to her that she’d already had an ice pop, or that none of the other kids was getting a second one. In her mind, she was being singled out for unfair treatment. And this was a typical scene in my house, one that repeated itself numerous times every day. “She got more cake than me!” she’d cry. Or, “You made my toast darker than his!”

Not only did her constant negativity and non-age-appropriate tantruming try my patience, it also made me worry about her future. What’s going to be with her? I would fret. I’m never going to be able to turn her into a mensch!

When I caught myself ruminating this way, I stopped myself immediately. I just have to handle this moment, I would tell myself. I don’t have to project into the future.
Although Kayla’s issues were primarily scholastic, not behavioral or social, her poor performance in school caused her to lose the respect of her classmates, which made her a social outcast.

Knowing how hard a time she was having with everything school related, I tried to compensate by keeping her home environment as loving and positive as possible. To my older kids, I explained that our house was Kayla’s only haven in this world, and that we had to make our home the happiest, most accepting place for her. They understood, and did their best to be kind to Kayla.

The sibling closest to Kayla in age was Riva, two years her senior. When Kayla would yell at Riva or try to provoke her into a fight, I would motion to Riva to keep quiet. In recognition of Riva’s restraint, I would buy her beautiful gifts, such as jewelry or decorations for her room.

“I know it’s hard not to answer Kayla or argue back,” I told her, “and I’m very proud of you for your gevurah.”

I made sure to give Kayla lots of hugs and physical affection, especially before bedtime, and I expressed to her repeatedly, throughout each day, how much I loved her. “I thank Hashem that I have such a special daughter who’s so sweet and precious!” I would exclaim. I didn’t only say these words — I willed myself to believe them.

When Riva brought home an award for academic excellence, I went out and bought two necklaces — one to recognize Riva’s achievement, and the other to show Kayla my love and admiration.

While Kayla never expressed to me that her unhappiness was the result of being forced to go for therapy and tutoring, it was obvious that this was the case. And with all the resistance she was putting up, she was gaining nothing from all the intervention. How much time, money, and energy could we invest into helping her if she wasn’t interested in being helped?

When Kayla was at the end of fourth grade, my husband, Shimon, and I decided to consult with a rav who was known for his expertise as a mechanech. After we explained the situation, he told us, “By forcing therapy, you risk losing the child. It’s not worth it. She’s a girl, and it’s not critical for her to succeed academically. Leave her alone.”
After hearing that, we canceled all her therapists and tutors.

My friend Elisheva thought I was crazy. She was in a similar situation: Her daughter Henny was struggling academically and resisting all therapy and remediation. When Elisheva heard I was “giving in” and letting Kayla have her way, she couldn’t believe how irresponsible I was being. “How do you let a child dictate a decision with such long-ranging ramifications?” she wondered.

I, too, would second-guess the decision many times in the coming years. What kept me resolute was the knowledge that I was following daas Torah — and also the knowledge that unless Kayla wanted help, no amount of professional intervention would accomplish anything.

Every so often, I would lose my resolve and urge Kayla again to go for tutoring or therapy. So adamantly did she refuse, however, that I realized forcing her would do more harm than good.

At the beginning of Kayla’s fifth-grade year, Shimon and I requested a meeting with the school principals, and at the meeting we explained the approach we had been advised to take with Kayla. “Whatever she learns in school, she learns,” we said. “Whatever she doesn’t learn, she’ll pick up if and when she’s ready. Our priority is her emotional health.”

The principals begrudgingly lent their support to the approach, although they made it clear that they disagreed with it.

At PTA several months later, the head principal reiterated to me that she thought we were making a grave mistake. “You need to tell your daughter that she was born with a weak head and she needs tutoring,” she said flatly.

“Why would I tell her that?” I wondered. “It would hurt her terribly.”

“Well, she needs to know the truth so she can face the reality,” she declared.

I walked out of the principal’s office and burst into tears. “Ribbono shel Olam,” I sobbed, “You gave me this child because You knew I wouldn’t hurt her. I’m trying my best with her, but I will not tell her point-blank that she’s dumb and she needs help. It’s hard enough for her to deal with her issues without having to hear such hurtful words.”

In the meantime, we continued to show Kayla tons of love — which wasn’t easy. Any request I made of her became an issue. If I so much as asked her to pick up a pen from the floor, she’d complain, “You always ask me to do the hardest things!”

In the interests of maintaining a good relationship with her, I stopped asking her to do anything but the bare minimum. I also tried to overlook her tantrums and negativity as much as possible, and focused solely on building her up and making her feel good about herself. If I see her as a success, I told myself, one day she’ll see herself as a success, too.

As long as Kayla had been compelled to go for therapy and tutoring, she had been unhappy and explosive at home, despite all our efforts to show her love and positivity.

Only when we allowed her to stop all the remediation did she calm down noticeably and become happier, although she continued to overeat and turn to food for comfort.

Once she seemed happier, I decided it was time to tackle her tantrums. Each time she’d explode, I’d send her to her room. In the beginning I had to hold the door to keep her in there, screaming and kicking, but with time, the tantrums subsided and eventually stopped altogether.

Even when her behavior at home was problematic, she didn’t make any trouble in school. No teachers ever complained about her behavior, but some of them did complain about her lousy academic performance. At the beginning of each year, I would speak to Kayla’s teachers and explain that our goal was to give Kayla as much positive attention as possible and avoid pressuring her academically. I asked them to consider Kayla’s effort and adjust her grades accordingly.

“If I write in her notebook that she studied, can you please give her a better mark, to encourage her to keep trying and studying?” I requested. I explained that at this age, Kayla had no choice but to be in school, and I wanted her school experience to be as pleasant as possible, despite her academic failings.

Some teachers honored this request, but others thought it was dishonest to inflate a student’s mark for effort, even in elementary school. As a teacher myself, I knew the value of cultivating a good relationship with your child’s teacher, especially when that child is floundering in school. I would speak to the teachers regularly and express to them that I wanted to work with them, and I would bolster that communication with thank-you notes and gifts for Chanukah and Purim. “We know you’re going out of your way to help our Kayla, and we really appreciate the extra attention you’re giving her,” I would write.

Unfortunately, not every teacher responded in kind. While there were those who gave Kayla the encouragement and kind word she so badly needed, some of her teachers simply ignored her the whole year.

Even after we despaired of getting Kayla professional help, I continued to work with her at home, studying with her and helping her with her homework. Sometimes, I would spend hours drilling her spelling words with her. We wrote the words. We sang the words. We played games with the words. And then, when she came to the test, Kayla would forget everything and flunk.

Once, the night before a big social studies test, Kayla and I walked outside for hours repeating the information again and again until she knew it practically in her sleep. But the next day, when she sat down to take the test, her mind went blank.

It was incredibly frustrating for her — and for me, too. To avoid becoming exasperated, I told myself every day that my mission in life was to help my daughter feel good about herself. True, I had eight children besides Kayla, but none of them required nearly as much time, patience, and emotional energy. I davened to Hashem constantly to help me deal with Kayla, and when I found myself losing patience with her, I would mentally put myself in her shoes and imagine how miserable it was for her to sit through school day after day feeling like a total failure.

What made it possible for me to keep building Kayla up, day after day, was my husband’s unwavering support. Shimon and I drew strength from each other, and being united in our approach to raising our daughter enabled us to persist even in the face of steady opposition from Kayla’s school.

The biggest problem of all was Kayla’s lack of friends. The teachers I could talk to and try to build rapport with, but I couldn’t prevail upon her classmates to include her. In all of Kayla’s elementary school years, I don’t think she got a single phone call from a friend. When my other daughters had a birthday, their friends would buy them gifts or go out with them for ice cream or pizza. When Kayla had a birthday, no one in her class would even remember.

Seeing that Kayla had not a single friend, Shimon and I resolved that we would be her best friends. We went for walks with her, we took her on special outings, we made a big fuss about her birthday, and we bought her all the little gifts that girls typically get from their friends.

I tried teaching her to cook and bake, hoping that she could at least be a success in the kitchen, but there, too, she was a dismal failure. At age12, she started making scrambled eggs, with disastrous results: Her first dozen or so attempts ended with egg all over the stovetop, the counters, and the floor. I didn’t utter a word of criticism, though. Instead, I kept encouraging her to try again, until she finally managed to produce something edible. Another time, she tried baking a cake, but instead of the three-quarter cup of oil that the recipe called for, she poured in three full cups. Then she came to ask me what the “four” in the three-quarters meant. I bit my lip, and gently suggested that she start again. When the cake finally emerged from the oven, I called my mother and sister and gushed to them that Kayla had made a delicious cake. So what if it was suspiciously flat and dry?

Shimon and I were both in chinuch and didn’t have money to spare, but we made Kayla’s self-esteem a priority, scrimping on other areas so that we could spend money on her. I bought her gorgeous clothing and made sure she always looked good, which wasn’t easy, because she was chubby. I sent her for art lessons, for music lessons, for drama lessons. She did not show much talent in any of those extracurricular realms, but I didn’t care. I wanted her to be able to brag that she was in drama, even if her part in the year-end play consisted of only three lines. I filmed that part and showed it to everyone in our extended family. “You have to see what an amazing actress Kayla is,” I gushed to them.

At least this way, Kayla was part of something. In school, she was never chosen for any significant tasks or given a part in a play, choir, or dance. To her peers, and to some of her teachers, it was as though she didn’t exist. Mimi, the girl down the block who officially walked to school with Kayla, would walk a few steps ahead of her the whole way and not say a word to her.

In eighth grade, a group of girls actually welcomed Kayla into their little circle. I was delighted that she had finally made some friends — until one day she came home and burst into tears.

“My friends aren’t nice to me,” she sobbed.
Turns out, these ostensible friends of hers were sending mixed messages. They would call her over to sit with them at lunchtime, but then they wouldn’t talk to her. They would make up to meet in a certain place at recess, but Kayla would wait for them the entire recess and they would forget to show up. The last straw was Kayla spotting pictures on the camera of one of these friends in which her face had been deleted from every group picture they had taken.

It seemed to me that these girls had taken on Kayla as a chesed project, probably upon the urging of a well-meaning teacher. But chesed and friendship are two different things, and being befriended in this patronizing manner turned out to be more painful for Kayla than having no friends at all. Each time these girls acted kindly to her, they got her hopes up — only to cruelly dash those hopes when they became tired of being nice and retreated into their own familiar clique.

“You don’t need them to be your friends,” I told her. “You’re a great girl, and you can decide who’s going to be your friend.”

The next day, when these girls beckoned to Kayla to join them in the lunchroom, she refused. I was so proud that I went out and bought her a cute picture frame, into which I placed a pretty picture of her. On the back of the frame I wrote, “Frame it in your mind: Mommy loves you best!”

That year, Kayla decided, with our encouragement, to go to a new camp in a different city where no one knew her. All the years she had attended the same camp as many of her classmates, who continued to spurn her all summer just as they did during the school year. Determined to carve out a new image for herself, she stepped off the bus to camp full of confidence — where she drew that from, I have no idea — and managed to make tons of friends over the summer.

When she returned from camp, the phone actually started ringing for her. What a sweet sound that was! Buoyed by her newfound popularity, she decided that in high school she was going to succeed. To my shock, she actually asked me to hire a tutor to study with her!

The Kayla who entered ninth grade was a different kid: happy, confident, smiling. Some of my neighbors even commented to me that she seemed like a new person.

“A miracle happened with this kid,” my father-in-law remarked.

At home, Kayla began taking far more initiative, offering to cook and clean and shop. While she still made plenty of mistakes and took a lot longer than my other daughters, she persisted in the tasks she undertook, and slowly, against the backdrop of continual praise from me (and a heaping dose of selective blindness on my part), she became a bona fide balabusta and a pro in the kitchen.

Her peers, however, still regarded her as the same hapless Kayla as in elementary school, and they continued to avoid her. When the phone rang for her it was always her new camp friends on the line. I would have liked to switch her to a different school, but our city had only one Bais Yaakov high school, so that wasn’t an option.

Despite Kayla’s newfound motivation to succeed academically and her willingness to be tutored, she continued to struggle throughout high school, bringing home anemic marks. Apparently, her brain was not cut out for school-style learning.

When she was in 11th grade, the teacher of the school’s elective computer course refused to allow her to sign up for the course.

“Your daughter won’t be able to keep up,” the teacher told me.

I begged the principal to give Kayla a chance, but she backed the teacher and insisted that Kayla stay out. Kayla, however, was determined to learn computers, and she sat down at our home computer and taught herself how to use it. (She became so proficient that she actually landed a job in camp a couple of years later producing the camp newsletter and yearbook.)

Baruch Hashem, Kayla survived her school years, her dismal academic and social performance notwithstanding. Sadly, I can’t say the same for Henny, the daughter of my friend Elisheva. Like Kayla, Henny had difficultly learning; unlike Kayla, she was forced, throughout elementary school, to receive all kinds of remediation. By the time Henny reached adolescence she was so full of fury and resentment that she rebelled against Yiddishkeit, turning her anger on her parents and their lifestyle.

All the years, Shimon and I had stood firm in our approach of building Kayla’s self-esteem and exerting no academic pressure on her. It was a lonely approach, garnering reluctant cooperation from Kayla’s teachers at best and vehement opposition and censure at worst. Many times, we had wondered if we were crazy. Now, I finally felt validated in having prioritized Kayla’s emotional health over her scholastic performance.

After graduating high school, Kayla really started blossoming. No longer stifled by a classroom environment, with its monochromatic focus on textbook learning, she was able to succeed on her own terms. She found a job as an assistant in a first-grade classroom, and when the teacher went on maternity leave, she very naturally took over the reins and began teaching the class herself. Being a weak student actually made her a marvelous teacher, because she knew how to reach every student, even the ones with challenges.
In addition to her teaching job, Kayla took a cosmetics course and began doing hair and makeup professionally in the evenings for simchahs, quickly becoming a sought-after name in the industry.

As for shidduchim, when people first started inquiring about her, the reports they received — from her teachers, principals, and classmates — were lackluster, and the boys suggested for her were hardly a distinguished lot. But as she put distance between herself and her ill-fated school career and established herself as a success at work, in camp, and in the community, her reputation soared, and shadchanim began to take note and suggest boys of a different caliber.

And why not? She’s a lovely, capable girl with a winning personality and wonderful middos, who will one day make an outstanding wife and mother.

Take it from me, her best friend.

(Originally Featured in Mishpacha, Issue 734)