Parenting Classes Are…

not mandatory — but they should be.

I think no one should be allowed into the delivery room until they produce a certificate showing they completed a parenting course. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But just a little.

I come from a large family, I have a large family of my own, and I’ve worked in chinuch for over 20 years, and let me tell you, after just one week with my new class, I can spot the children from happy homes — homes where the parents set boundaries calmly, confidently, and firmly. These kids are happier, more confident, more cooperative, and kinder to their peers.

Raising children is so incredibly challenging, especially in today’s world, where respect for authority is no longer a given and the temptations of the outside world are more accessible than ever before. How many people instinctively know how to set those boundaries?

Creating a happy home is the highest ideal. And we should be doing everything we can to achieve it: looking after ourselves so we have the energy we need, cutting back on our schedules so we have the time for our families, and investing time and effort in learning healthy parenting techniques.

—Dini

Parenting Classes Are…

a tool to help me parent with more information and more intention.

Before making any major (and plenty of minor) life decisions, I do my best to make sure I’m making an informed and educated decision  — whether that’s speaking to potential coworkers after a job interview, researching which brand of washing machine to buy, or looking at the side effects and risks of a proposed medical intervention. Why should parenting — arguably the most important job of my life — be any different? If I seek expert and experienced voices to guide me through tasks of much lesser importance, isn’t it only logical to do the same when it comes to raising my kids?

Taking a parenting class doesn’t mean outsourcing your brain or your decisions, and I don’t think a parenting class should be overly dogmatic or prescriptive. But the course I took gave me the background and big-picture view to make my own decisions — with the benefit of more information and greater understanding.

Just spending two hours a week focused on parenting was tremendously helpful; instead of drowning in the overwhelm of bedtime and tantrums, it forced me to focus on my priorities as a parent, helping me make more intentional decisions.

Parenting classes don’t mean someone else is telling you how to raise your kids; they help you figure out how you want to raise your kids.

—Mindy

Parenting Classes Are…

well, it depends.

Parenting classes sprout like mushrooms after a rain, so I really think it depends on the credentials of the teacher. People are drawn to charisma, so a very popular class may be taught by a dynamic personality without really offering the tools you need.

Having a degree or being married to a rav aren’t necessarily credentials — that may or may not be a start. I want to know that this is a person with a lot of experience working with children, has professional accreditation, and is hashkafically sound.

If everyone is raving about an amazing class, I want to know why. I want to hear something concrete, not just gushing about how it changed their life. Obviously, no one can give over hours of parenting classes they’ve taken while schmoozing with you on the park bench, but if no one can define specific gains from the class or general attitudes they’ve adjusted, it may be a case of a dynamic teacher. If everyone is saying, “You have to be there to understand,” I’d run the other way.

A class should give you ideas broad enough, you’ll be able to use them in the future for the circumstances you can’t even predict will come up, but with enough specific examples that you really understand the concept being taught.

All that being said, once you’ve done your due diligence, I wouldn’t get too nitpicky about being in the absolute most perfect class. Raising children involves endless tedium and minutiae. It’s so easy to get lost in the daily, “Pick up the Lego, did you do your homework, brush your teeth,” that hopefully any decent class will help keep you “big-picture focused,” and I think that’s the most important part. In the short run, I just want everyone in bed. In the long run, I want these little people to grow into awesome adults, and hopefully a good class keeps that long run in your view.

A person very close to me was once complaining about her very exasperating child, who was never happy, always had to kvetch about everything. After asking if she was interested in hearing what I saw, and she confirmed that she was, I shared that her child was thriving on the negative attention she was giving him. He clearly enjoyed watching her run around trying to please him, and if she would ignore his kvetching, he’d eventually give it up. But that was something hard to work out without seeing the pleasure in the kid’s eyes as he so clearly played his mother.

So the bad news is, if you’ve really got a blind spot, even the best class in the world isn’t likely to let you see it. The good news is there are probably people in your life who see it and can clue you in, if you’re both brave enough.

—Peri

Parenting Classes Are…

Sometimes a way to avoid looking inward.

This is how I did it with my daughter. This is how you deal with your son’s issue. Everyone wants the quick fix, the easy, one-size-fits-all answer to their problems. In this age of overwhelming information, we have all become seekers, searching for magical solutions everywhere but within.

But ultimately, there is no algorithm for how to build the perfect child. Parenting classes introduce strong concepts with authority, and offer beneficial  solutions, but they would be able to guarantee success only if all our children would behave in the same ways, and would react similarly to our responses. Only then would they be able to provide a secret formula to bring up our child as a ben or bas Torah. But this is not the case. Each child is unique and there is no magic pill. So we should not jump on parenting classes like we jump on fad diets. Put these calories in and do this much cardio and watch your waistline shrink! Put this much love in and add this much discipline and see your child’s middos grow!

To keep searching for tricks, for secret tactics to make our children and our relationships with them perfect without examining what we’ve been until now would be just another way to avoid looking inward.

Going to parenting classes might feel like you’re making a fresh start. But there’s rarely a clean slate to write upon — just children, with all their foibles and flaws, watching the “new you” with the skepticism of kids who know better.

It’s so much easier to move forward while putting aside the past, to forget what we’ve done before in favor of the new solutions that parenting classes promise. But our kids are the product of our decisions until now, of our parenting until now. So of course, parenting classes are useful and can provide valuable perspectives and guidance, but remember that the main work is internal. When we jump to follow someone else’s new advice, we must be careful not to neglect to examine how we’ve erred (and succeeded) in the past.

—Chani

Parenting Classes Are…

a clever ploy that allows some super-confident people to make money.

When I was a young mother debating taking parenting courses, my husband mentioned it to our mentor, who by his own admission was somewhat of a cynic but was undoubtedly wise as well. We thought he would be impressed with how proactive we were being. We were surprised when he told us we should rather go to a fancy restaurant and discuss our kids at length over steak.

Not all courses are daas Torah, he explained. He went on to elaborate that he has seen courses billed as Torah-based chinuch where the instructor basically took dubious psychological concepts and then cherry-picked Chazals to back up her point, calling it Torah-based.

It’s really important to us mothers to be great at what we do, and we’re so happy to hear these lofty sounding ideas — especially when they come from Chazal. But the fact is that we have no context, and we don’t know when something is actually true or just plain warped.

For generations, people managed just fine without parenting classes; why do we think we are incapable without them? If anything, people are more messed up today than they ever were, despite every type of course that will supposedly turn us and our children into the most blissful people on earth.

I’m honestly skeptical that these classes even work. The biggest proof is that most people who took one continue to take more. If the promise delivered — would you need to do that?

—Ruchy

Parenting Classes Are…

essential for most people.

Some people are blessed to have grown up in homes with parents who had refined middos and good anger and stress management skills, who knew the appropriate way to handle a toddler’s tantrum or a teen’s chutzpah, who knew how to be authoritative without being authoritarian.

Those people can just emulate what their parents did. They don’t need parenting classes.

But for people who grew up with parents who were compromised in these areas — which I think is the majority of people; humans are flawed and all that — parenting classes are essential. You don’t want to model your parenting behavior on a flawed model. You wouldn’t operate highly complex machinery using an outdated guidebook with advice that led to damage or injury. Why would you take on the highly complex and hugely important job of raising children using techniques that you know were dysfunctional?

I took a parenting course when I had five little kids. It was heavy going; it ran for more than a year, plus there was homework and bonus classes. But I can say that it changed my life. Changed the tone of my home. Changed me as a person.

It made me realize how wrong so many of my basic beliefs about a parent’s role and the way to execute it were. I thought parenting was about creating obedient nachas machines through offering rewards and threatening consequences. I thought that the more I did for my kids, the easier I made life for them, the more I hovered over them and protected them, the more loved, the safer, and the more confident they’d feel. But I was just getting more and more frustrated at their disobedience, even as I offered bigger rewards and threatened more frightening consequences. I was working myself to the bone to do everything for them, while they became more and more demanding and ungrateful.

My classes taught me the basic principles about what my goals should be in raising my children — creating independent ovdei Hashem who would want to do the right thing even when I wasn’t supervising them, and who were self-reliant and were confident because of that.

My classes showed me what emotionally healthy parent-child interactions look like. And it taught me how to achieve them. And every day, I thank Hashem for them.

—Leah

Parenting Classes Are…

available in all different flavors.

As a parent with embarrassingly little confidence in my motherly intuition, I’ve taken a number of parenting courses, some of which flatly contradict each other. And each one, despite fiercely contesting the axioms underlying the others, has improved my parenting.

Most criticisms leveled against parenting classes aren’t true across the board. Some of them are certainly dogmatic or over-confident; some of them don’t recognize kids’ different temperaments; some of them make parents feel inadequate. Just like anything imparting wisdom — shiurim, rabbanim, schools — not everything will be suited to everyone. And that’s not a bug, it’s a feature: There’s something for everyone, and it’s up to our powers of discernment to choose what we want to consume.

There are many right ways to parent.

Growing up, I remember my father telling an anecdote about an industrial researcher brought in to improve worker productivity. The research team improved the lighting, and the productivity went up. Then they tried dimming the lights, and productivity went… up. They lowered the air conditioning and productivity went up; they raised the air conditioning and productivity went — you guessed it — up. This peculiar phenomenon, which I’ve since learned is called the Hawthorne effect, basically indicates that it’s not the specific tweaks we make, but rather the act of observation itself that affects the observed individuals.

In a similar vein, I’d say that the most important feature of a parenting class is not the specific content, but the way it focuses our attention on something that too often becomes autopilot. When I’m taking a course, I’m thoughtful, intentional, and in the game. The different styles have drawn my attention to different aspects of parenting, and I’ve learned a lot from each, but the greatest benefit has been the heightened consciousness and intention with which I parent.

Sometimes I’ve incorporated things I learned in a class, and sometimes I’ve chosen to do the exact opposite. Sometimes I’ve chosen to consciously look away from a specific topic. But after taking a parenting course, it’s my choice, rather than inertia, which guides that decision.

—Shaina

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 906)