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The Jewish Home | MARCH 31, 2022
Dr. Deb
Love Your Kid by Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
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OctOber 29, 2015 | the Jewish Home
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t’s hard to love a teenager who is way out of reach in more ways than one. Here are some things parents have said to me: Scenario #1 “Dr. Deb, how do I love a kid that is so disrespectful? Me: You have to regardless. Hashem loves us, even though we sin. Scenario #2 “Dr. Deb, I lose it. I’m trying to help him learn, and he just doesn’t get it. I get so frustrated.” Scenario #3 “Dr. Deb, this kid is mechalel Shabbos. He won’t come to the table with us; he’s on his phone.” Scenario #4 “Dr. Deb, he’s on the streets. He won’t come home….” Scenario #5 “Dr. Deb, this kid reported us to the Child Protective Services! And we are good, kind parents. We did nothing wrong.” I remember the first time I got the other side of the story. A couple came in for marital counseling many years ago, and it inevitably
uncovered all sorts of problems with the children. So they sent their teenage daughter to meet with me alone. She was 15. In one of our sessions, she said to me, “My parents don’t love me.” I was shocked. I asked her permission to tell her parents this, and she was only too happy for them to know. I knew that her parents were worried sick about her. I also knew they were frustrated with her and maybe let her have it on occasion. Isn’t that normal? Don’t most parents yell? How did this kid get a much worse message than the intended one? When the mom came in the following week, I shared this information, and she was beyond shocked. She just couldn’t understand it. So I relayed to her Gottman’s rules for fighting couples and how they would apply to a child. Apparently, in couples whose marriage makes it forward in spite of obstacles, there are compliments given to each other even when fighting. (Of course, when people are angry, they do not want to give compliments, and Gottman doesn’t have an answer for this. However, Richard Schwartz does
have an answer, and I’ve covered this in previous articles.) Applying Gottman’s rule, I told her that she must say positive things to her daughter throughout the day even if she was frustrated with her. You see, Gottman found that when people stayed together in a marriage, they would utter at least one compliment or positive statement for every 5 complaints when they were getting along, and even when they were arguing, the ratio became one to twenty. That positive just had to squeeze itself in there for the relationship to survive. Today, I got news that made me think maybe I saved that girl from death. You see, someone else I once knew died by his own hand. And I knew that person to not fit in back in those awful teenage years, not belong. Our kids, like that child, then desperately try to make a place for themselves, a place in which they feel they can be who they really “are.” Sometimes, to do this, the teenager joins the “wrong” group, or goes off the derech, or rebels in other ways. This scares us, and I get that. So we try to clamp down harder, which leads to
worse rebellion. Instead, see inside the kids. See the chaos they make and flames they ignite as the outer representation of anguish inside. See it. Feel their pain. Not only pain but fear. The kid who doesn’t belong wonders if even G-d loves him, wonders if he was “supposed to” be here in this world, wonders if he isn’t somehow so defective that he’s beyond repair. That’s what they’re thinking, wondering, and frightened to find out. Then, if they hate themselves enough, they will “find out” all the evidence that stacks up against them. All the evidence that makes them finally, after trying so hard and suffering so long, give up hope and give up life.
Unearned Fish Back in the first third of the twentieth century, Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist, was observing the training process for dolphins. The trainers were teaching the dolphins to come up with new tricks. That means that any trick they produced would get a reward in the session in which it appeared but would no longer be re-
