All My Children

There are many contributions that only parents can make to their child’s play. For example, no teacher, and certainly no age-mate, can be as deeply and personally involved in play that seems to relate to the child’s future as are his parents. Play is anchored in the present, but it also takes up and tries to solve problems of the past, and it is often future-directed as well. Continue Reading »

A child doesn’t want to be “kept quiet.” He needs and wants to do things that are important to him. For example, it is always exciting for the young child to investigate the contents of a purse—but nothing can compare with turning his mother’s purse inside out. Fascinating as adult secrets are in general, none are more interesting than those of one’s parents. The child is curious about the contents of his parents‘ drawers! What other people do, what they have, how they organize things—all these become important as the child begins to learn about the differences in how things are done by his family and how they’re done in other households. But first he wants to learn how things are done at home. Continue Reading »

Depending on what being Jewish means to you, your guidance to your child can be as specific as you prefer. Ultimately, what you’ll probably do is assess your child’s needs and determine how Jewishness fits into that picture. I want to supplement your ideas with a few suggestions that have occurred to me in speaking with Jewish parents. Continue Reading »

An uncomfortable problem for you as an idealistic young person, especially in the early teens, is the sharp contrast between the physical side of sex and the romantic, tender, spiritual side. By the time you are in your late teens or early twenties, these two aspects will tend to fuse together (sooner in one individual, later in another), giving strength and meaning to each other. But at first they are so opposite that they seem to battle against each other. Continue Reading »

I myself think that the teen years up to sixteen, seventeen or eighteen are generally the time for an informal kind of companionship between boys and girls, mainly in groups.

You get lots of opportunities to learn about the opposite sex and your own sex by being with other young people regularly in school, in Sunday School, in camps, around the neighbourhood, in dropping in and out of other families‘ homes. This kind of sociability allows you to get to know others casually, which is the most comfortable way for most early adolescents. You can talk as much or as little as you feel like doing, instead of having to fill up all the silences, the way you feel you have to do when there are only two people present. You can be on school and youth club committees to carry out projects and social activities. You can participate in the activity clubs that exist in many schools—a Spanish club, a stamp collectors’ club, a nature- study club, etc. Continue Reading »

Teaching by Example

A child usually learns far more by the attitudes of those around him than he does from books and formal lectures. For example, what he sees and feels in the family ordinarily makes a greater impression on him than what he reads when he is older. Here in his own home he will gain a better understanding of the breadth and depth of family living. Here he can see what it means to be a mother, a father, a husband, or a wife, and he also knows what it means to be a child. Continue Reading »

Nothing is more difficult for some parents than to discuss the question of sex with their children. They can talk about these things quite freely with other people. But with their own children it becomes a most embarrassing experience for all concerned. Often the child is left completely confused, especially when no proper groundwork has been laid.

Yet the happiness of the whole family may be vitally affected unless the child is well informed on this important question. Countless young people have fallen into bad company for no other reason than lack of proper instruction in advance. Children are naturally inquisitive, and inevitably there comes a time when the child begins to inquire where he came from. The manner in which you answer his questions now will largely determine the way he will always react, not only in this but also in many other family problems. Continue Reading »

In the later teens—at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—a majority of young people will have lost enough of their shyness and gained enough experience so that they can mix socially with pleasure. Those who are in love will be in love on a more realistic basis than when they were younger—in the sense that they will have got to know the beloved before allowing themselves to become infatuated, and in the sense that they are seeing each other fairly regularly in real life situations, not just dreaming of each other at a distance. Others will not be emotionally ready yet to fall seriously in love, but they are drawn to certain members of the opposite sex and are having regular or occasional dates. Continue Reading »

If you are in love and are perhaps talking of marriage, better not let yourself be persuaded to reveal previous love affairs or sexual experiences. Your beloved may say, and it sounds plausible, ‘We shouldn’t have any secrets from each other.’ But most people in love don’t want to tell and don’t want to hear about previous romances—they were mistakes in one way or another. The person who is eager to tell about his past romances is usually someone who gets unconscious pleasure from making his beloved jealous. And the person who wants to know about his beloved’s past has, in most cases, an over-jealous personality : it will only make him resentful and miserable to hear the story. Continue Reading »

Popularity with a large group is useful only to the politician who’s after votes. What you as an individual can use and need is to be appreciated fondly by a small circle of friends for your particular flavour, whether it’s for your generosity or understanding or vivacity or witty tongue. Romantically what you as a teenager need is a chance to get to know and be known by some appropriate members of the opposite sex—a few at a time—in order to reveal your own ideas, to learn to respond to the ideas of others, to let your own qualities of personality come out so that those of the other sex who might cherish them can see them, to find out for yourself what qualities you want and need in a beloved. These things are not at all clear to a young person at first. In order to take advantage of your opportunities to get to know members of the opposite sex, you ought to learn enough easy flirtatiousness to signal interest to them. I don’t mean a heavy seductiveness but a sparkle in the eye, a personal smile, a lightly flattering remark, to show that you think the other person is fun. You should acquire enough facility with light talk so that you can pass ten minutes or an hour with another person while you—and he—decide whether or not there are possibilities in this friendship. Continue Reading »