Rabbi Shmuley Asks: Who Do You Want To Be?

December 25, 2007

The Mentorship Approach With Kids & Teens

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the star of the television show Shalom in the Home. He visits families and helps them solve ongoing conflicts and learn to enjoy each other more. His approach to family relationships, and to parenting in particular, is based on instilling values and developing character, guiding children towards meaningful adult lives. It’s the Mentorship Approach!

One of Shmuley’s many books is titled 10 Conversations You Need to Have with Your Children. His first chapter talks about conversations around the theme, “Who do you want to be?”

Shmuley points out that it’s far more important to involve our children in thinking about Who they want to be, in terms of their character and morals and values, than it is to ask them What they want to be. Life is so much more than a career or work field, which can be changed more easily than character.

He brings this into conversations with his own children at teachable moments. I offer a scenario to show how to apply his method. A young near-teen-age girl is asking relentlessly for clothes that seem too adult and too revealing. The typical conversation might start out with parents encouraging her to change her mind, then mom or dad might throw in some shaming comments about the risqué look, and the fight is on.

In the end, at least these days it seems, the parents are likely to give in because they default to two things: their overblown worries about the importance of their children “fitting in” and embracing the “lowest common denominator” model, where they figure if other parents allow it maybe they should, too. Hey, wait a minute! That’s also about fitting in! It’s just the parents wanting to make sure they fit in.

Shmuley’s conversation would focus on values on character. “Do you want to be a young lady who respects her body and respects the effect it has on young men when you show your body? Or do you want to use your body to command young men’s attention? Do you want young men interested in you for the beauty of your spirit and the wonders of your mind, or do you want them interested because they get the message they can get physical satisfaction?”

I see a particular kind of magic in this approach. Most parents want to instill values and develop their children’s character, but it turns into shaming and critical statements too quickly. Unfortunately, the “popular culture” approach to solving this problem is to encourage parents not to teach values to their children, but to believe children (even at young ages) have their own well-developed values. It’s absurd!

Real child development experts don’t promote these silly ideas because they understand the development of morality and know that the moral reasoning of children is limited. They don’t really have adult complexity in their moral reasoning until the end of the teen years or sometimes later.

Shmuley’s approach respects the fact that children will develop their own character and values, but more importantly it respects the fact that they don’t develop them on their own and by a young age. Shmuley’s approach honors the reasoning in moral reasoning. It gives parents a template for sharing our values, and the reasons we hold them.

It also gives us a template to share our optimism and vision for the future with our children. It encourages us to see their potential, to show them our vision of who they can become, and to guide them towards it. That’s the Mentorship Approach.

Posted in The Mentorship Approach With Kids & Teens, Zine 3: December 2007, Zines in 2007