Every parent has been there: your child won’t listen, the moment is escalating, and somewhere in your head a voice says, “There’s no other choice. I have to be harsh right now.” Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, teaching Rav Wolbe, wants to interrupt that voice before it wins — not with a scolding, but with one piercing question: is there really no other choice?
Rav Wolbe’s approach starts from an honest admission: sometimes, harsh approaches really do seem to produce better results, faster. A sharp word or a strong consequence can stop misbehavior in its tracks right now. Wolbe doesn’t pretend otherwise. But he adds a phrase that reframes the entire discussion: a wise person’s eyes are in his head — meaning, a wise person thinks about where this leads, not just what happens in the next thirty seconds.
Here is the specific test Rav Wolbe gives parents to run before reacting harshly, especially with young children: ask yourself, “Am I doing something that could, in a negative way, alter the relationship I have with this child?” If the answer is yes, the next question is not “What else can I do?” but “Is it worth it?” Wolbe’s claim, which Kelemen says took him years to fully absorb, is that at young ages — two, three, four, five, even seven years old — you often won’t see any sign of relationship damage. The child still runs to you, still laughs with you, still seems completely fine. The cost doesn’t show up on schedule. It shows up later, sometimes much later, when a teenager who was handled harshly as a small child quietly stops bringing you their real problems.
Kelemen shares an account of a father who, mid-way through learning this very material, realized he had no better alternative prepared and simply stopped using harshness on the spot — even though it left his household without a clear discipline system for months while he learned what to do instead. Years later, his son, in a relaxed and unprompted conversation, told his mother he would never forgive his father for how he used to be treated — a memory from years before the father had already changed his approach and apologized. The relationship cost had already been paid, long before any outward sign of it appeared.
So what do you do instead, in the heat of the actual moment? Rav Wolbe’s practical answer, elsewhere in his teaching, is almost disappointingly simple: speak firmly, say it once, say it twice, keep your tone calm but immovable, until the child listens. The skill isn’t a clever trick — it’s knowing how to speak and when to speak, holding the long-term relationship as more valuable than the short-term win.
Before your next confrontation with your child, try running Rav Wolbe’s two questions in your head, even silently, even mid-conflict: Could this response damage my relationship with this child? Is winning this moment worth that risk? You won’t always land on the gentle answer — some moments genuinely call for a firm consequence. But asking the question first changes the kind of parent you become over the years, even when the results of asking it don’t show up for a very long time.
If you’d like more of Rabbi Kelemen’s teachings on choosing long-term relationship over short-term control, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.