Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen shares a story from his own home that he tells against himself — the kind of story that only means something because he’s willing to admit the mistake in public.
Partway through learning Rav Wolbe’s approach to chinuch, Kelemen realized his own household had been relying on harshness to get results. He came home and told his wife: we can’t use harshness anymore. Her reasonable next question was, “So what do we do instead?” His honest answer: “I have no clue — we didn’t get that far in the lecture yet.” So he simply stopped disciplining harshly, cold, with no replacement system in place yet. He describes the result plainly: his house was “hefker” — ownerless, unstructured — for six months. The kids were, in his words, bouncing off the walls.
That part of the story is almost funny in hindsight. The part that isn’t funny came years later. When his son was about ten or eleven, in the middle of an entirely relaxed, ordinary conversation with his mother — not an argument, not a moment of tension — the boy said, unprompted: “I’ll never forgive Abba for the way he used to treat me.” Kelemen had stopped the harsh treatment when the boy was seven or eight. He’d apologized at the time. And the memory was still sitting there, fully intact, years later, surfacing in a completely calm moment.
Why tell this story on himself? Because it makes a point no amount of theory could make as forcefully: harsh treatment doesn’t disappear from a child’s internal record just because the parent stopped, apologized, and moved on. The relationship can heal. The specific memory often doesn’t.
This connects to the deeper principle Kelemen keeps returning to throughout his teaching on chinuch — that relationship, not harshness, produces the results parents actually want, and it produces them without leaving this kind of residue behind. Rav Wolbe puts it sharply: sometimes harsh approaches seem to produce better results in the moment, but a wise person keeps their eyes on the long-term picture, not just the immediate outcome. A parent who understands “the secret of chinuch” is careful, especially with young children, not to judge a method only by whether it worked today.
What can a parent actually do with this, practically, before reaching the ten-years-later regret stage?
Don’t wait until you’ve eliminated a bad habit to build the replacement. Kelemen’s honest admission is that he stopped harshness before he had anything to put in its place — and that gap cost him six chaotic months. If you’re ready to change your discipline approach, look for the replacement system first, even if it takes a little longer to start.
Apologize when you get it wrong, but don’t assume the apology erases the memory. It matters for the relationship going forward. It doesn’t necessarily undo what already happened in the child’s mind.
Ask yourself, in any moment of frustration, whether the approach you’re about to use is one you’d be comfortable being remembered for in fifteen years. That’s a higher bar than “will this stop the behavior right now,” and it’s the bar Kelemen suggests parents actually need.
Trust that consistency and warmth compound over time, even without a dramatic harsh intervention. The data and the mussar agree here — relationship is the through-line that produces a child who wants to listen, not just one who’s afraid not to.
For more honest, practical chinuch teaching like this, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.