One of the more liberating and counterintuitive ideas Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen teaches from Rav Shlomo Wolbe’s work on chinuch is also one of the hardest for anxious parents to actually absorb: you have no control over results. None. What you have control over is the method — whether you’re raising your child according to the proper approach, the proper “halachos” of chinuch, regardless of how the child eventually turns out.
This sounds almost fatalistic at first. Isn’t the entire point of good parenting to produce a good outcome — a well-adjusted, values-driven, successful child? Rav Wolbe’s answer reframes the goal entirely: chinuch, done properly, is an act of serving God — avodas Hashem — not a performance metric aimed at guaranteeing a specific outcome. You do it right because it is right, not because right technique guarantees a particular result. Two children raised by the same devoted parent, using the exact same principles, can turn out completely differently, because a child is not a controllable variable. They’re a person, with their own choices.
This reframing matters enormously for how parents experience their own effort. If you measure your parenting only by outcomes — how your teenager behaves this week, whether your child is thriving compared to peers, whether the values you’re teaching are visibly “working” — you tie your sense of adequacy as a parent to something you fundamentally cannot control. That’s a formula for anxiety, resentment, and eventually burnout, because outcomes are influenced by a thousand factors beyond any parent’s reach: a child’s own temperament, their friends, their own free will, timing, circumstance.
Measuring by method instead gives you something you can actually hold onto. Did I model what I wanted to teach today? Did I explain rather than just enforce? Did I discipline gently rather than harshly? Did I give real attention? These are questions you can answer honestly every single day, regardless of how your child’s week is going. And because they’re within your control, they’re also the only fair measure of whether you’re doing your job well.
How do you put this into practice without becoming indifferent to outcomes altogether?
Keep a private, honest checklist of method, not outcome. At the end of a hard day, instead of asking “did my child behave well today,” ask “did I parent well today” — they are not the same question, and only one of them is fully in your hands.
Release the comparison trap. Comparing your child’s trajectory to a sibling’s or a friend’s child’s is measuring a variable you don’t control. Compare your own consistency this month to your own consistency last month instead.
Let go of guilt tied purely to outcome. A child’s hard choices, especially as they grow older, are not a referendum on every decision you made as a parent. You can have done the method faithfully and still watch a child struggle — that’s the nature of raising an independent person, not proof you failed.
Recommit daily, not permanently. Because you can’t control results, the entire task resets each day. Today’s chinuch doesn’t ride on yesterday’s outcome or guarantee tomorrow’s.
There’s real peace available in this teaching, once it settles. You were never actually in the results business. You were only ever in the method business — and that, unlike your child’s future, is entirely up to you.
For more teachings on the deeper purpose behind chinuch, join the inner circle at lawerencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.