Rav Wolbe opens his work on chinuch, Zriya U’Vinyan Ba’Chinuch, with a sentence that quietly dismantles the anxiety most parents carry every day: you have no control over results. What you’re learning, he says, isn’t a formula for guaranteed outcomes — it’s a set of halachos, a set of correct actions, for how to raise children according to the Torah.
This sounds almost too simple, but sit with it for a moment. So much parenting stress comes from measuring ourselves by outcomes we can’t actually control — will this child turn out observant, successful, kind, respectful? Rav Wolbe’s answer is that this was never the right measuring stick. We do chinuch correctly not because it guarantees a particular result, but because doing it correctly is itself part of serving Hashem — part of our avodas Hashem.
This reframes the entire project of parenting. If chinuch is about getting the actions right rather than engineering a specific result, then a parent’s job becomes much clearer, even if it doesn’t become easier: learn what the correct, Torah-guided response is in each situation, and do that — regardless of how the child turns out in ten or twenty years.
Rav Wolbe follows this with a practical instruction: organize and categorize what you actually do as a parent. Some of what we spend our time on is genuinely chinuch — it shapes and educates the child. Some of what we spend our time on, even though it feels like parenting, has nothing to do with education at all. Knowing the difference matters, because it tells you where to actually invest your energy.
How to carry this into your week:
1. When you feel anxious about how your child “will turn out,” redirect the question. Ask instead: am I doing the right thing right now, in this moment, according to what I know? That’s the part you control.
2. Separate your actual chinuch activities — teaching, modeling, responding to behavior — from the logistical noise of parenting that isn’t really educating anyone. Spend deliberate energy on the former.
3. Let go of result-based self-judgment. A hard day, a child’s bad choice, a rough phase — none of it is proof you’re failing at chinuch, because chinuch was never measured by results in the first place.
4. Revisit, periodically, whether you actually know what correct chinuch looks like for the situation in front of you — because that’s the one thing you’re responsible to get right.
There’s real relief in this idea. You were never supposed to control how your child turns out. You were only ever responsible for doing the right thing today. Everything else belongs to Hashem.
To learn more from Rabbi Kelemen’s shiurim on Rav Wolbe’s Zriya U’Vinyan Ba’Chinuch, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.