For years, Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen taught a demanding, months-long course on chinuch — the Jewish approach to raising children — to a room full of single young women in Jerusalem who had no children at all. It’s a fair question: why teach parenting principles to people who aren’t parents?
His answer reframes the entire subject. The course was never really about children. It was about how to build a person — how to shape a personality that is honest, kind, thoughtful, and orderly. Chinuch, in this view, is essentially mussar: a course in Jewish character development that happens to use the parent-child relationship as its primary case study. The techniques for cultivating patience, honesty, and self-control in a five-year-old are, at their root, the same techniques for cultivating those traits in yourself. You don’t need a biological child to have a “self” you’re responsible for shaping.
There’s a second, more practical reason this material gets taught early, before anyone has children of their own: by the time you have eight kids and no time to read a book, it’s too late to start learning the framework. The lessons that would have been easy to absorb in a quiet season of life become nearly impossible to absorb in the chaos of actually raising a family. Wisdom acquired in advance is usable. Wisdom you wish you’d had is just regret.
This has an application far beyond the single women in that original classroom. Most people encounter the language of chinuch — patience, gentle correction, planting values before demanding behavior, modeling over lecturing — and assume it’s irrelevant until they have children. In practice, every one of these principles applies directly to how you manage a team at work, how you handle a friend going through a hard time, how you talk to yourself when you fail at something.
Gentle discipline instead of harsh reaction applies just as much to your own self-talk after a mistake as it does to a toddler’s tantrum. Planting values before demanding behavior applies to how you build habits in yourself — you don’t demand discipline from a version of yourself that hasn’t been given the right conditions to succeed. Modeling over lecturing applies to leadership of any kind, in any setting, with any audience.
A few ways to use this material even if parenting isn’t on your radar:
Treat “planting before building” as a personal growth principle. Before demanding a new habit of yourself, ask whether you’ve laid the groundwork — sleep, structure, environment — that makes the habit realistic.
Apply gentle correction to your inner critic. The same harshness this teaching warns against using on children tends to backfire just as badly when you turn it on yourself after a setback.
Notice where you’re “lecturing” instead of “modeling” in your own life — with a spouse, a friend, a colleague — and experiment with demonstrating instead of explaining.
Learn the framework before you’re in crisis. Whether that’s before you have children, before you take on a leadership role, or before a relationship hits a hard patch, the principles are far easier to absorb in calm conditions than in the middle of the fire.
The single women in that Jerusalem classroom weren’t wasting their time learning to parent children they didn’t have. They were learning to parent themselves — arguably the harder and more universal assignment.
For more teachings that apply Torah wisdom to character growth at every stage of life, join the inner circle at lawerencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.