A frustrated mother once called Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen with a complaint every parent recognizes instantly: “My kid is driving me crazy. I can’t get him to bed.” Rabbi Kelemen asked a simple question back: “What time is your bedtime?” She laughed it off — “He’s supposed to go to bed at eight.” Rabbi Kelemen pressed again: “No, what time is YOUR bedtime?” Eventually she admitted it: “I go to bed when I’m tired.” His response landed quietly: “Oh — that’s what your son does also.”
The modeling you didn’t know you were doing
Rabbi Kelemen draws directly on Rav Wolbe’s teaching here: planting starts with yourself. You create certain perspectives and values inside yourself, and simply by looking at the world through those eyes, those values pass to your children — often without a single word being said. A parent who treats bedtime as a flexible, feeling-based decision is quietly teaching a child that bedtime is a flexible, feeling-based decision. The lecture about “you need your sleep” gets contradicted every single night by what the child actually observes.
Why this is easy to miss
Most parents genuinely believe they’re being consistent about bedtime because they enforce a rule for their child. But children are extraordinarily perceptive about the gap between a rule enforced on them and a value actually lived by the person enforcing it. A demand without a matching example doesn’t fully land — it registers as an arbitrary imposition of power rather than a shared value. Kids comply, but they don’t internalize.
Turning insight into action tonight
- Audit one battle you’re currently having. Before addressing your child’s behavior, ask honestly: do I model this myself, or only enforce it? Screen time, punctuality, tone of voice, and diet are common places where the gap hides.
- Make the modeling visible. If you already model the behavior privately, let your child see it. “I’m heading to bed now too” carries more weight than an unseen habit.
- Fix the model before the mandate. If you discover you’re not actually living the value you’re demanding, work on your own habit first — Rav Wolbe’s planting always starts with the planter, not the seed.
- Expect a delay. Just like planting, this kind of modeling doesn’t produce instant compliance. It changes the atmosphere a child grows up in, and that shift shows results over months, not overnight.
Rabbi Kelemen’s question wasn’t a trick or a gotcha. It was a mirror. Most of what we struggle to install in our children through rules, we could install far more effectively by first installing it in ourselves.
To learn more from Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen’s teachings on chinuch and personal modeling, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.