Rav Shlomo Wolbe has a phrase that sounds almost like a riddle: “a wise person’s eyes are in his head.” What he means is straightforward and a little uncomfortable — a wise parent is always looking ahead, not just at what’s directly in front of them.
He sets up the problem honestly: “Sometimes it seems to us that we get better results with harsh approaches.” A slap, a sharp word, a threat — these often work immediately. The child stops. The behavior halts. It feels effective. But Rav Wolbe insists that parents who know “the secret of chinuch” and who keep their eye on the long-term goal are very careful, especially at young ages, not to judge a method only by its immediate result.
He gives an example every parent recognizes: a child isn’t listening, so a parent gives a couple of slaps — and it works, the child listens right then. Case closed, right? Except Rav Wolbe is asking us to track a different metric entirely: not “did it work in the next ten minutes” but “what is this doing to the relationship over the next ten years?”
This is the same insight validated, interestingly, by secular child psychologists Rabbi Kelemen references — researchers who found that a strong relationship, not harsh consequences, is what actually produces well-behaved kids over time. Some theorize the relationship “widens the conduit” for values to transfer; others say children behave because they don’t want to lose the relationship. Whatever the mechanism, the relationship is the lever, not the fear.
The practical challenge is that harsh methods and relationship-preserving methods often diverge exactly at the moment you’re most tempted to cut corners — you’re exhausted, you’re in public, you’re already late. That is precisely the moment to ask Rav Wolbe’s real question: is this action going to alter, even slightly, the trust this child has in me?
A workable habit: before responding to misbehavior, silently ask, “Will I be glad I handled it this way when he’s sixteen?” It takes two seconds and it reliably changes what comes out of your mouth next.
You don’t have control over how your child turns out. You do have control over whether you did chinuch the right way, protecting the relationship, one moment at a time.
Join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com for more of this long-view approach to raising children.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.