Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen once wrote an article making a proposal that, by his own account, landed with total silence. No letters to the editor. No pushback. No conversation. Just quiet, and then nothing. The idea was this: just as couples are sometimes required to take a short course on the laws of family purity before marriage, they should also be required to enroll in a much longer course on midot — character development — before having children. Being biologically capable of having a child, he argued, is not the same thing as being ready to raise one.
It’s a proposal that sounds almost too obvious once you hear it, which may be exactly why it generated no reaction. Nobody disagreed. Nobody organized around it either. It sat there, correct and ignored, the way a lot of good ideas about character do.
The logic underneath it is simple: chinuch runs entirely on the character of the parent doing the educating. You cannot teach patience you don’t have. You cannot model honesty you don’t practice. You cannot pass down emotional steadiness to a child while running on your own unresolved reactivity. And yet the training most people receive before becoming parents is entirely medical and logistical — how to change a diaper, how to childproof a home — with essentially nothing dedicated to the actual character work that chinuch depends on.
This isn’t a call to delay having children until some impossible standard of self-perfection is reached; nobody reaches that. It’s a call to treat character development as an active, ongoing project rather than an afterthought, ideally starting before the pressure of actual parenting makes quiet self-work nearly impossible to schedule.
If no one is going to require this course, the practical question becomes: how do you build your own version of it?
Identify your own weakest midah before your child does. Every parent has at least one character trait — impatience, a sharp tongue, disorganization, anxiety — that will get tested constantly by parenting. Naming it now, before the pressure hits, is far easier than trying to work on it mid-crisis.
Treat your marriage as the first classroom. Long before a child arrives, a marriage is already the training ground for patience, generosity, and honesty under pressure. If those muddy in a marriage, they don’t magically clarify with parenthood.
Build a support structure for character work the way you’d build one for anything else. Learning partners, mentors, regular Torah study on midot — treat this the way you’d treat any skill you take seriously, because chinuch is, at its foundation, a skill that runs through your own character.
Revisit this periodically, not just once. Character work isn’t a course you complete and file away. It’s closer to physical fitness — something that atrophies without ongoing attention, long after the “prerequisite” phase is over.
Kelemen’s unanswered article may not have started a movement, but the idea inside it doesn’t need institutional backing to be true for one family at a time. The course he proposed was never going to be mandatory. It can still be personal.
For more teachings on character, marriage, and the inner work behind chinuch, join the inner circle at lawerencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.