Therapist and author Wendy Mogel answered questions as she signed books for people who came to Congregation Beth Israel to hear her advice on child rearing.
Photos by Elaine Durbach
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March 26, 2009
Perhaps it was just as well there weren’t any children at Wendy Mogel’s two talks at Congregation Beth Israel in Scotch Plains on March 19. The child psychologist and author seemed to delight the Jewish educators who gathered on Thursday afternoon, as well as the parents at the second talk that evening, but their offspring might have had a very different reaction.
“I want parents and teachers to gang up on their kids,” she told the teachers. She instructed the parents to “talk behind your children’s backs.” They don’t need more “tall friends,” she said; they need adults who share information and coordinate with one another.
Mogel’s appearances were sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey. About 90 teachers attended the professional development workshop, and around 350 people came to the evening event, filling the sanctuary and most of its extension. Among them were dozens of people who have been taking part in weekly discussions led by Westfield therapist Amy Norton and based on Mogel’s 2001 bestseller, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children.
If youngsters had been present at the March 19 events, they might have wondered just what brought the adults out in such enthusiastic numbers — and what elicited repeated roars of laughter and rounds of applause. After both events, long lines of people gathered to buy The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and to have her autograph the books.
New-York born Mogel, who has worked for the past 20 years as a therapist in Los Angeles, believes helping children grow stronger begins with parents’ getting their priorities right.
Many of today’s adults — “good parents gone bad,” she called them — are so eager to see their children succeed and so panicked about what can go wrong, they don’t allow their children to develop the life skills they need.
“Good sense comes from experience, and experience comes from bad sense,” she quipped. “These parents think they are being kind, but they are depriving their children of opportunities to learn.”
‘Teach them to swim’
Mogel said she wants to see “kids who are bored, disappointed, unhappy, cold, wet, or hungry for more than one-and-a-half seconds. I want them to have a second-grade teacher who is crabby, unenlightened, and uninspiring. One day, they might have a crabby, unenlightened boss, or they might have a crabby, unenlightened spouse — at least a first one.”
After addressing local educators March 19 at Beth Israel, Mogel met with Amy Norton of Westfield, who has been leading workshops based on Mogel’s book on parenting.
While it might be harder at first to ask more of children, it makes them much easier to live with, Mogel said. And seeing their parents happier might make them more inclined to become parents themselves.
This is where Mogel brings in Jewish wisdom. Her book, her therapy practice, and her talks around the country to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences draw deeply on the Torah and the teachings of Jewish sages. The guidance is all there, she said — with the warnings not to overindulge our children and smother them with materialism, and also “to teach them to swim” — to deal with the practical challenges of the world, not just the academic ones.
“We try to create a life that is without any discomfort,” she said, “but if we give them every single thing that they want by the time they’re 13, why would they want to grow up?”
Mogel chatted with Norton after her speech, clearly fascinated by her description of the local discussion groups. Speaking a few days later, Norton said her Friday morning group the next day “was jazzed and only wanted more. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Wendy individually, and I’m even more excited about the prospect of working together on a training program.”
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