Not So Fast

Good yontif.

With the recall election just a day away, everyone’s talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger. However the politician who has really captured my attention recently is Florida Senator Bob Graham. But not for the reasons you might think. A few months ago, as you may remember, the press made a big deal out of the diaries that Graham meticulously keeps. He records such details as the exact time he wakes up, the clothes he wears, the car he drives, the places he goes, the movies he watches, and the food he eats.

Graham’s diary got me thinking about how I’ve filled up the days of my life. With three kids of my own now, my schedule has become quite full. Watching the girls grow up, I find myself thinking a lot about my own childhood—about a more carefree time in my life.

If, as a kid, I had kept a diary like the one Senator Graham keeps, what would a typical entry tell me about my life?

It’s October, 1978—25 years ago. I’m in the fourth grade at Swanson Elementary School in Omaha, Nebraska.

7:00 a.m.: My mom makes me scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast. I have a glass of orange juice. Mom makes it from scratch. She takes a small cylinder out of freezer, carefully unwraps the cardboard container, and drops a solid piece of highly concentrated frozen orange juice into the blender, adds water, and whips. It’s delicious.

8:30 a.m.: School begins! Today is especially fun because we’re studying Nebraska history which means I get to learn about the Omaha Indians.

11:45 a.m.: I realize that I forgot my lunch at home. I ask Mrs. Hatcher if it’s ok to run back and get it—I live just five minutes away. She shakes her head disapprovingly but lets me go anyway. The door’s unlocked but mom’s out—she must be running errands. I grab my lunch from the fridge and head back to school. In the afternoon we have P.E. outside—kickball rules!

4:00 p.m.: After school my older brother and I fortify ourselves with a few bowls of cereal and then head outside to shoot baskets. He beats me for the nine thousand, five hundred, and thirty-seventh consecutive time. After the game he heads up the street to visit a friend. I go next door where a new house is being built. I especially like it when the men leave and then I can jump the fence and walk around. Mom told me not to get too close so I don’t go inside. The frame is up and I love imagining what everything will look like when it’s done.

5:45 p.m.: Dad’s home from work. When I get up in the morning he’s already gone, making rounds at the hospital, but he always makes it home in time for dinner. We eat and then I go upstairs to my room to do my homework. Mrs. Hatcher’s out of control, I think. There must be 15 minutes of homework tonight! I finish as fast as I can and then sit in my parents’ room watching TV with my dad. If there’s a finer show than Mork and Mindy on television, I don’t know what it is! Before bed my brother and I listen to the new DEVO album: Question: Are we not men? Answer: We are DEVO. I fall asleep wondering what that means.

My adolescence, as you can tell, was filled with lots and lots of unstructured time. Time to explore. Time to be creative. Time to be bored.

But times have changed. And many kids today are going so fast, they don’t have time anymore.

Wendy Mogel, in her book, The Blessings of a Skinned Knee, tells this story:

A mother, concerned about her child, comes to see the rabbi. “Rabbi, can you talk to my son, Jordan? He’s angry all the time and I know something is bothering him. Maybe it’s the divorce, maybe it’s something going on with his friends… I don’t know, but you seem to be able to get kids to talk. Can I bring him in to see you?”

The rabbi then offers a time, say, Wednesday at 4:30.

“No, that won’t work. Jordan has basketball practice.”

The rabbi offers another time.

“No good again. He has his math tutor.”

And another. “Guitar lesson.” The rabbi sees that this young person’s appointment calendar is even busier than his own. He [says] that he believes he already knows what Jordan is angry about. (p. 209)

The Problem

Jordan is angry and it’s no wonder. He’s incredibly stressed out. In his now-classic book, The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, David Elkind writes that “[t]oday’s child has become the unwilling, unintended victim of overwhelming stress—the stress borne of rapid, bewildering social change and constantly rising expectations.”

As a result of these changes, parents are hurrying children to grow up quickly. “We do not mean our children harm in acting thus,” writes Elkind. “On the contrary, as a society we have come to imagine that it is good for young people to mature rapidly. Yet we do our children harm when we hurry them through childhood.” (p. 3)

Those of you with teenagers know that it only gets worse. Some of you might have read “Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students,” by Stanford University lecturer and Beth Am Congregant, Denise Clark Pope.

Pope profiles five teens who attend a public high school that has an excellent reputation and is located in a wealthy California suburb. The school has one of the lowest dropout rates in the state, small class sizes, and a longstanding tradition of hiring the best teachers in order to provide the highest-quality instruction. More than a third of its students are enrolled in honors and advanced placement courses, and practically all of its students go on to college. Sounds familiar, right?

What Pope discovers is that these “successful” students are incredibly stressed out, unhappy, and learning precious little of lasting value other than the importance of doing whatever it takes to get good grades including cheating, lying, and playing the system to their advantage.

These hurried teens don’t get enough sleep, experience an enormous amount of pressure, and face anxiety and frustration as they attempt to balance parental expectations with their own desires to have “a life” outside of school.

The students “explain that they are busy at what they call ‘doing school.’ They realize that they are caught in a system where achievement depends more on ‘doing’—going through the correct motions—than on learning and engaging with the curriculum.” (p. 4)

As one child psychologist puts it, “for such young people, school is like a bad job.” (Elkind, p. 192)

The consequences of all of this hurrying can be devastating for kids.

· More than one in three children suffer stress-related illness including dizziness, chest pains, wheezing, stomach problems and headaches

· A recently released study on underage drinking estimates that one-third of all high school students use alcohol regularly and a third of all American schoolchildren under age 18 have used illegal drugs

· Close to 5,000 teenagers kill themselves each year—suicide is the third leading cause of death for teenagers and the teen suicide rate in this country has tripled over the last 30 years

Friends, children should not suffer from stress-related illnesses. Kids should get the flu and a runny nose. And children should not have ulcers. They should get tummy aches from eating too much candy.

And our teens should not be drinking and doing drugs or cutting themselves or starving themselves or making themselves throw up. And, please God, please God, our children should not be killing themselves.

And this should matter to us, all of us, even if our children are grown, even if we don’t have children. The stress that today’s adolescents and teens face shapes the adults of tomorrow. Moreover, our children’s hurried lives tell us something about ourselves. Think about Rabbi Marder’s words from last night. These kids are the canaries in the coalmine telling us something troubling about the way we live our lives today.

Why is this happening and what, if anything, can be done to stop it? And how can our Jewish tradition help us find a way out of this situation?

We live on a peninsula that values achievement, excellence, hard work, and success. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things. In fact, I wish them on us all. And I hope that, some day, all of our kids can experience the benefits of them as well.

But the problem is, the message many of our kids hear is that excellence, achievement, and success are the only things that matter in this world. And this is a terrible message for our kids. It’s a message that leads to expectations that result in a lot of stress and a lot of suffering for our children. Kids who internalize this message end up “doing school” instead of learning. And then, ultimately, they become adults who end up “doing life” instead of living.

The horrible irony of it all is that the system that we’ve constructed to push our children to become successful achievers is actually a failure. Study after study demonstrates this. One example is early reading programs. Experts in child development have demonstrated that programs designed to give kids an early start, end up dampening their enthusiasm for reading. Yes, we can make our kids read before kindergarten or first grade, but it won’t make them more successful readers down the road.

Of course, companies that market early reading programs do their best to manipulate parents. The other day I received this in the mail:

Dear Josh Zweiback,

As a caring parent you know that teaching your child to read is one of the most important tasks you have if you want your child to succeed in school and in life…

The letter went on to explain that if I loved my children, if I didn’t want them to end up in debtor’s prison or living in a van down by the river, it was my parental obligation to have them reading before they enter kindergarten. The letter ended with a cautionary P.S.: “Remember Josh Zweiback: The later your child learns to read, the harder it will be to catch up.”

And that’s a big part of what’s driving all of this, isn’t it? We don’t want our child to have to play catch up. It’s a tough world out there. Competing in the global marketplace is hard. There’s a lot of economic insecurity in our world today. It used to be a given that we would have it better than our parents did. That’s no longer the case. So to make it in today’s world, you need every advantage.

Now when we over-program our kids, we do so with the best of intentions. We want to give them every advantage. We want them to make it in life. We want them to be happy and successful.

But research suggests that enrichment programs for toddlers and young children don’t necessarily make their lives any richer. Instead, there is evidence that what most helps to develop our children’s creativity and imagination is unstructured free time.

What children need most of all, writes David Elkind, “is a healthy sense that the world is a safe place, that their needs will be met, and that they will be cared for and protected by the grown-ups in their world.” (p. 105)

It is our job as grown-ups to care for and protect our children.

And protecting kids is a core value of our Jewish tradition.

Parents are, of course, required by our tradition to provide for the basic needs of their children. And in Jewish, basic needs includes not just food and clothing, but also a proper education. Torah study is a given. Some sages add that we should teach our children how to swim. Another says that we must teach them a craft.

But as important as learning is, our tradition understands that it must not be rushed: “Rav said to Rabbi Shmuel ben Shilat: ‘Do not accept pupils who are less than six years old…’” (Bava Batra 21a) The message: don’t hurry. For millennia our people, no slouches when it comes to learning and achievement, have waited until a child was five or six to start formal education. And our sages understood that a child should only be introduced to more difficult subjects like mishna and Talmud, when he is ten or fifteen years old.

But one of the most profound lessons about parenting comes in a rather unlikely place. In tractate Yoma, the part of the mishna that details the laws, customs, and meaning of this sacred day of Yom Kippur, we learn:

“Do not make children fast on the Day of Atonement. However, they should be trained the year before or two years before so that they become accustomed to the observance of the commandments.” (8:4)

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It seems obvious. Toddlers should not be required to undergo a 25 hour fast. It would be harmful to their health and of little value to them spiritually as they would not be able to understand the significance of the activity. When they are older, 11 or 12, they can prepare for adult responsibilities by eating a few hours later than usual. Once they become bar or bat mitzvah, they are required to fast like other Jewish adults. But until that time, they are k’tanim, they are minors and are not required to behave as adults behave. The Hebrew of the mishna is suggestive. It uses the term tinokot, babies as if to remind us that, in the eyes of Jewish law, a seven year old is still a baby. Just as babies must be protected and nurtured, so too must young adolescents.

And this principle is extended to the post-b’nai mitzvah kids who still live in our homes. As long as they sleep under our roof, our tradition considers them our wards. We are still required to protect them and watch over them.

It is a mitzvah to let our kids be kids. They should play like children and act like children, and dress like children. We protect our kids when we insure that their childhoods, their birthright, is not taken from them.

What Is to Be Done

So how do we do this? How do we keep from hurrying our children?

First, we can model the importance of slowing down as a family. A committee made up of Palo Alto community leaders, parents, and educators, is working together to carve out a few nights a year with no homework, no sports practices, and no scheduled activities. A night for families to just be together. That there are only two of these planned for an entire year is a bit pathetic and in some ways symptomatic of the problem. But it is a start.

Yet we don’t have to wait for some committee to tell us when it’s family night. We can do this right now. Pick one evening in the next month and commit as a family to just being together. No meetings, no TV, no cellphones, no internet, no GameBoy, no homework. Creating a family night does mean saying “no” to other things. It means setting limits, which we do as parents all the time.

So give yourself and your family a gift in the next month. Have a picnic in the park. Read together. Kick a soccer ball around in the backyard. Go for a long walk.

Just slow down together. And, as Rabbi Marder reminded us last night, Shabbat is the ultimate Family Night. If we are willing, our community and our tradition can help us make any Friday night, Family Night.

Second, as a community we need to learn more about these challenges so we can respond to them thoughtfully, effectively, and Jewishly. In January and February, Denise Clark Pope will offer some workshops here at Beth Am. We need your participation. Together, we can make things different for our families. After all, our schools reflect our values and our concerns. The local culture that shapes our kids’ lives reflects our values and our concerns. We are not hapless victims of societal conditioning. We can change things.

Third, I imagine that some of you are thinking, “Boy, if he really wants to help, why not get rid of religious school—it’s just one more thing that makes slowing down so hard.” Yet I think that would be a huge mistake.

I believe with all of my heart that the values that we transmit at Beth Am are a critical part of the solution to the problem. Beth Am provides a learning community dedicated to caring for and protecting our children’s neshamot—their very souls. This is a place where our kids are respected for who they are, not for how well they do on standardized tests. In fact, it’s a place where they learn without tests at all.

It’s a sacred community, a place dedicated to a life of ma’asim tovim—a life of goodness and righteousness. It’s a place where our kids and grandkids can study with caring adults who model Jewish learning and Jewish living. It’s a place where your kids feel safe and loved and accepted for who they are.

And I believe that these values will serve our children well when they become adults. Long after our kids have set aside the saxophone, put their soccer cleats away, or retired their ice skates for good, Judaism will still be a part of their lives. So it makes sense to invest seriously in raising children who are truly committed and proud and knowledgeable about their heritage.

But regardless of the future benefits, the Beth Am community can be a lifesaver for our kids right now. One father told me the other day that Beth Am is the only place where his kid feels good about his learning and about himself.

Our congregation can be a refuge, a haven from the stress and pressure and madness. And when it all feels too much for you or for your kids, know this: your clergy and educators are here for you.

And teenagers, you who are here this morning: please listen carefully. We are here for you. In the next few weeks you will receive in the mail the home and cellular phone numbers of your clergy. If you want to talk, call us. If there is no one you can turn to, call us. If you need a ride home, if you’re scared, if you’re feeling lonely, even if you just want to know when services start on Friday night, call us. We are grown-ups who care very deeply about you, about your well-being, and about your safety. We love you and want you to know it.

Not So Fast Little Girls

I have three little girls. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of parent I want to be. I’ve been thinking about the kind of childhood I want them to have. And I’ve been imagining a diary that one of them might keep, detailing a typical day in her life, five or six years from now. And if I were one day permitted to see that diary, I’d like very much to read that, each day, she had time for unstructured play. I’d like, each day, for her to have had at least one meal with her parents. I’d like, each day, for her to have had some time to read something or do something or play something just because she wanted to, for the pure joy and pleasure she found in that activity.

What I don’t want to read, what I pray won’t be in my child’s diary, is a mind-numbing list of activities and details that tell the story of a hurried, stressed-out childhood.

An adult might choose to run for president. But our constitution wisely demands that our children wait until they are at least 35 years old before making such a choice. Our kids aren’t running for president. They aren’t even running for governor. We shouldn’t be hurrying them as if they were.

So let us not forget the obvious lesson of this Holy Day: Children don’t fast on Yom Kippur. We adults do.

I remember what it was like to be a child. And now I know what it is to be a parent. I’m really thankful to my mother and father for giving me a wonderful childhood. I’m grateful for all the home-cooked meals and the bed-time stories and the family time and the permission they gave me to explore and discover and create and just be a kid.

The Talmud teaches that a parent’s love is for his child but that a child’s love is for his own children. And it’s true, isn’t it? We don’t really understand how our parents love us until we have children of our own.

The best way I can thank my mother and father for the gift of my childhood is by trying my hardest to give my kids the very same thing. It may be more difficult now because our world sure has changed. But that just means we adults have to try harder. That’s all any of us can do anyway. And if we do it well, our kids will thank us by doing the very same thing for their children.

And I don’t know about you, but when I really stop to think about it, that strikes me as the greatest achievement any person could ever desire.