Monday, April 02, 2007

Dialogue Between Rabbi Shmuley and Dr. Amy Sohn

Shalom in Whose Home?
 Amy Sohn and Shmuley Boteach on the duties of modern parenting
 
 
 I’ve known Rabbi Shmuley Boteach since 1999, when I was publicizing my first novel, Run Catch Kiss and found myself a guest on a Fox News show with him. We were brought on as two opposite sides of a coin - he the conservative, family-values Jew, and I the provocative, twentysomething sex columnist.
 
 Oprah’s favorite rabbi has flitted in and out of my life a couple times since then. My parents gave me Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments for a birthday a few years back. Then, several months ago, I came in the living room after putting my daughter to bed to find my husband Charles watching Shalom in the Home, Shmuely’s popular parenting show on TLC that has inspired his latest book of the same name. It was the episode with the woman who nagged her children even when they made her breakfast, and I liked Shmuley’s way of dealing with her. Even Charles, who has a healthy skepticism of makeover shows, was impressed with his shrewd psychologizing.
 
 Shmuley and I recently had the opportunity to appear on a panel at the JCC-Riverdale on the subject of sex. Again, we were brought on to be adversaries, but the most contentious things got was when I mocked the way women stop caring about their figures after motherhood and Shmuley felt the language I was using was too harsh. Still, I will never appear in public with this guy again: his sound bites are far too studied and funny for me to stand a chance of upstaging him.
 
 Plus, in an orthodox Jewish setting (the audience was largely orthodox), the rabbi is a rock star, whereas a Jewess who’s written sexually themed novels is a pariah. You should have seen the looks they gave the big red lips on the cover of Run Catch Kiss.
 
 Luckily, Jewcy has offered me the chance to play critic this time around.
 
 - Amy Sohn
 
 
 To: Shmuley Boteach
 From: Amy Sohn
 Subject: The Perils of Anti-Attachment Parenting
 
 Dear Shmuley,
 
 I’m sorry I was not able to attend your 40th birthday party (our mutual friend Scott invited me), although I was aghast that you are only 40 because your beard ages you, and curious to see what such a celebration would look like.
 
 I live in Park Slope, near Prospect Park, and frequently observe “your people” walking with their many children on Sunday afternoons or playing in the Third Street Playground and I feel a mix of contempt, curiosity, and envy. As an iconoclastic, Brown-educated, sex-writing, feminist, raised Reform Jew, married to an atheistic, religion-hating, genetically Gentile son of divorce, and raising a baby girl with him, I find myself wondering what we the secular community might have to learn from the religious community. I despise the xenophobia, insane rigidity, homophobia and sexism of Orthodox Jews (who I will call here the frum) but I often envy their emphasis on the sanctity of marriage and honoring mother and father.
 
 This is in part because I feel so frustrated by American parenting today. When I look around me at the playground, the local Food Coop or 7th Avenue to see how other parents are raising their children, I am sickened by the total indulgence, lack of affection between parents, and general dog-wagging-the-tail. So what can the un-frum learn from the frum? This seems to me to be essence of your show Shalom in the Home and your new book Shalom in the Home: Smart Advice for a Peaceful Life.
 
 Shmuley, I see you as the anti-attachment parent. You practice (at least on your show) detachment parenting. I agree with your belief in the importance of marital intimacy to family harmony. If children do not witness loving and sexual parents in the home, they will have no idea how to enter into healthy and loving relationships as adults. But in so many of the relationships I see, the children are the center of the family. Parents seldom go out alone or vacation alone, the sex life is nonexistent and by the time they begin to get it back they feel social pressure to have another baby - which only puts it on hold for another few years. Men look at online porn; women watch America’s Next Top Model, eat Ben & Jerry’s, and nurse chardonnays for the intimacy they’re no longer getting in their marriages.
 
 Worse, both father and mother seek this intimacy from the children. When the baby awakens in the middle of the night they argue - not over who gets to ignore it, but over who gets to go in - so eager are they for the company the children provide. Email, newsgroups, television and the computer all offer a kind of connection, however false, that adults are no longer getting from each other.
 
 So I am not surprised that in many of the scenarios on your show, the key to helping the family was to work on the couple. And I am certainly not surprised that in many of the families, one or more children were sleeping in the marital bed. Co-sleeping is in vogue these days, though its consequences are treacherous.
 
 I also agree with your contention that too many American parents are afraid to discipline their children. Today’s parents are afraid to be the bad guy, to enforce boundaries - and this has already had unpleasant results for the children, with today’s high level of antidepressant use among young adults.
 
 What twenty-year-old wouldn’t be depressed if he were raised to think he was the center of the universe? The Maxwell family in Chinatown was a glaring example of this. The 3-year-old son did not sleep in his own room, the father indulged his every whim, and the parents had a platonic relationship. I only wish Dr. Bill Sears, author of The Baby Book and the one who started this mess, could hear you say, “Withholding discipline in the name of loving our children is, in practical terms, to despise our children and to cause them grievous harm.”
 
 I recently visited a preschool program at a local synagogue and witnessed a child repeatedly hitting a teacher in the face. Eventually she was restrained but clearly someone at home was teaching this child that hitting was acceptable. I saw a father at a local restaurant allow his two-year-old to empty the entire contents of the saltshaker onto the table while they were waiting for their food. It’s one thing to give a kid a fork to bang - but to let her take the condiments hostage? I know several four-year-olds who insist on pooping in their diapers and a three-year-old whose mother must get in bed with her each night for up to an hour until she falls asleep, after which her mother sneaks out. What is going on here? Why are so many parents afraid of their own kids?
 
 I do have two fundamental disagreements with your book. I do not think, as you say, that “teenaged sexual activity . . . robs them of their childhood and precious innocence.” I think much depends on the age of the adolescent and the relationship. Two seventeen-year-olds in a respectful, committed relationship may be more capable of lovemaking than two drunken twentysomethings who just met at a bar. And if a teenaged girl is lucky enough to have a committed partner who cares about her pleasure, she will compare future lovers to that first, attentive one, knowing that a man who doesn’t care about her pleasure isn’t worth it. Your categorical insistence on abstinence in teenaged years is naïve, out of touch, and will only encourage children to hide their activities from their parents instead of ask advice on such matters as birth control and STD production, advice they desperately need.
 
 And I think in many of the families you visited you tried too hard to get them to forestall divorce when it was clear that divorce was the best thing for the children. Some of your interventions designed to bring separated couples together (like the Romeros) or keep conflicted couples together (like the Lubners) seemed forced and ill advised. Isn’t the best thing for a child two happy parents? As a child of divorce yourself, don’t you think your parents did you a favor - or are you agonized that they split up and trying to compensate for it in your show?
 
 Amy
 
 
 Would You Alienate the Only Source of Your Love?
 Amy Sohn and Shmuley Boteach on the duties of modern parenting
 
 To: Amy Sohn
 From: Shmuley Boteach
 Subject: Would Alienate Your Only Source of Love?
 
 Hi Amy,
 
 Thank you for your compliment about my apparent youth. Since many tell me I am an old soul, I will take your words as a compliment.
 
 Your expression of “your people” puzzles me. I know of only one human family and one human nature. As John F. Kennedy said, “We all cherish our children’s future…” In other words, what we share in common by far outstrips that upon which we disagree. Similarly, your comments about sexism and xenophobia in the orthodox Jewish community are highly misguided. The definition of orthodoxy is an adherence to Torah law, and the Torah mandates the highest respect for women and a love for the stranger. On the contrary, the sexism that I witness is in secular society where, after sixty years of feminism women today are still valued more for their bust than for their brains, a heresy that is not practiced in orthodox Jewish society.
 
 Be that as it may, I enjoyed your letter very much and you write extremely well.
 
 The reason why parents cannot enforce discipline among their children today is three-fold. The first is physical exhaustion. Since we define success today primarily through our professional endeavors, that is where we exert out energy. There is very little of us left by the time we come home. And it is easier to give in to our kids and let them do their own thing then lay down the law. The second is guilt. So many parents do not give their children the attention they need. So they give in to them as a way of compensating for their neglect. The third is the most interesting of all. In an age where so many parents have bad marriages, they depend on their children as their principal source of affection.
 
 Now, would you punish or alienate your only source of love?
 
 That’s why one of the principal solutions to the lack of parental discipline is a more holistic definition of success, that embodies both the personal as well as the professional, and more passionate and intimate marriages.
 
 I disagree profusely with your comments on teen sexuality. Indeed, research suggests that there is even a direct link between teen sexuality and teen depression. A study by the Heritage Foundation, in-turn based on the government-funded National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, found that about 25 percent of sexually active girls say they are depressed all, most or a lot of the time, while only 8 percent of girls who are not sexually active feel the same.
 
 While 14 percent of girls who have had intercourse have attempted suicide, only 5 percent of sexually inactive girls have. And whereas 6 percent of sexually active boys have tried suicide, less than 1 percent of sexually inactive boys have. The report challenges the previously held notion that teens become sexually active in order to self-medicate their own depressions.
 
 “Findings from the study show depression came after substance and sexual activity, not the other way around,” says researcher Denise Dion Hallfors of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, analyzed data from a national survey of more than 13,000 teenagers in grades seven to 11.
 
 Pretty tragic, huh, that it takes children slashing their wrists or sinking into a morbidly dark depression to awaken parents to the dangers of children engaging in activities that should be reserved exclusively for adults, and married ones at that.
 
 Sex is the most powerful impulse known to man. It is as overpowering as it is pleasurable. Do you really think that those in a rickety boat should be exposed to this storm? How could we ever have believed that allowing big children detonate such powerful emotions, in empty relationships where neither party is sufficiently developed to assimilate such strong emotions, would do anything but eviscerate the emotional landscape of its child practitioners? Heck, we don’t even let teenagers play with fireworks for fear of them blowing their own heads off. But we’ve given them the emotional equivalent of a nuclear blast.
 
 Many parents mistakenly believe that the first job of a parent is to love their child, when really the primary responsibility of a parent is to protect their child from harm. You can’t love that which is no longer extant. An object of love that is destroyed will forever remain unloved.
 
 Thus, prior to loving your child, prior to teaching your child, prior to even to feeding your child, your first objective is to protect your child. Your role as guardian comes before any other. A parent who allows harm to come to his or her child is a parent who has been delinquent in the very fundamentals of child rearing.
 
 Most parents believe that protection involves guarding children from physical harm. You lock the door at night so that your kids won’t be injured by robbers. You drop them off at school so that they won’t be abducted by kidnappers. You teach them how to cross the street safely so that they won’t be hit by cars.
 
 But protecting your children from external dangers is miniscule compared to the task of safeguarding them from absorbing influences that will corrupt them from the inside, and it is much easier to recover from physical scars than from their emotional equivalents.
 
 Look around and you’ll see parents who take little kids to R-rated movies, who allow their kids to listen to and sing misogynistic melodies and sexual lyrics, and who let their kids play video games where the most graphic violence is the main selling point. I know otherwise responsible parents who smoke marijuana with their teenage kids, and I know parents who have no problem with their kids watching MTV and VH1 music video junk for hours a day. Indeed, parents today seem to have little compunction about the tremendous amounts of garbage from the popular culture being pumped directly into their children’s cerebral cortex. Will we pretend that daily loads of toxic smut will not permanently coarsen our children, robbing them of their innocence and making them grow up preternaturally? By treating our children as young adults rather than big kids, we are allowing them to skip the childhood stage of life, which is essential to a strong foundation in their later years.
 
 Healthy parenting involves the dual role of nurturer, on the one hand, and protector on the other. A child is like a sapling that requires water and nutrients, but also protection from weeds and pests. The unconditional love we give our children instills in them a sense of security and internalizes a feeling of value. If they are shortchanged of love, they will later grow to believe that things like money are currencies by which they may purchase an otherwise lacking self-esteem.
 
 But unconditional love is just one side of the coin. All the watering in the world won’t shelter a vulnerable plant that has been uprooted by a fierce wind. We have to shield our children from the increasingly malign influences of a culture that is telling them, subtly but constantly, to skip the essential stages of childhood and become an adult while they are really still kids. Exposure to gratuitous violence, sex and other uniquely adult subjects overwhelms children with emotions and experiences they cannot digest, sowing confusion and anxiety. It also imparts to them an inauthentic desire to prematurely discard the wonders of their youth and join an adult world that where they trade in awe for cynicism and conviction for compromises.
 
 Our kids may not look like it, but they’re crying out for a protector. It may seem that they just want to be left alone, that they crave unrestricted freedom and unbridled indulgence. But deep inside they want to be protected. They want someone to stop them from harming themselves. They want someone that says no. And if not you, the parent, then who?
 
 One final thing, Amy. Please give my warm regards to your husband. And please tell him that aside from hating evil, hatred is something we should purge from our breast and eradicate from our heart.
 
 G-d bless you and your family.
 
 Shmuley