What Do You Really Know About Your Child?

Parents who want to help their children grow often begin with love, concern and good intentions. But good intentions are not always enough. Real educational progress begins with something quieter and harder: paying attention to the facts.

Rabbi Asher Grozman writes that in his days studying educational counseling, one lecturer asked the class who the greatest researcher in the world was. Before anyone answered, he said: the one with the most pencils in his pencil case and the most pages in his notebook.

The point was simple. The best conclusions come from the person who collects the most information. The more facts you have, the less you are guessing.

To illustrate this, the lecturer told the story of a fisherman in northern Norway known for catching especially large tuna. While others went out to sea and hoped for the best, this fisherman kept detailed notes. Every time he caught a large, high-quality fish, he recorded everything: weather, wind speed, wave height, water temperature, sunset time, bait, season and more.

Over time, the growing pile of information gave him something other fishermen did not have. He knew where to go, when to go and what conditions produced the best results.

Rabbi Grozman argues that parents need the same approach.

Most parents are ready to do anything for their children. They invest, sacrifice, pay for help and try every solution they hear about. But after a while, many are left wondering why nothing changed. The problem is not always that they did too little. Sometimes they simply did things that were not right for that specific child.

He gives the example of several students who were sent to horseback riding therapy after one parent read an article about its benefits. Other parents followed, and soon a group of children were going every week. Only later did it become clear that no one had really checked whether this was what those boys needed. A year of treatment had passed before the parents realized the therapy may have been unnecessary.

The lesson is not that therapy is bad, or that parents should avoid outside help. The lesson is that help must begin with accurate knowledge.

To know what a child truly needs, parents have to put aside assumptions, shame, wishful thinking and the urge to protect their own image. They need to look honestly at the child’s real situation: what he likes learning, what he avoids, where he succeeds, where he struggles, who his friends are, what his strengths are and what his weaknesses really look like.

That kind of honesty can be uncomfortable. Parents naturally want to see their children in the best possible light. But pretending a problem is smaller than it is does not help the child. Neither does chasing every fashionable solution because someone else said it worked.

Rabbi Grozman writes that parents must act from deep love, but also from the willingness to accept reality. Only once the facts are clear can the right help be offered.

Often, he says, once the real picture is understood, the solution turns out to be much simpler than expected. The right answer may already be close by, waiting for the parents to notice it.

A parent who wants to lift a child and help him move forward needs more than concern. He needs information, patience and the humility to observe before acting.

The first step is not to fix. It is to know.