Rabbi Farhi Answers: Here's How to Parent Your Difficult Child | WATCH
The Torah’s response to failure is not punishment or shame, but home, dignity, and care. Real change happens when a broken person is placed in an environment of belief, kindness, and giving.
When we have a difficult child, the goal is not to remake the child.
The goal is that the child should have a home. A place to return to. A place that stays open no matter how far the child falls. The only real goal is to make the home a home.
We see this clearly in the Torah. Even when the Torah speaks about a rebellious or failing person, it never says to lock them out, abandon them, or shame them. The message is: no matter what, we want you home.
I’ve seen this personally. Working with children and teenagers, and remembering my own yeshiva years, once a child was caught stealing, he was often treated as “finished.” In some societies, even today, a thief is publicly labeled and humiliated.
But the Torah does the opposite. In Parashat Mishpatim, right next to the laws of judges, teaching that holiness and our relationship with God depend on how we treat people, the Torah addresses theft. If someone steals and cannot repay, the Torah does not put him in jail and does not shame him. Instead, he is sold as a servant so he can repay what he owes. If he can repay, he simply pays and is left alone. There is no public humiliation anywhere in the Torah.
Even more striking: the owner who takes this servant must treat him with exceptional care. If there is only one pillow in the house, it goes to the servant. This seems illogical, until we understand the deeper idea. If someone is sick and you have one pillow that can help them rest, you give it to the sick person. The servant is emotionally sick. He is not evil; he is broken.
The Torah understands that what heals such a person is not the street and not prison, which only teaches worse behaviorm but a home. A place of kindness, structure, containment, and belief. Someone who believes in him when he cannot believe in himself.
By living for six years in a Jewish home built on giving, not taking, he learns chesed, empathy, responsibility, and care for others. The Torah teaches that behavior is often shaped more by environment than by ideology. Put a broken person into a home of giving and that is what heals him.