On a recent visit to the bank on a particularly busy day, I was pleasantly surprised to find that waiting in a bank queue need not always be a frustrating experience. I observed an interaction between one of the bank personnel and a client. The worker was trying unsuccessfully to print up some important information that the client needed from his computer.

"I’ve been having a hard time with my printer lately," said the clerk, and he began to give the printer a good thrashing (i.e., a few hard bangs), hoping that in this way he would gain his printer’s cooperation.

"You can’t fix it like that," said the client. "You have to open it up and see what’s wrong."

This brief exchange intrigued me, for the client’s words rang true, yet I myself have seen an electrical appliance begin to work after I banged on it, when it had not been functioning as it should. Wondering why this should happen, I later called a neighbor of mine, who is an electrician and a whiz with appliances, to ask him about this phenomenon. He explained that when a wire or two are loose, knocking on the appliance can actually move them into place. Nevertheless, this tactic is rarely effective; most of the time, banging will do even more harm, throwing more things out of place. The real way to fix it, he insisted, is to open it up, look inside, and find the root of the problem.

We sometimes tend to react impulsively in an attempt to fix something, even though

1. it does no good
2. it will probably do even more damage
3. the real way to fix it is to open it up and find out what’s wrong.

How can we fix anything properly if we don’t even know what’s wrong with it?

This is the very question we must ask regarding the chinuch of our children.

One hyperactive child who attended our school disturbed his class continually, and we felt the situation warranted further investigation. To this end we invited his father to the school to discuss his child’s problems (the mother was ill at the time, and could not have participated).

"How is your relationship with your child?" we asked.

"Fine," came the father’s quick response.

"Does he act up at home?"

"In fact he does," his father admitted, "quite often."

"How do you deal with it?" we asked.

"Well…sometimes I throw him out of the house and lock the door. Even though he bangs on the door and screams, we keep him outside for as long as our nerves can withstand the noise. I’ve even had occasion to sit on him when he’s wild and out of control, just to stop him from breaking something or hurting someone." (The boy was almost 12 years old.)

"Has your son always been wild?"

"I guess it started around fourth grade."

"Did you ever take him to a professional to assess the situation?" we asked.

"Actually, I did," replied the father. "He said that my son doesn’t have proper equilibrium."

"Have you done anything about that problem?"

"No," came his starkly honest reply.

For years, this boy has been going through the motions of functional living, lacking the standard advantage of proper equilibrium. Is it any wonder that he is hyperactive?

Another father was working with his little girl, who was having difficulty with her math at school. He tried every method he could think of to teach her the principles of subtraction, to no avail. Finally he took five apples, removed three, and asked her, "if I take away three apples from five apples, how many am I left with?" to which the girl replied in wonder, "Daddy, I didn’t know that subtract meant ‘take away’!"

Criticism ranks very high on the list of impulsive reactions parents have in their attempts to "fix up" a situation. But impulsive criticism doesn’t help; in fact it can be most damaging. Criticism highlights faults, and shows a child that he is incompetent.

No matter what parents say, their children tend to believe them. If parents tell a child consistently that he is incapable, the child comes to believe himself to be incapable, and it follows that he becomes incapable. One author expressed this thought concisely when he said, "Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right."

To be continued. (B’ezrat Hashem)