When you become a parent you take on tremendous responsibility. That baby that you adore, that you can’t stop staring at because you’ve given birth to a miracle, will grow up someday. Your first baby will bring you unbelievable excitement and joy. Along with the excitement and joy and the breathtaking love, comes a certain amount of fear. “Am I doing everything right? Is there something I’m not doing I should learn how to do? What if I make a mistake?”
It takes a while to feel comfortable and confident. But you get there. And if you have another baby, you feel your level of expertise and sense of accomplishment.
A common complaint among adults is when child number two or three, as an adult, realizes their baby book is barely filled out while their eldest sibling has even the smallest occurrence filled out in excruciating detail.
“Johnny smiled today!” “Johnny rolled over today!” “Johnny slept through the night!” “Johnny ate peas!” “Johnny burped!”
As your child grows, the hardest issue to deal with is punishment. Johnny is now three and is curious about the wall outlets and like any future Einstein has decide to stick something into the wall outlet to discover what it is. Something like a hair pin or a fork. You catch it just in time and swoop Johnny up saying “No, no, no!” And then you have to make a split second decision “Should I smack Johnny’s hand? Just to bring home how serious that was?” You reason, “Would a bit of pain make Johnny never want to almost electrocute himself again?”
Most parents go for that option.
One time, I walked into the kitchen and my three year old had drug a chair to the kitchen counter top, climbed on it, opened the doors of the upper cupboard and was attempting to scale the upper shelves. The shelves that held glasses and dishes and ceramic serving trays. I snatched her down and put her on the floor and said “No! No! No! Don’t do that! Bad! Bad!” and I smacked her hand and she cried, then I cried and stood there shaking. I had visions of her falling and bringing the glass and ceramic crashing around her head. It scared the heck out of me.
Punishment is effective and necessary to raising children and contributes greatly to their making it to adulthood. Not beatings, but punishment. It comes in many forms.
There’s the “go to your room and don’t come out until I say so.” Not necessarily as effective as it used to be given how many kids have IPads or other gadgets in their room. There’s the “you’re grounded for two days!” which can work as kids hate nothing worse than being at home with their parents and not being able to go out or play or visit their friends. You got the “give me your phone, you’ve lost phone privileges.” That’s pretty effective now because kids can’t live without texting their friends or playing video games.
My favorite was “give me your car keys” that was always a super killer.
The point of punishment is to teach your children that certain behaviors will bring negative consequences into their lives and it’s easier to not do those behaviors and not get punished than to forge ahead with their impulses and find out the consequences after it’s too late.
Punishment is also a part of teaching your child a moral compass, a part of that. As equal to punishment and even more important is to teach empathy and caring. Teaching them to look at people not as things but as prescient beings that share the human experience. Every human on this planet shares the commonality of existence and the attendant joy, love, exhilaration, happiness, connection, care, pain, suffering, desperation, sorrow, hunger, want, depression, disconnection and so on.
There is a person on this planet half way around the world who has gone through the same range of human experience I have gone through. If we met tomorrow, being of different ethnicity, different color, different language, different customs, different religion, different circumstances and experiences; after time spent with one another, we would realize we are the same. We would have one belief and understanding, mostly in common, that being we’re born, we live, and we die. This is the most important lesson you can teach your children, ever.
I’m watching these protests at Ivy League campuses and other campuses and it is clear to me, those protesting Israel and Jews, weren’t punished appropriately in their childhoods. Nor were they taught empathy. Nor are they very discerning or informed. They’re just mobs. Lemmings who’ve never been taught to think for themselves or to gather as much information as possible in order to determine the truth of a situation.
I also note, I don’t see a lot of working class people out in the streets calling for the destruction of Jews. Just kids who were raised with a silver spoon in their mouths, often by a Nanny.
The truth of the situation is that Hamas runs Gaza. They are the Bloods and Crypts of the Middle East, except they are being supplied arms and ammo by governments like Iran, and other bad actors, whose goal is the complete annihilation of the State of Israel and its people of so many ethnicities, backgrounds and countries of origin that call themselves Jews.
Hamas is not just ruinous to Jews, it is ruinous to a people who call themselves Palestinians. I saw a video recently where a Palestinian man is cursing a Hamas soldier. He is screaming at him, telling him how he has destroyed his life and the lives of his family. I’ve seen a few, actually. When I mention these to my husband, he says “They elected them.” My argument back is “Maybe they’re too afraid to vote any other way.” Remember Saddam Hussein? People were terrified to vote any other way for fear they’d be found out.
I am pretty sure I am not responsible for the way the parents of these protestors raised their kids. I do know if I found out one of my grown children took part in these anti-Semitic protests, they’d have hell to pay when I found out about it. I actually have the temerity to fly into New York, find my son or daughter in the crowd and grab them by the ear, while beating them with my purse and drag them out of there. Or disown them, whichever would be more effective.
What we are looking at are ignorant people. People who were not raised right. People who are viciously uninformed, yelling and screaming for the criminals that killed over 1,700 other human beings that day. That is the equivalent of 40,000 Americans dying on 9-11. That’s the same as if campuses broke out in protest to support Al-Qaeda
after 9-11.
These protestors are either so incredibly stupid (beyond redemption) or they are incredibly gullible or incredibly psychotic; that they don’t earn, now or in the future, a place in our society. Get their names and pictures, put it in a database for future employers.
And they don’t deserve the millions of our tax dollars the Federal Government is using to subsidize these schools, with their grants and federally guaranteed student loans.
To this end, I am calling my Congressional Offices every day to demand their federal funding be pulled. You can too. Just call 202-224-3121, the Capitol Switchboard and you will be directed to your Congressman and your Senators (three separate calls). Tell them you want federal dollars, your tax dollars, stripped from these institutions.
At present, New York University and Columbia University. I’ll add more if I see it.
In my life I have learned, you either stand for something or you stand for nothing. And at this juncture, I stand four-square for Israel without hesitation.
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