Raising Courageous Kids
In raising my two daughters, I had always hoped they would have courage to face life challenges with confidence and character.
In raising my two daughters, I had always hoped they would have courage to face life challenges with confidence and character.
My husband was working late, so my son and I had a thrown-together dinner of leftover pasta, yogurt, and carrots. I added one touch, store-bought challah, to give our table a semblance of Shabbat.
The sight of the braided bread was enough to spark my 4-year-old
Tomorrow, my oldest child begins kindergarten, and I’m not sure who’s more nervous. My sweet, sensitive, 95-year-old-Jewish-man-trapped–in-the-body-of-5-year-old son has expressed numerous concerns, ranging from: “What if I don’t make friends?” to “Where will the bathrooms be?” I tell him not to worry, that it won’t be so different from his cherished preschool in my synagogue (where everyone knows him, where is he most comfortable outside of our home) - but I know it will be completely new and very different.
By no plan of our own, our Jewish family took a different Shabbat journey.
As in many families, we found that the grip of electronics in the lives of our children was becoming tighter. This was not a good thing. In the mornings, our children would claim that they were not hungry for breakfast so they could watch TV.
I am an illustrator and/or author of books for children, many of them for URJ Books & Music. Because I am a storyteller, I thought I would – you guessed it – tell the story of how my book Noah’s Swim-A-Thon came to be. Once upon a time, I lived in the suburbs with three young children
I grew up watching "Leave It to Beaver," and was always a little jealous that my family wasn't so perfect. When I got older, I realized the days of the Cleaver family were long past - if they ever were.
“Who’s that guy?” I asked my mom.
“He’s the rabbi,” she answered. I stared up at my mom, with a blank gaze on my face.
When I was eight years old, my family joined a synagogue for the first time.
Even before then, we always had a fairly strong sense of Jewish