Parenting & Expectations

An article I just wrote for the Jewish Press (in the quarterly mental health insert) is available online here. It discusses how our expectations affect our parenting and how we can help ourselves out of the box that such expectations can create. Rabbi Noach Orlowek, shlit”a, defines anger as “the distance between expectation and reality.” I think this definition neatly explains much of the parental anger that we moms and dads struggle with as we try to raise superstar children. So much of our anger is the result of our having expectations of our children that are not met. This does not mean that we shouldn’t have expectations of them – only that we should be careful to temper those expectations with a clear picture of reality . . .