Hi Shmuley,

I think you are wrong about today’s parents. A lot of parents want desperately to be good husbands, wives, and moms and dads, but have trouble giving their families the time and attention they need because they are so stressed about work. I live in a neighborhood with a fair number of self-employed or freelancer parents and I see them in the playground during the week, happy to be playing with their kids and to have the leisure to spend a few days a week with them. They – we – are lucky, because when you are self-employed you can make your own schedule, as I am sure you know. Most of the country does not have this luxury.

American businesses can treat their workers better, by giving more personal time, more paternity leave, extended maternity leave (some months without pay if need be), on-site day care, and flexible hours. Today’s parents do want to spend time with their kids and spouses – but are hampered by unfair policies at work, creating a massive time crunch that leaves them unhappy at home and never fully present. This leaves them in an I-You relationship with their kids and spouse instead of I-Thou. In order to make the realization that your family requires as much care and attention as your job, you have to have the leisure to be able to reflect on things like that, to spend an hour or more a week talking to a therapist or a friend, to lie on the bed from time to time and ruminate on your quality of life. The families you visit on your show and the families on the nanny makeover shows obviously do not have that leisure time, which is why they need help to see what’s wrong.

You are right that women are more likely to be overworked than men, and in need of attention and focus from their husbands so that they can maintain a sense of their erotic and personal selves. But as someone who makes a living listening to the pulse of the American family, you should also know that in some families the dynamic is different. My husband cooks dinner 360 nights out of the year, twice a night, once for our toddler and once for the two of us. He cleans the apartment every week while I take our daughter out. He cares for her alone at least a day or two a week as well as many nights, when I, afraid that my life is over, must go out to hear live music, see a play or have drinks with a girlfriend.

Many men chip in with housework and childcare – look at any of the daddy blogs out there on the Internet – and feel pulled in two directions between work and home, just as women do. I always enjoy your soundbites like, “The history of relationships is that the female need for attention is rarely matched by the male attention span,” but these out-of-date stereotypes of American men as clueless Neanderthals hurt men and set us all back.

I know many men who
seek out sex from their wives because they, the men, crave intimacy, and aren’t getting it. Men want closeness too. Men like slow sex even if they’re not always capable of having it, and men want to be held, complimented, and listened to. Men crave attention too – and even if they don’t need to be complimented on their physique on a daily basis (and some do!), they need to be appreciated for other things, like supporting their family, or cleaning up once in a while, or going out and taking the children. We all need more attention and more love. The challenge for today’s couples lies in figuring out how to love your partner the way your partner needs to be loved.

With regard to teen sexuality, I guess my feelings are complicated. Some teens are ready. Some aren’t. I don’t think you can say categorically that any teen sex is bad but yes, a lot of teens find themselves in situations for which they are not ready, even if they think they are. So yes, I am heartened that some teens are holding off because they want to meet the right person. If a girl’s first time is going to leave her bloody and terrified, better it be with someone who cares enough about her to hold her when it’s over, and who maybe, just maybe, can give her an orgasm, if not the first time then maybe by the fiftieth.

Lastly, Shmuley, there are days I wish I could go on your show. Unfortunately Charles is far too private. But when it’s six o’clock at night and my toddler is throwing a tantrum as I try to wash her hands for dinner, the TV is blaring Cops in the living room because my grandson-of-a-cop husband finds it soothing, and I have three deadlines to meet that night in order to make enough money to feed three mouths, I feel in desperate need of some shalom in the home.

L’hitraot,

Amy

Previous Entries:

Shalom in Whose Home?

Would You Alienate the Only Source of Your Love?

Stop Blaming Husbands!

But It's Hubby's Fault!

The post I-You vs. I-Thou Relationships appeared first on Jewcy.

Dear Amy,

Nice to hear from you again.

The main reason why parents neglect their children is not because of the government. They do so because of the single criterion of success that prevails in the United States. We are only successful if we acquire money and professional acclaim. We are judged today not by the quality of our relationships but by the quantity in our bank accounts. This has caused the family meltdown in the United States. We all want to be a somebody, and nobody wants to be a nobody. And since our culture tells us that we are only a somebody when we gain the recognition of our peers, the recognition of our children is far less important by comparison. It will take a new definition of success, a much more wholesome, holistic definition, if we are to re-energize American parents to reinvest in their families and children. No doubt government policy can help that along. But in the final analysis the real effort must come from us.

I am much more reluctant than you to blame women, married women, for putting on weight or giving up on their appearance than you are. And the hundreds of cases where I’ve seen this happen and have been involved as a counselor, it mostly involves a husband who was utterly neglectful of his wife. You mentioned that some women let themselves go despite entreaties on the part of their husbands. But entreaties are not what is necessary. It is rather an active focus of husband on wife that makes all the difference. Women today are overworked. They are the ones that have two jobs most of the time, not the husbands. They are the ones who work during the day and come home to more work at night. Why would any woman make an effort, in addition to all her other responsibilities, to look great when no one notices. The history of relationships is that the female need for attention is rarely matched by the male attention span.

I also strongly disagree that women today are forming, as you describe it, nearly incestuous relationships with their children. I do not think that a woman’s erotic needs are satisfied by a baby suckling at her breast. No baby could nave could never make her feel desirable as a woman. True eroticism is where someone lusts after you and needs you and desires you. Women are desperate for male attention and affection. But in the pornographic age in which we live, in which women are highly disrespected by men, turned into commodities, and a collection of assorted body parts, men just don’t know how to truly lust after one woman, they know only to lust after many. This is also something that should be changed if marriage is to survive and if women are not to throw in the towel and just give up on men. You will recall the New York Times cover story about three months ago that shocked the nation by reporting that 51% of women today live alone and without a man. So the tragic process is already happening.

By the way, I was surprised that you quoted statistics lauding the fall in teen sexuality when in the first letter you seem to be a proponent of teens exploring sex, something that I am vigorously opposed to.

On the subject of how my parents’ divorce impacted on the work I do now in trying to rescue families, Amy, I was honestly not avoiding your question. Rather I’ve written so much on the subject of how my parents’ divorce is the main cause of all the work I do today that I thought by now it was known. I love my father, am as close to him as I am to my mother, and I thrive in our relationship.

I decided to dedicate my new book to my mother because I wanted to take the opportunity to tell my mother and all the other mothers around America how much we children appreciate the phenomenal sacrifices that they make when the world demands so much of them.

Wishing you and your family all the very best and God bless you.

Yours sincerely,

Shmuley

To read Amy's closing letter, click here.

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Would You Alienate the Only Source of Your Love?

Stop Blaming Husbands!

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Dear Shmuley,

Don’t you think the reason today’s parents find work so exhausting is because the American workplace is still so unfriendly to families? Many companies still expect employees to be available at all hours and on weekends, when moms and dads want to be spending time with their kids. This has only gotten worse with the advent of Blackberries, cell phones, wireless Internet, and telecommuting, which make workers available around the clock.

As Judith Warner reported in her book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, more than a third of all working parents in America have neither sick leave nor vacation leave. In the late nineties, Warner reports, five years after the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, fewer than half of US workers were eligible for unpaid leave. And any who were eligible did not take advantage because of fears of repercussions at work. My tax dollars pay for day care for children of military personnel but if I want it for my own child, I have to shell out $12,000 a year. And it’s $25,000 if I want one-on-one care in the form of a full-time nanny.

DIK (dual income with kids) families are pulled in too many directions at once, stressed from work when they come home, guilty about time spent away from their kids even when they need personal time for their own sanity, and resentful of all the competing expectations. This is especially true of moms, who are expected to put their children ahead of work all the time, even if their companies penalize them for it by mommy-tracking them.

It’s no wonder, then, that, as Warner reports, a 2002 Gallup poll on stress and relaxation time found that families even with household incomes of over seventy-give grand were among the “most stressed’ households in America. And this is rich people. Our government needs to start putting families first with more universal pre-K, national standards for day care, paternity leave, longer maternity care, emergency day care in the workplace, and longer vacations.

Despite my pessimism about our government’s abandonment of the American family, I am more optimistic about our teenagers than you are, especially with regard to teen sex. Increased awareness of and discussion of sex has made kids smarter about it and more prudent than even my own generation of teens (I was fifteen in 1988.)

A recent NBC News and People poll that surveyed teens about their sexual attitudes and practices found that eighty-seven percent of teens aged 13 to 16 have not had sexual intercourse. And seventy-three percent have not been sexually intimate at all. Why? Nearly three-quarters of the virgins said they had not had sex because they “made a conscious decision not to” and three-quarters said it was because they believe they are too young. As for the active teens, nearly two in three said a principal reason they had sex for the first time was because they met the right person. Whether or not this is true, at least they are not treating sex as brazenly as you think.

But let me get back to the subject that brings you and me together: adult sex. We both agree that too many American married couples are in sexless marriages, but Shmuley, you put too much onus on the men. You are right to point out that low male libido is a plague – and I think it’s far more common than popular culture would have us believe.

You say in your book that women who have “let themselves go” do so because they feel that their husband doesn’t care how they look. And this is true for some. But many women, especially mothers, let themselves go in spite of active entreaties and compliments from their husbands. This is because the erotic needs that the husband once satisfied are now satisfied by the child – they get touch, physical affection, suckling (if breastfeeding), smell, and constant contact – and they don’t even have to wear lipstick to get it! The physical relationship with children, while not sexual, is sensual, all encompassing, luxurious and erotic enough to satisfy some of the same needs that sex once satisfied.

So when Dad comes home and demands sex, Mom doesn’t feel desire, because she already has a sensual partner in her newborn. Other women “let themselves go” because their sexuality was never that important to them in the first place (don’t worry, Shmuley, I’m not talking about myself) and they are relieved to have an excuse (the child) to refuse sex. This isn’t a problem if the husband has low desire too, but if he’s got high desire, Mom and Dad have got a serious problemo.

Women need to make a conscious effort to maintain a relationship to their own erotic selves throughout marriage. An erotic marriage is like a fire and if you don’t feed the flame with oxygen, it goes out. For women, the oxygen comes in many forms – erotic novels, movies, a flirtation at work, a crush on a movie star, intense eye contact with a stranger on a subway train, a pair of expensive footwear, a nice set of lingerie, a new Murakami novel. Too many women forget to “feed the flame” after childbirth because they simply don’t have the time or energy to devote to it. If a woman has desire, she will find a way to make love with her husband but after motherhood it takes more work to locate the desire, and women should be willing to put in the work.

And yet it seems that in our country, married sex is all but dead. I agree with you that, “the functional termination of a couple’s sex life is a functional termination of the marriage itself.” How sad, then, that The New York Times recently reported the results of a survey by the National Association of Home Builders in which “builders and architects predicted that more than 60 percent of custom houses would have dual master bedrooms by 2015” and some builders said that “more than a quarter of their new projects already do.” This article came only weeks after another Times article on co-sleeping, in which several affluent families admitted that one or more of the parents regularly slept in the child’s bed or had children in the parents’ bed with them.

How odd that you and I agree in so many areas. I believe that my own witnessing of a healthy married relationship (my parents’) has made me see the value of prioritizing my husband’s and my intimacy, now that I am a mother. Yes, kids need their parents to pay attention to them. But they also need their parents to love each other and show it.

I keep wondering whether it was your own parents’ divorce that led to your desire to “fix” other people’s marriages. I asked you about this in my first letter, but like a reluctant therapy patient, you ignored the question. How did your parents’ divorce come to inform your own interest in family life, your show, and your entire career? You dedicate your book to your mother. Do you speak to your father? Are you angry with him? Have you sought therapy? Come on, Shmuley. Give me an Oprah moment.

Amy

To read Shmuley's reply, click here.

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Hi Amy,

Thank you for your compliment about my apparent youth. Since many tell me I am an old soul, I will take your words as a compliment.

Your expression of “your people” puzzles me. I know of only one human family and one human nature. As John F. Kennedy said, “We all cherish our children’s future…” In other words, what we share in common by far outstrips that upon which we disagree. Similarly, your comments about sexism and xenophobia in the orthodox Jewish community are highly misguided. The definition of orthodoxy is an adherence to Torah law, and the Torah mandates the highest respect for women and a love for the stranger. On the contrary, the sexism that I witness is in secular society where, after sixty years of feminism women today are still valued more for their bust than for their brains, a heresy that is not practiced in orthodox Jewish society.

Be that as it may, I enjoyed your letter very much and you write extremely well.

The reason why parents cannot enforce discipline among their children today is three-fold. The first is physical exhaustion. Since we define success today primarily through our professional endeavors, that is where we exert out energy. There is very little of us left by the time we come home. And it is easier to give in to our kids and let them do their own thing then lay down the law. The second is guilt. So many parents do not give their children the attention they need. So they give in to them as a way of compensating for their neglect. The third is the most interesting of all. In an age where so many parents have bad marriages, they depend on their children as their principal source of affection.

Now, would you punish or alienate your only source of love?

That’s why one of the principal solutions to the lack of parental discipline is a more holistic definition of success, that embodies both the personal as well as the professional, and more passionate and intimate marriages.

I disagree profusely with your comments on teen sexuality. Indeed, research suggests that there is even a direct link between teen sexuality and teen depression. A study by the Heritage Foundation, in-turn based on the government-funded National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, found that about 25 percent of sexually active girls say they are depressed all, most or a lot of the time, while only 8 percent of girls who are not sexually active feel the same.

While 14 percent of girls who have had intercourse have attempted suicide, only 5 percent of sexually inactive girls have. And whereas 6 percent of sexually active boys have tried suicide, less than 1 percent of sexually inactive boys have. The report challenges the previously held notion that teens become sexually active in order to self-medicate their own depressions.

"Findings from the study show depression came after substance and sexual activity, not the other way around," says researcher Denise Dion Hallfors of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, analyzed data from a national survey of more than 13,000 teenagers in grades seven to 11.

Pretty tragic, huh, that it takes children slashing their wrists or sinking into a morbidly dark depression to awaken parents to the dangers of children engaging in activities that should be reserved exclusively for adults, and married ones at that.

Sex is the most powerful impulse known to man. It is as overpowering as it is pleasurable. Do you really think that those in a rickety boat should be exposed to this storm? How could we ever have believed that allowing big children detonate such powerful emotions, in empty relationships where neither party is sufficiently developed to assimilate such strong emotions, would do anything but eviscerate the emotional landscape of its child practitioners? Heck, we don't even let teenagers play with fireworks for fear of them blowing their own heads off. But we've given them the emotional equivalent of a nuclear blast.

Many parents mistakenly believe that the first job of a parent is to love their child, when really the primary responsibility of a parent is to protect their child from harm. You can't love that which is no longer extant. An object of love that is destroyed will forever remain unloved.

Thus, prior to loving your child, prior to teaching your child, prior to even to feeding your child, your first objective is to protect your child. Your role as guardian comes before any other. A parent who allows harm to come to his or her child is a parent who has been delinquent in the very fundamentals of child rearing.

Most parents believe that protection involves guarding children from physical harm. You lock the door at night so that your kids won't be injured by robbers. You drop them off at school so that they won't be abducted by kidnappers. You teach them how to cross the street safely so that they won't be hit by cars.

But protecting your children from external dangers is miniscule compared to the task of safeguarding them from absorbing influences that will corrupt them from the inside, and it is much easier to recover from physical scars than from their emotional equivalents.

Look around and you'll see parents who take little kids to R-rated movies, who allow their kids to listen to and sing misogynistic melodies and sexual lyrics, and who let their kids play video games where the most graphic violence is the main selling point. I know otherwise responsible parents who smoke marijuana with their teenage kids, and I know parents who have no problem with their kids watching MTV and VH1 music video junk for hours a day. Indeed, parents today seem to have little compunction about the tremendous amounts of garbage from the popular culture being pumped directly into their children's cerebral cortex. Will we pretend that daily loads of toxic smut will not permanently coarsen our children, robbing them of their innocence and making them grow up preternaturally? By treating our children as young adults rather than big kids, we are allowing them to skip the childhood stage of life, which is essential to a strong foundation in their later years.

Healthy parenting involves the dual role of nurturer, on the one hand, and protector on the other. A child is like a sapling that requires water and nutrients, but also protection from weeds and pests. The unconditional love we give our children instills in them a sense of security and internalizes a feeling of value. If they are shortchanged of love, they will later grow to believe that things like money are currencies by which they may purchase an otherwise lacking self-esteem.

But unconditional love is just one side of the coin. All the watering in the world won't shelter a vulnerable plant that has been uprooted by a fierce wind. We have to shield our children from the increasingly malign influences of a culture that is telling them, subtly but constantly, to skip the essential stages of childhood and become an adult while they are really still kids. Exposure to gratuitous violence, sex and other uniquely adult subjects overwhelms children with emotions and experiences they cannot digest, sowing confusion and anxiety. It also imparts to them an inauthentic desire to prematurely discard the wonders of their youth and join an adult world that where they trade in awe for cynicism and conviction for compromises.

Our kids may not look like it, but they're crying out for a protector. It may seem that they just want to be left alone, that they crave unrestricted freedom and unbridled indulgence. But deep inside they want to be protected. They want someone to stop them from harming themselves. They want someone that says no. And if not you, the parent, then who?

One final thing, Amy. Please give my warm regards to your husband. And please tell him that aside from hating evil, hatred is something we should purge from our breast and eradicate from our heart.

G-d bless you and your family.

Shmuley

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To: Shmuley Boteach From: Amy Sohn Subject: The Perils of Anti-Attachment Parenting

Dear Shmuley,

I’m sorry I was not able to attend your 40^th birthday party (our mutual friend Scott invited me), although I was aghast that you are only 40 because your beard ages you, and curious to see what such a celebration would look like.

I live in Park Slope, near Prospect Park, and frequently observe “your people” walking with their many children on Sunday afternoons or playing in the Third Street Playground and I feel a mix of contempt, curiosity, and envy. As an iconoclastic, Brown-educated, sex-writing, feminist, raised Reform Jew, married to an atheistic, religion-hating, genetically Gentile son of divorce, and raising a baby girl with him, I find myself wondering what we the secular community might have to learn from the religious community. I despise the xenophobia, insane rigidity, homophobia and sexism of Orthodox Jews (who I will call here the frum) but I often envy their emphasis on the sanctity of marriage and honoring mother and father.

This is in part because I feel so frustrated by American parenting today. When I look around me at the playground, the local Food Coop or 7^th Avenue to see how other parents are raising their children, I am sickened by the total indulgence, lack of affection between parents, and general dog-wagging-the-tail. So what can the un-frum learn from the frum? This seems to me to be essence of your show Shalom in the Home and your new book Shalom in the Home: Smart Advice for a Peaceful Life.

Shmuley, I see you as the anti-attachment parent. You practice (at least on your show) detachment parenting. I agree with your belief in the importance of marital intimacy to family harmony. If children do not witness loving and sexual parents in the home, they will have no idea how to enter into healthy and loving relationships as adults. But in so many of the relationships I see, the children are the center of the family. Parents seldom go out alone or vacation alone, the sex life is nonexistent and by the time they begin to get it back they feel social pressure to have another baby – which only puts it on hold for another few years. Men look at online porn; women watch America’s Next Top Model, eat Ben & Jerry’s, and nurse chardonnays for the intimacy they’re no longer getting in their marriages.

Worse, both father and mother seek this intimacy from the children. When the baby awakens in the middle of the night they argue – not over who gets to ignore it, but over who gets to go in – so eager are they for the company the children provide. Email, newsgroups, television and the computer all offer a kind of connection, however false, that adults are no longer getting from each other.

So I am not surprised that in many of the scenarios on your show, the key to helping the family was to work on the couple. And I am certainly not surprised that in many of the families, one or more children were sleeping in the marital bed. Co-sleeping is in vogue these days, though its consequences are treacherous.

I also agree with your contention that too many American parents are afraid to discipline their children. Today’s parents are afraid to be the bad guy, to enforce boundaries – and this has already had unpleasant results for the children, with today’s high level of antidepressant use among young adults.

What twenty-year-old wouldn’t be depressed if he were raised to think he was the center of the universe? The Maxwell family in Chinatown was a glaring example of this. The 3-year-old son did not sleep in his own room, the father indulged his every whim, and the parents had a platonic relationship. I only wish Dr. Bill Sears, author of The Baby Book and the one who started this mess, could hear you say, “Withholding discipline in the name of loving our children is, in practical terms, to despise our children and to cause them grievous harm.”

I recently visited a preschool program at a local synagogue and witnessed a child repeatedly hitting a teacher in the face. Eventually she was restrained but clearly someone at home was teaching this child that hitting was acceptable. I saw a father at a local restaurant allow his two-year-old to empty the entire contents of the saltshaker onto the table while they were waiting for their food. It’s one thing to give a kid a fork to bang – but to let her take the condiments hostage? I know several four-year-olds who insist on pooping in their diapers and a three-year-old whose mother must get in bed with her each night for up to an hour until she falls asleep, after which her mother sneaks out. What is going on here? Why are so many parents afraid of their own kids?

I do have two fundamental disagreements with your book. I do not think, as you say, that “teenaged sexual activity . . . robs them of their childhood and precious innocence.” I think much depends on the age of the adolescent and the relationship. Two seventeen-year-olds in a respectful, committed relationship may be more capable of lovemaking than two drunken twentysomethings who just met at a bar. And if a teenaged girl is lucky enough to have a committed partner who cares about her pleasure, she will compare future lovers to that first, attentive one, knowing that a man who doesn’t care about her pleasure isn’t worth it. Your categorical insistence on abstinence in teenaged years is naïve, out of touch, and will only encourage children to hide their activities from their parents instead of ask advice on such matters as birth control and STD production, advice they desperately need.

And I think in many of the families you visited you tried too hard to get them to forestall divorce when it was clear that divorce was the best thing for the children. Some of your interventions designed to bring separated couples together (like the Romeros) or keep conflicted couples together (like the Lubners) seemed forced and ill advised. Isn’t the best thing for a child two happy parents? As a child of divorce yourself, don’t you think your parents did you a favor – or are you agonized that they split up and trying to compensate for it in your show?

Amy

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