Author wows parents

By JENNIFER DIRECTOR KNUDSEN

article created on: 2009-06-11T00:00:00

Children are like seeds in an unlabeled packet. You don’t know in what season they’ll bloom or even the flower you’ll get. Your job is to allow the flower to blossom while tending its plot; remove only the biggest weeds.

This metaphor represents savvy parenting, according to Wendy Mogel, Ph.D., a nationally known author, clinical psychologist, parent educator and parent herself. She presented a talk, “Blessing of a Skinned Knee—How to Stop Overindulging, Overscheduling and Overprotecting” to nearly 200 parents on May 7 at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center.

Her first Portland event open to the public, Mogel—perhaps best known for her book “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children,” now in its 12th printing—said she found Portland folks wear great shoes, don enviable haircuts and are just plain nice.

All that put the Los Angeles resident at ease for her lecture, followed by a question-and-answer session and book signing. (Twenty-five paperback books at $15 a piece sold that evening.)

“It was a great crowd, very open-minded and receptive so I felt I could talk about anything,” Mogel, 58, said in the days following the two-hour event, organized by Seattle-based publication ParentMap and co-sponsored by Oregon Episcopal School, Portland Jewish Academy, the French American International School and the Portland Children’s Museum.

She covered numerous topics that clearly resonated with the audience, caught laughing at their own parenting foibles and Mogel’s telling anecdotes, some quotidian, others hyperbolic.

For example, Mogel noted the fifth season of the year—college application season. She recounted the story of a college administrator phoning an anxious father who made himself available at an otherwise inopportune moment.

“It’s fine,” the father reportedly told the administrator who’d reached him via cell phone, “I can talk to you right now; I’m just doing a colonoscopy.”

“This,” said Mogel, “is what I’ve called good parenting gone bad. It kinda illustrates the dark side of parental devotion.”

She talked, too, about parents’ desire to show love and devotion by exerting perhaps too much influence over their kids’ lives, especially in today’s world marred by a sagging economy and frightening climate change.

“So we narrow our focus,” she said. Parents, for instance, can’t control melting ice caps but, “I can control if my child gets the good or the better second-grade teacher.”

And yet, she explained, “It’s good for your fourth grader to have a crabby, unenlightened and uninspired teacher” because later in life that same child will have a boss—or spouse, for that matter—with the same character flaws. The strategies to deal with such people must be learned now, in childhood, not avoided at the hands of the child’s parents.

Mogel once left her psychology practice for full-time study of Judaism and Jewish texts, an education that underpins her book and some of the insights shared during her lecture.

The Talmud includes the lesson that every parent has the obligation to teach her child to swim. “We’re raising our kids to leave us,” Mogel said, urging her audience not to be “Big Brother parents” or to treat their kids like “handicapped royalty.”

Rather, she said, “Kids need danger, responsibility, privacy, dignity and some suffering,” all of which prepares them for adulthood.

Mogel enjoyed a great reception in Portland. Mel Berwin’s comments echo many attendees’.

Berwin, a Jewish educator and parent of three children, ages 7, 5 and 23 months, said, “I took away the reminder to have fun with my kids,” as well as “Mogel’s rebuke of contemporary parents that we are stressing out our children by expecting too much of them, and by her advice…to pick our biggest issues for putting our foot down, and to laugh at much of the rest.”