by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman

“Parenting is the hardest job in the world” declared the rabbi as he sat down somewhat heavily in his chair. He was just returning from chasing after his seven year-old son from room to room and under tables before catching up with him for whatever now long-forgotten misbehavior. I was there for an evening study session (Pirkei Avot, Chapters of the Fathers), and remember thinking at the time, “Oh, poor fellow, can’t even control his own son.” I’m not sure if, at the time, or only later, I noted that he managed not to lift either his hand or his voice against the boy. Years later, after some hands-on experience of my own, I have come to agree that, for anyone who takes parenting seriously, it is indeed the hardest job in the world.

It seems, however, that not everyone is in agreement. In a recent Newsweek, Anna Quindlen devoted her column to “the prevailing ethos about being a parent…that it’s mostly intuitive and uniformly joyful…” Quindlen countered this mythology with the fact that “the news, and our own lives, are full of those who found it so conspicuously otherwise that they made an utter mess of actual human beings.”

Jewish tradition encourages a realistic appreciation of the challenge of parenting. Abraham and Sarah disowned Ishmael; and Esau was out to murder his brother Jacob. Hardly a picture of undisturbed familial harmony.

The patriarch Jacob is called bechir sheba’avos, the choicest of the Patriarchs. But how can we consider him greater than Abraham, who was ready to sacrifice his son at God’s command at the Akeida, the Binding of Isaac? And how could he be considered greater than his own father Yitzchak, who willingly went with his father? Why does Jacob, who overcame no comparable trial, merit this distinction?

The answer is, that to raise twelve outstanding sons, each one a righteous person in his own right, the great personalities upon which the eternal Jewish people were founded, is an achievement even greater than that of Abraham or Isaac.

So, how should one approach the responsibilities of childraising? Quindlen, an island of common sense in a bizarro media universe, suggests that, after first facing up to the real difficulties, that there are strategies for successful parenting available. She cites a study which shows how skilled parenting can have a strikingly positive effect even on high-risk juveniles, and she discusses an NYU Child Study Center program for advice and support for real-life parents.

There is, however, another, radically different answer for the anxious parent. Namely, that the parental role is not nearly as important as one might think. The consensus on the classic “Nature vs. Nurture” question these days is that about half of human behavior is determined by genetics, the other half by environmental influences. But psychologist Judith Harris argues that the long-held assumption that nurture is synonymous with parenting is mistaken. After a comprehensive review of the vast research on the topic, Harris has concluded that peers matter much more than parents. That a child’s interaction with friends and schoolmates have a much more powerful effect on the developing personality than anything the mother or father do. Counterintuitive as it may sound, Harris backs up her claim with plenty of evidence from psychological studies and her own experience raising two children.

If Harris is right, as some think she is, parents are off the hook. And she saves us the trouble of drawing unfair conclusions by drawing them herself: “A lot of people who should be contributing children to our society…are reluctant to do it,” she says, “because they feel that it requires such a huge commitment. If they knew that it was O.K. to have a child and let it be reared by a nanny or put it in a day-care center, or even to send it to a boarding school, maybe they’d believe that it would be O.K. to have a kid. You can have a kid without having to devote your entire life–your entire emotional expenditure–to this child for the next twenty years.”

So the question has shifted. No longer Nature or Nurture, but what kind of nurture, parents or peers. But the Jewish perspective offers yet another way of looking at it: It can be found in a seemingly casual comment of Rashi about the Torah’s identification of the man who cursed God. Rashi points out that the blame for his blasphemous act was placed on himself, his father and the tribe of Dan, with which he was associated. Thus, in a line, Rashi has given us the Torah view: that how a person turns out is the result not only of parent and society, but himself, as well. It is the third factor, of which the nobody in the foregoing discussion took account: the free will of the individual. When all is said and done, and all of nature and nurture is accounted for, there is the person himself, greater the sum of his influences.

Sources: Rabbi Yissachar Frand, An Offer You Can’t Refuse, Pp. 117-118, quoting the Ostrovtzer Rebbe; Anna Quindlen, “A Teachable Moment” Newsweek, April 18, 2009; Malcom Gladwell, “Do Parents Matter?” The New Yorker, August 17, 1998.

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