Navigating Yom Tov for Our Children
The Simple Version
Imagine you’re a kid and the holidays are coming. You’re excited, but the grown-ups around you are stressed. They’re worried about food, money, cleaning, and whether you’ll behave. You feel it. Then they keep telling you what to do, correcting you, and getting upset when you don’t listen.
Rabbi Russell says: this is exactly backwards. The most important thing parents do on a holiday isn’t teaching kids the rules. It’s showing kids that they are safe, secure, seen, and soothed. If a child feels those four things from you, they absorb everything else on their own. If they don’t, no amount of speeches will help.
He also says something surprising: kids are supposed to be childish. A child who jumps on the table isn’t broken — he’s a child. Stop being shocked that children act like children.
How It Actually Works
Rabbi Russell’s framework has three parts, and the order matters.
1. The Gavra before the Cheftza
The Chovos HaLevavos says the job of parenting is twofold: to raise a healthy human being (the gavra), and to install the mitzvos (the cheftza). What happens when the two collide? — when your child refuses to wear tzitzis, or doesn’t want to daven, or won’t come to the seudah?
“You never compromise the development of a healthy person for the sake of forcing a mitzvah. Ever.”
Forcing creates revulsion. A healthy child becomes a beautiful kli into which mitzvos will naturally settle. A wounded child, no matter how many mitzvos you drill, becomes a receptacle of shame.
2. Transmission happens through relationship, not speeches
His mother was ranked the second-best teacher in London. He asked her why. She said: “Every day I walked into that classroom and tried to present myself as a person every child would want to be.” That’s it. The children who admired her absorbed everything.
For adults, ideas transmit through drashos. For children, values transmit through attachment — through who you are in their presence, not what you tell them.
A 2010 study in the Journal of Chemical Education found that first-year chemistry students had their first lapse of attention within 30–60 seconds. Long divrei Torah at the Yom Tov table are biologically impossible for children. So he invented the SMV — Short Meaningful Vort: under two minutes (sometimes 30 seconds), designed to provoke conversation, not deliver a shiur.
3. Recalibrate your expectations of children
Rashi on Niddah teaches that the angel Laylah decides before birth whether a child will be smart, strong, rich — everything except yiras shamayim comes from Hashem. That means your child’s temperament, middos, and life circumstances were assigned, not chosen by them.
The Chofetz Chaim read “oy la’aretz she-malkah na’ar” as a warning about parenting: when the king is a child and his ministers constantly bark at him, he will never grow into a king — they’ll destroy his spirit. When the Brisker Rav’s toddler son climbed on the meeting table during a gathering of talmidim, one of them said “chanech him!” The Brisker Rav replied: “He’s a child. He bothers you — he doesn’t bother me.”
Key Takeaways
- The gavra comes first. Never compromise a healthy child for a mitzvah you can’t lovingly install.
- Practice the Four S’s. Safe, Secure, Seen, Soothed — before reacting, check if you’re providing them.
- SMV over shiur. Prepare a short, meaningful 30-second vort designed to start conversation, not to teach.
- Sit with your kids 2–3 days before Yom Tov. Validate that screen-deprivation is hard for them. Plan together. Don’t mussar them.
- Kids are supposed to be childish. Delayed maturity is real. Lower your expectations, love who they are, help with who they will become.