My Divorce Freed Me From Pretending to Be Religious. My Son Is Crushed.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

I’m recently divorced after a 23-year-long marriage. My ex-husband is Jewish, and when I was engaged to him, I converted to the religion. I never took it all that seriously, but I went through the motions to keep the peace between us. Now that it’s over, I’ve dropped the pretense, and it has been a profoundly liberating experience. However, it seems to have caused problems with my 19-year-old son, “Seth.” I don’t know if it’s transference from the divorce, or just the normal run of young adult problems and seeking solace, but he’s taken the knowledge that I never really believed in any of that stuff really hard. He seems to think it calls his own status as a Jew into question, and has even pulled me into the fringes of this: I got a call from the synagogue I used to go to, asking if there was any way I could get him to reconsider his decision to pull out of blowing the Shofar this year. Seth seems to think that if he’s not sure he’s really “properly” Jewish, he shouldn’t be leading a ritual. To be honest, I never understood why he was into all that ritual anyway, and I think it’s probably for the best if he pulled back a bit from it. But I worry it will long-term sour our relationship if things continue as they are. On the other hand, I also don’t want to be pretending I’m someone I’m not. I spent far too many years doing that. I don’t know how to thread this needle.

—Freedom Pains

Dear Freedom Pains,

I am trying to be sympathetic to your pain, I really am—it’s my job, after all (as I see it, anyway)—but I’m struggling. Converting to Judaism without conviction is a lousy thing to do (and in Orthodox Judaism, it is forbidden), and you don’t seem to be taking any responsibility for the decision you made over two decades ago, and which you continued to stand by for so long. You weren’t forced to convert; you decided to do so because your fiancé wanted you to and you felt it was the easiest path (you “kept the peace”). I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you didn’t care very much one way or the other, that you didn’t give religion—Judaism or the religion from which you converted—much thought, and since you hadn’t any convictions, you certainly didn’t have the courage of your convictions to say no. I’d also like to believe that you were very young when this occurred. But you kept up this pretense for 23 years. And now you’re relieved—naturally, you are!—to stop pretending. But you lied to your son. You’ve already soured your relationship with him.

Of course you shouldn’t keep pretending to be someone you’re not. You should not have pretended in the first place. And I know I’m becoming a broken record here (in Jewish culture, we say “hocking a tscheynik”—metaphorically banging on the same old teapot), but a conversation with your son is in order. Talk to him about the regrettable decision you made years ago, and be honest with him about why you made it. He’s going to have a lot of questions for you about all these intervening years and what you do believe. Answer them honestly. And then suggest that he speak to his rabbi. I’m no expert in Jewish law—me, I’m a secular Jew (I’m pretty sure this isn’t something you can convert to, but maybe I’m wrong), nonbelieving, nonobservant, yet still very much a Jew—but it seems to me that Seth is taking Jewish law as he understands it literally, if selectively. The most observant Jews are firm on this: A child born of a Jewish mother—and only a child born of a Jewish mother—is Jewish (the Reform and Reconstructionist movements accept patrilineal descent). Does Seth believe that because you are not “really” Jewish, he isn’t either? His rabbi will help him figure this out. I suspect that what Seth is going through is more complicated than that, though—that he’s lashing out wildly, and mostly against himself, because he’s hurt and confused. You need to help him with this in any and every way you can—and that means supporting him in what he needs, not what you want for him. You don’t have to understand why he’s into “all that ritual”—that’s his business, not yours—and one sure way to drive a permanent wedge between you is to tell him that you’re glad he’s pulling back from that. If being an observant Jew has been meaningful to him, then feeling as if perhaps he cannot or should not continue to be must be terribly painful for him. Is his distress over that all mixed up with his distress about his parents’ divorce? Maybe. That doesn’t make it any less real. Talk to your son. And at least as important: Listen to what he has to say, too.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

I’m a stay-at-home mom who has a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old and I need to teach my older son not to hurt his brother. First I tried, “I’m moving myself and your brother to another room. You are not allowed to hurt us. I need to keep our bodies safe”—that sort of thing. Then I tried time-outs. Then I tried throwing away his toys. Then I tried, “Feet are not for kicking. Go use your feet to jump up and down” and the like. I’ve tried bringing out basketfuls of toys and games when I’m about to breastfeed because 99 percent of the time that’s when the problem occurs. Everything I try works—for just a little while—and then it doesn’t. Help! I breastfed my first until he was two and it created a tight bond between us. I’d like to have that bond with the baby too.

—Breastfeeding is Ruining My Relationship with My Toddler!

Dear Ruining My Relationship,

I feel for you. And I feel for your 3-year-old, too. It’s hard to take care of a baby while you’ve got a small child at home who also wants all of your attention and is outraged that he’s no longer getting it. It’s also hard to be a big brother when you’re still barely more than a baby yourself (not that he would cop to this! I can just see him puffing up his chest and insisting, “I am NOT a baby!” like every toddler before him).

You’re both struggling. I know you feel stuck: You’ve got to (and you want to) nurse your baby but you have to keep your older kid, who doesn’t want you to nurse the baby, from hitting and kicking him. I think the key here is not to focus on stopping the behavior—because, after all, the behavior is not random acting up, but is a response to a specific, easily identifiable trigger. So maybe take that trigger by the horns (I do love a good mixed metaphor), by which I mean sitting down with your toddler and helping him work through his feelings about the interloper. Ask him if he remembers nursing. He may, given that it ended only a year ago, and he may not. If he doesn’t have a conscious memory of it, he for sure remembers and knows the feelings he had around it—how it was just you and him back then. Ask him how he feels when you nurse the baby. He may not have sufficient words yet to express these feelings, but asking him will give him a chance to identify them and begin, in his toddler-mind, to process them. If I were you, I’d go so far as to acknowledge that he must feel left out when he sees you feeding his brother. Ask him to use his words when he feels left out, lonely, or resentful. Make sure to give him plenty of hugs and cuddles—and your full attention—when you have these conversations.

Talk to him about nursing the baby, too. Tell him (as many times as you need to) what nursing is for: “This is how your brother is fed. He doesn’t eat food yet—the special milk he gets from me is what nourishes him and will help him to grow up to be big enough to pIay with you. And even when he starts eating food like you do now that you’re big, he’ll still need to breastfeed for a while. That’s part of what being a baby is about.”

I think taking these tacks will help (both of you) way more than reminding him that he’s not allowed to hurt his baby brother, or punishing him, or redirecting/distracting him. Be patient, because this is not a magic bullet that will solve a problem that comes with the territory. You will likely have to have these conversations many times, not just once. But I’m betting that this will not only solve the short-term problem but will set a foundation for the two kids’ futures.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

My 5-year-old son, who is (like me) white, won’t stop saying the N-word. He seems to have picked it up at school from one of his Black friends. We’ve taken the usual steps, explained that this is a bad word, put him in time-out, and taken away toys and devices, but he continues to say it. We’ve never spanked our kids, but I think this warrants it. My wife disagrees. I don’t see any other options. I don’t want to spank him without my wife’s approval, but I think she is out of line here. Am I crazy?

—Don’t Want to be the Father of a Racist

Dear Don’t,

Spanking your child will not teach him not to be racist. It will teach him that physical force is the appropriate way to make yourself clear when you’re not getting through to someone any other way—it will normalize hitting. It will not change the behavior you object to, and because kids who are spanked tend to become more defiant, I can promise you that it will do more harm than good.

“The usual steps” have been of no use because none of them have addressed the issue head-on. Any sort of punishment—taking away toys or privileges, time-outs, yelling at him—will not make it clear why he should never use the word. It will only make it clear that you disapprove (a lot) of his using it. And if your hope—your assumption—is that your disapproval should be sufficient reason for him to quit it (the “because I say so” method of parenting), you are in for a long, rough stretch. Ultimately, it’ll lead to a less-than-healthy, less rewarding, and less loving relationship with your son as he grows up.

Let me add that telling your young child that the N-word is a “bad word” is meaninglessly authoritative—it’s no wonder that this strategy hasn’t worked either. Tell him why he shouldn’t use the word. Tell him that it has been used throughout history to demean, humiliate, and degrade Black people, and that even if he thinks he is using it without malevolence, any invocation of the word is an act of violence and racism. If he protests—as he likely will—that his Black friends say it, you can talk to him in an age-appropriate way about why his saying it is different from his friends who are Black saying it (in other words, this is not a conversation about reclaiming a word and taking the sting out of it—which I think would go over the head of most 5-year-olds). You might just say that it’s one thing to say something about yourself, it’s another to say it about someone else (a gross oversimplification, to be sure—and it doesn’t account for the many Black people who consider the word too repulsive to be used by anyone, ever—but it’s a place to start with a child this young).

PBS ran an interesting story on the N-word as “the atomic bomb” of racial slurs that’s worth listening to, or reading the transcript of, as you educate yourself. And I think educating yourself would be helpful here, as you take this moment as an opportunity to educate your child. (Which is always a better idea than hitting him.)

Dear Care and Feeding,

What do you say to your kid when they say, “I don’t like myself”? My first grader started doing this recently, and my impression was that they were trying to verbalize feelings of guilt about something they had said or done that they felt bad about. I’ve tried saying things like, “It’s OK to feel bad about things we’ve said or done. That’s our body’s way of telling us we don’t want to do those things again”; “We all make bad choices sometimes, but that doesn’t make us bad people”; and, “I love you even when you feel that way.” But they don’t like any of these responses! They keep insisting they don’t like themselves… but then we get to school, and seeing a teacher or friend will snap them out of it and they’ll run off smiling. Am I making too much of their saying this? Has it become an attention-getting game? I wouldn’t worry so much if it was a one-off, but this has happened multiple times. Is there anything more I can do or say when they feel this way? It hurts me to hear them talk like that, and I worry that it will get worse as they get older. How can I help them develop some more self-love and kindness to themself?

—Lovingkindness

Dear Lovingkindness,

I’m curious about where your “impression” came from that these expressions of self-loathing are the result of guilt about something your child has said or done. Are you just guessing? If so, you shouldn’t assume that you know what’s behind the feelings they’re verbalizing to you. The first two responses you’ve mentioned don’t account for the possibility that you’re guessing wrong (and if I were your kid, I’d be immensely frustrated by that); the third seems to be saying that it doesn’t matter how they feel—it’s how you feel that counts.

Of course, I know that’s not your intention. I’ve no doubt that your intentions are good. But unless your child says that they don’t like themselves because they did something they’re ashamed of, it’s time to abandon the first two lines of reasoning. When they say, “I don’t like myself,” ask them why. And if you want to reassure them that no matter what they’ve done or haven’t done, said or haven’t said, or feel at any given moment, they can count on your love and your help, tell them that. But not before you’ve had a chance to help them work through whatever is actually going on.

And one thing I know for sure: Platitudes never help. (They don’t help adults any more than they help kids.) Even if your kid answers your question (“What’s wrong, bud? Why do you feel bad about yourself?”) by telling you about something crummy they did that they feel guilty about, try talking that through. Why did they do that crummy thing? What were they thinking when they did? For that matter: How did they know it was crummy?

The fact that your kid cheers up around friends or teachers suggests to me that they want something specifically from you when they’re feeling this way. Is it an “attention-getting game”? Well, do they need more attention—or some particular kind of attention—from you that they aren’t getting? Don’t call it a game. Call it a need. And then do your best to fulfill it.

—Michelle

Our babysitter “Mandy” has taken care of our two small children since they were born. She also housesits for us when we are on vacation. We care about her and she has been incredibly helpful to our family. When she first started working for us, Mandy was living with her boyfriend “Tom.”