Episode 67: Clarity in Parenting | With Miriam Blau-Cohen, founder and supervisor of a network of daycares, guide for caregivers and workshops for mothers

00:00 Speaker 1 Come get one little capsule of knowledge worth its weight in gold to every mother and every woman. How do you feel when your child starts crying? Have you noticed how many times a day you end a sentence with “okay”? Parenting shouldn’t be so confusing. Not so overwhelming, not so noisy, not so full of more and more. In this episode, we’ll talk about clarity in parenting—raising children by returning to basics. Not to sophisticated methods or charts, but to our instincts, to what’s already inside us, waiting for us to listen. We’ll talk about the atmosphere at home, about adjusting, and about calming techniques that we can—and should—teach children, and yes, ourselves as adults too. About boundaries, love and understanding, and why sometimes less is so much more. And we’ll end in a quiet, deep place: with gratitude, honoring parents, and a way of looking at things that lets us see the good even when we’re tired. I’m happy to welcome Miriam Bloya-Cohen, founder and supervisor of a nationwide daycare network, a mentor to caregivers and young mothers throughout the country, and a woman who brings decades of experience and reassuring human wisdom—the kind that stays with you long after the episode ends. Did you enjoy the episode? Don’t keep it to yourself. Pass it on to a mother, sister, neighbor or friend who matters to you. And why meet only on the podcast? Let’s stay in touch. Find me on Instagram, Chani Moskowitz, or save my number to follow my status: zero five zero eight five zero five seven hundred seventy. You can also use that number to book workshops and talks on tools from Chassidus and digital processes. The intro, and then, of course, as always, we’ll begin. How can we turn our lives into lives of shlichus, full of meaning? I’m Chani Moskowitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine, now continuing my shlichus in Karmei Gat, Israel. On this podcast, we’ll meet different women who have brought their shlichus into a variety of fields, and through them, help every woman find and refine her own shlichus in the world. Because living

01:57 Speaker 1 the lives we were created to live is as good as it gets. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting right now. Welcome to another episode of the Shlichus as a Way of Life podcast, and today we’re with Miriam Bloya-Cohen.

02:12 Speaker 2 That’s how you say it.

02:13 Speaker 1 Exactly. You know, I have to take a second to tell the story of how this episode came about. Behind every podcast episode there’s a story. One day, a woman called me. I’ll keep her anonymous; I think that’s what she wants. And she said, “Listen, I heard Miriam speak once.”

02:29 Speaker 2 Wait, sorry, I wanted to tell that story. I wanted to start.

02:33 Speaker 1 Okay, over to you.

02:34 Speaker 2 I wanted to start like this. First of all, thank You, Hakadosh Boruch Hu, that a woman my age—I’m already eighty-one—is still doing all sorts of things, writing books, and still has enthusiasm for life. Thank You, Hashem.

02:47 Speaker 1 Touch wood, don’t jinx it.

02:48 Speaker 2 And the second woman I want to thank wants to remain anonymous, so let’s call her Dini, just to give her a name. At the daycares where I serve as a mentor and supervisor—the Chaya daycare network of Colel Chabad—I hold the parents’ evenings at the beginning of the year for all the mothers. So I spoke at the daycare attended by this mother’s child, and she told me—she called me two days later and said, “Look, I’m not someone who usually calls to say, ‘That was wonderful.’” And I asked her why not. I actually think it’s lovely when people do that, but never mind. “And I think it’s really a shame. It isn’t fair that only such a small group of women gets to hear you. So maybe you should do a podcast.” A podcast! Folks, I’m not from the podcast generation. I’m...

03:35 Speaker 1 What’s that? Explain to me what it is, too.

03:36 Speaker 2 No, I do know what podcasts are. But you know, all those things, all those buttons you have to press—it’s just not me. It’s not my world. I said okay, thinking, you know, we’ll move on. And suddenly she calls. No, I’m already... And then I saw the podcasts you make, and I really, really liked them. This is the first time I’m here without any notes or anything.

03:58 Speaker 1 Freestyle. Just go with it.

03:59 Speaker 2 Yes, freestyle. Ask questions, and with Hashem’s help, I hope... And I want to say that I really do this because I feel this is my shlichus for this generation. For thirty-seven years—I was also the director of a daycare in Nachlas Har Chabad. I founded the Chama daycare thirty-seven years ago, and afterward I became a mentor too. I now have fourteen daycares under my supervision. So I see the... I see how hard it is for parents. They truly want to be wonderful parents, but they’re really struggling. And I say, wherever I can speak and share what I know, I’m there, no problem.

04:31 Speaker 4 Amazing.

04:32 Speaker 2 That’s it.

04:32 Speaker 4 Let me mention, as an aside, that our audience, more or less—I can see it in my statistics—is overwhelmingly young mothers. Every so often I also hear from someone who tells me she listens to the podcasts: a girl, a teenager, even a fourteen-year-old. And grandmothers and great-grandmothers too, who probably have something to learn for their grandchildren. Teenagers have something to learn for the future. So it really is relevant to everyone.

04:56 Speaker 2 Amazing.

04:56 Speaker 4 So that’s where we are. We’re sitting together now for about an hour, and I want to hear the best things you have to say to someone like me—a woman caught up in the whole whirl of life and shlichus and work and busyness, with young children. When I spoke with her on the phone, she told me things we’re missing, things that perhaps should even come naturally to us, but suddenly we need to focus on them. So I’m here to listen. And tell us a little about yourself too.

05:29 Speaker 2 I feel—I feel that we can’t see the forest for the trees anymore. We just can’t, with so many opinions. I’ll put it this way. There used to be...

05:37 Speaker 4 Approaches, too.

05:38 Speaker 2 Yes, so many approaches. There used to be this natural instinct, and it’s all but disappeared. Every mother knew what to do. She made mistakes too. I’m not saying everything was wonderful back then and people didn’t make mistakes, but it wasn’t like today. I like things laid out clearly in my mind: one, two, three, or one, two, three, four. So I have a one, two, three for parenting. I really like it. One: a parent is a guide; a parent is a leader. What does it mean to be a guide? Say I want to travel abroad now. I have two options. The cheaper option is to plan the whole trip myself, but then I won’t get to all the places because I don’t know them all. Or I say, okay, I’ll pay a lot of money, but it’s an organized tour with guides. Every morning we get a sheet telling us exactly what we’re going to do, and so on. One morning I get up and there’s no sheet. I say, “Excuse me, what are we doing today?” “I don’t know.” “What do you mean, you don’t know? Excuse me, I paid for this tour so you’d take me to all the...” A child comes into the world waiting for that guide to explain what we do in this world. Now, I say that every parent is capable of doing this. It doesn’t sound right. How can that be? Some can and some can’t. No. I say every parent can, and I’ll give you a simple example. Say we’re traveling abroad and we’ve run out of water. There’s a store that isn’t kosher, but I can buy a bottle of water there. I go in with my child. “Mommy, I want this. Mommy, I want...” “Yossi, listen. Everything in this store is not kosher.

07:04 Speaker 2 We can’t buy anything here except the bottle of water we need to drink right now.” Now your body language, your tone of voice, the look in your eyes tell the child that even if he cries for a year, he won’t get it. And he won’t cry for a year. He’ll understand that’s that. So what happens to us the rest of the time? Sometimes I tell parents: Take that sentence you say when your child doesn’t listen, and say it in front of a mirror. Look at yourselves. Do you look like pushovers, or do you have some... Do you look like leaders? Do you look like guides? That’s very, very important. So number one: a parent is a guide; a parent is a leader. Two.

07:43 Speaker 4 Can I jump in for a second?

07:44 Speaker 2 Yes.

07:45 Speaker 4 I can’t help saying how closely this connects to Tanya. It tells us: “The mind rules over the heart by its very nature.” And in chapter 14, the Alter Rebbe says everyone can do it—no asterisks. What does it mean for the mind to rule over the heart? The mind is the faculty of intellect: chochmah, binah and daas. They’re called the parents of the emotions. And that’s our job with our children: to let the mind rule over the heart, and not just give in. Because if we follow our hearts, Hashem help us, who knows where we’ll end up. And then the children will be leading the situation.

08:12 Speaker 2 Everything, everything comes from the Torah, and everything comes from Tanya. It’s the most amazing thing there is. I say this: the Alter Rebbe wrote it 250 years ago. You’d think it was for his generation. But no, it’s exactly for us.

08:21 Speaker 4 Yes.

08:22 Speaker 2 Two, we’ve reached number two. The child will resist and cry. Expect it. Don’t be surprised by it, and don’t be afraid of it. I say just the opposite: thank Hashem. I have a healthy child who’s doing the most natural thing. When someone tells me what to do, yes, I resist and I cry. But what do we actually do? Number three is what I call a bird with two wings. A bird can’t manage with one wing; it can’t fly. It always needs both wings. One wing is acknowledging feelings, and immediately the second wing is the boundary. Years ago—not hundreds of years ago—there were only boundaries. “If you don’t do this and that,” two slaps, and so on. It didn’t work. The child might have listened more, sometimes, but it was out of fear. And if the parent wasn’t there, the child would do whatever he wanted. That’s not the kind of education we want. On the other hand, people went all the way to the opposite extreme: “Anything you want, my prince, my princess—just don’t cry.” That’s very bad. Then people realized we need something in the middle, both things together. Say we’ve just been at the playground, the child was playing, and we had a wonderful time, but now we need to go home. I say, “Yossi, I was watching you, and I saw how much you enjoyed yourself today.” The more I describe what I saw, the more the child knows: Mom was watching me today. She wasn’t looking at her phone. Children notice that so much, and we don’t even think about it. At school events too—sorry to bring this up—the mother stands behind the camera. The child wants to see his mother’s eyes,

09:55 Speaker 2 he wants to see her looking at him. But no, she’s looking through the camera. We’ve gotten things mixed up here. So she describes it: “You did this, and you had such a good time. But now we’re going home.” Yes, that’s the boundary. Now we’re going home. Well, of course Yossi cries, as we said. He cries and resists. He lies down on the ground. I don’t tell him again. He heard me the first time. One of the biggest mistakes parents make is repeating themselves over and over. Once a child hears us doing that, he knows, “Okay, there’s a button I can press here. Mom is afraid of me; she’s afraid to tell me what to do.” I said it once. Now I count to twenty in my head, and then, in the calmest tone, I say, “Can you do it yourself, or do you need help?” That’s the magic sentence—but calmly. Not, “Can you do it yourself or do you need help?” No. Very, very calmly. He keeps crying. Now I don’t say anything else. I don’t say, “Didn’t I tell you? I warned you.” Leave it. Pick him up? Of course. I’m not talking about an eighteen-year-old, right? I’m talking about a little child who’s been getting this message from the start. I pick him up and put him in the stroller or the car seat, wherever I need to. I don’t—this crying now is healthy crying, and it’s perfectly okay. That’s it. Today he learned what a boundary is. Okay, I’m not saying he’ll listen from tomorrow on. He’ll test us a few more times. But that’s one, two, three: clarity. A parent is a guide. The child will resist and cry, and that’s where we need to acknowledge his feelings, but immediately set the boundary. And we need to do it consistently. Consistency is another very important word here. Today I don’t

11:27 Speaker 2 have the energy: “Fine, do whatever you want.” Now I do have the energy: “No, you can’t.” What’s a child supposed to make of that? The child will just do whatever he wants.

11:33 Speaker 4 I’m making a video of you.

11:35 Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yes, and I’m not even talking about the educational side anymore. I’m talking more generally now. Doctors have really reached conclusions about this. Forgive the expression, but it messes with a child’s brain. Until age two, absolutely not, not, not. It’s like giving a child a spoonful of poison. It simply damages the brain. They’ve done many, many studies on this. What happens with children who were given it? Some of the children swam or did some other physical activity, and some played video games. Afterward they gave them a test, just an ordinary test. The ones who had done physical activity performed a thousand times better than the—it's as though it does something to the brain. It puts the brain to sleep. Everything on the screen is so colorful and so captivating.

12:22 Speaker 4 As opposed to physical activity, which brings the brain to life.

12:24 Speaker 2 Yes, look, there are still many homes where children read books. Books are something you start with from the very beginning. If you can get a child excited about a book, then later, when the child learns to read, they want to read on their own. Or there are older siblings at home.

12:39 Speaker 4 Games, even books.

12:39 Speaker 2 Reading aloud. It’s like, what have we done? What have we done here? It’s hard. It’s hard. I have a whole podcast on this subject too. It’s very easy to say, “Don’t let them watch it,” but a mother wants to drink a cup of coffee too, so what do you do? All right, but that’s not for this time. We’ll continue, with Hashem’s help.

13:00 Speaker 4 Wow.

13:00 Speaker 2 So one, two, three: clarity. And everyone can do it. Every mother can do it, and every father too. By the way, the father and mother need to be in this together. When Dad says something, children are so clever. The child goes to Mom as if nothing happened and tries to get what he wants from her instead. No. If Dad said no, then it’s no. And the same goes if Mom said something. So always be together on this. You have a disagreement? You grew up in different ways. Go outside, take a walk, talk it all through, and when you come back, you’re of one mind. The same idea, the same approach. That’s what the Rebbe Rashab spoke about. Just as putting on tefillin is an obligation—there’s something about it in Teves, I think it’s in Hayom Yom—so is dedicating that half hour. There really is so much to devote to our children’s education, and as time goes on, it takes even more time. We need that time. It’s so important to think about how we do this, how we raise our children. “Raise” is such a beautiful word. You really raise a child. Interestingly, English says it too: “to raise a child”—to lift the child up, to help them grow. That’s what we want to do here.

14:20 Speaker 4 Wow, we really do grow into it. Life rushes along: you get married, the children arrive, baruch Hashem, when everything goes as it should, and you don’t even take in the situation. I can tell you about myself: suddenly, baruch Hashem, I have six children. No one teaches you how to do this. There’s no instruction manual. The first child arrives and you hear advice from everyone, and everyone has something to say. One person says this, another says the opposite.

14:46 Speaker 2 Right.

14:46 Speaker 4 “Do it this way.” “No, no, no, what are you talking about?” And...

14:48 Speaker 2 I say: thirteen years in school, and the two most important things in life—marriage and children—aren’t discussed. What good does all the trigonometry and ancient history and who knows what else do me? I’m not talking, G-d forbid, about sacred studies. But with the other subjects, so many hours are spent on them instead of on these important things.

15:12 Speaker 4 Absolutely. Wow. Well, we want to hear about many more things. I’m trying to think—or perhaps you can lead us into... You sent me an interesting reading.

15:23 Speaker 2 I want to talk about crying, because I think it’s so, so important. It says that Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave Adam and Chava a gift. Ah, how does it say it there? A precious stone—as if the tear, tears, are simply a gift. Only human beings cry. Now, G-d forbid, may no one ever have anything difficult in life. But when we do face some difficulty, crying is what gives us release. And here we just want to quiet these children. A baby cries—boom, a pacifier. I’m not saying not to give one. The right way is to hold the pacifier in front of his face, and if he opens his mouth a little, then I give it to him. I don’t shove it in to quiet him. Now, in the past it really was like this. People would say, “If you’re going to cry for no reason, I’ll give you two slaps and then you’ll have a reason to cry.” That sounds terrible. But what do people say today? “Why are you crying? Are you a baby?” Notice: it’s all about quieting them, quieting them.

16:20 Speaker 4 I think they don’t even say it. It’s something subconscious.

16:22 Speaker 2 Subconscious, yes. Look—

16:23 Speaker 4 How to make him stop.

16:25 Speaker 2 Yes, he has to—there has to be quiet here. Now, a few years ago—I don’t know, I can’t remember how many, maybe five or six—I started doing things completely differently. I remember the first time I did it with the older group, the child looked at me like this. He had never heard anything like it. The child is crying. Yes, it’s the beginning of the year. You know what? I even wrote it down on a sheet of paper, because our automatic response is, “Don’t cry, Mommy will be here soon. Don’t cry.” I wrote it down and told the staff, “Read it from the page until you know how to say it spontaneously.” The child cries. I go over to him and say, “I understand. You’re crying. You don’t know me yet. You don’t know the other children, and you want Mommy, and you’re crying. You’re allowed to cry. It’s okay to cry. Do you know that I cry too when I’m sad? I cry and cry and cry until I get it out of my heart, and then I feel much better.” There was a time at one of the daycare centers I visited. It was simply amazing. There was a girl about two and a half years old whose mother was the director of the center. Okay, I had come for a training day, and apparently it was a Sunday too. Usually her mother probably indulged her a bit more and didn’t bring her straight in, but this time she did. The girl was crying. We were sitting in the office, and the mother said to me, “I can hear Tamar is still crying. Should I go to her?” I said, “You stay in the office. I’ll go see what’s happening.” Tamar is smart. She was sitting on the floor, stamping her feet. “Mommy, Mommy!” As if to say, “I know you’re here. What are you playing at?” And there were two groups of children who needed to eat breakfast. They were all looking in her direction, all sort of frozen.

18:02 Speaker 2 Okay, I came in and said, “Tamar, I understand. You want Mommy right now. But you know, Mommy is at work now and she can’t come. You’re crying, and I understand that you’re crying because you’re sad about it. But it’s okay to cry like that.” So, the same, the same, the same scenario, so to speak. I also went over to the children at both tables and said, “Tamar is crying because she wants Mommy, but I’m letting her. It’s okay to cry. Crying helps us feel better.” Both groups turned back and started eating breakfast. They understood. She kept going. I’m not going to tell you some fairy tale: she kept crying for fifteen minutes by the clock. I sat facing her the whole time. She was on the floor and I was on a little chair, looking at her and trying to send her good thoughts. I was thinking, Tamar is learning now what it means to delay gratification. I didn’t ask her, “Do you want a drink? Do you want this?” Don’t talk to them when they get into that state. I don’t even know what to call it.

19:01 Speaker 4 Come on, have a cry.

19:02 Speaker 2 Yes. Don’t ask them questions. After fifteen minutes, it was simply amazing. It was like when you have a metal awning and rain is falling on it—that kind of noise—and suddenly the rain stops. That’s what it was like. Suddenly she stopped. Then I asked, “Tamar, do you want a drink?” She drank two cups of water, got up and went to the table. I stay for a full day, and during the day she saw me several times in the yard. She ran over to hug me, as if to say, “This woman did something good for me.” That’s how I felt about what happened. “This woman did something good for me.” So I say, that’s it. We need to think about this. Crying is not the problem. Crying is the solution. Now there are three things we need to know. Okay, first of all, when a child cries, check all their physical needs. What might the child need? A child cries when he’s hungry. A child cries when he’s tired. A child cries when he’s thirsty. A child cries when his diaper needs changing—all those things.

19:55 Speaker 4 And with a baby, of course, crying is how they express themselves.

19:59 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, but I’m saying to check first. Don’t say, “Okay, Miriam said to let them cry.” I didn’t say that. Check everything the child might need. Then I say this: try to imagine, especially for a child in an infant daycare room, there are at least eighteen babies—three groups, six babies in each group. It’s madness. In the older group there are thirty-three children.

20:23 Speaker 4 Like the nursery in a hospital.

20:25 Speaker 2 Yes, something like that, something like that. Now try to imagine it. I tell every adult to imagine being in a room. The door is closed; you can’t leave. You’re there for eight and a half hours with, with, with thirty-three children. For us, that would be like being with five hundred people. This one pushes me, that one took something from me, another pulled at me, another shouted in my ear. It builds and builds and builds and builds, and then I want to scream, “Get me out of here already! Enough, I can’t take it!” Now, there’s a hormone called cortisol, and when its level is high, the whole immune system weakens. That’s one reason children get sick so often in daycare centers, in places with lots of children: they’re under stress. They’re under stress. There’s no getting around it. Listen, I’m telling you, I’m waiting for Moshiach just because of this. I can see the scene. No, I can see it in my mind. I can see it: there are no problems making a living, so no one has to go out to work. Every mother really loves being with her children. She enjoys being with them.

21:24 Speaker 4 Six in one belly won’t be easy.

21:26 Speaker 2 What?

21:27 Speaker 4 I’m saying there’ll be six in one belly.

21:29 Speaker 2 All right. But wait—the daycare centers will still be there, as a sort of community center. Every mother will be able to come with her children, happily and lovingly. No, because sometimes I hear...

21:39 Speaker 4 It really is so hard. If we get into that subject—and we won’t—it’s really as though the conditions aren’t fit conditions. And my mind goes straight to school. A child comes home overwhelmed. You think, “What am I expecting of him? Would I want to sit in that classroom for eight hours?” Not necessarily. Thirty...

21:54 Speaker 2 Well, you know I have a daughter...

21:56 Speaker 4 Thirty-eight children.

21:57 Speaker 2 I have a daughter who homeschools. Did you know that? For six years already. Dinush.

22:01 Speaker 4 Dinush in Ashkelon. Right, right, I heard.

22:03 Speaker 2 Amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. At first, the whole family looked at me. And now, after COVID—especially in the United States, millions of people did it, because suddenly they were at home with their children and said, “Wait, wait, this is fun. I want to get to know my children. I want to get to know them and enjoy them.”

22:19 Speaker 4 Yes, I have a podcast episode with someone who did that kind of education.

22:22 Speaker 2 Okay, that’s an aside. So, as we were saying, the child really does have this stress that keeps growing and growing. I describe it as a semicircle. Okay, it rises and rises and rises and rises. It reaches a peak. Now it needs to start coming down, but we never let it reach the peak. We’re always saying, “Do you want water? Do you want this? Maybe you want that? Maybe we should do this for you?” Let him get it all out, and then you’ll see—he’ll go back to being a sweet child. In other words, he’s let out everything he had inside. And the third kind is what we talked about earlier. When I tell a child what I want him to do, he resists, and that can involve crying too, okay? So I tell him, “I understand how you feel, but this is what we’re doing now.” Period.

23:08 Speaker 4 The question is what you...

23:08 Speaker 2 Without the “okay” at the end. You know, we get this wrong. “Okay.” No, there’s no “okay” here. I’m not asking. I’m telling him. And really, what is a boundary?

23:16 Speaker 4 Wow, that “okay” is so automatic.

23:18 Speaker 2 What is a boundary? We get boundaries terribly wrong. We think that when we give a child an instruction, that’s a boundary: “You’re not going to do this or that.” That isn’t a boundary; it’s an instruction, a command. Take a simple example. I live in a high-rise building, and the elevator has lots of buttons. Of course every child really wants to try them, but no, that could put the whole elevator out of order. I say to the child: “I see those buttons for the floors. You really like playing with them, but you can’t. We don’t want the elevator to get stuck or something to happen.” So now I tell the child what I’m going to do. That’s the boundary: “When we go into the elevator, I’m going to stand with my back to those buttons. I’ll lean against them so you won’t be able to touch them.” I don’t ask, “Okay?” I don’t say anything else. I’ve told him what the boundary is, and now I do what I said. That’s called setting a boundary. Children need to hear that. I think that when a child tries again and again, it’s because he hasn’t actually received a clear message. It looked as though the rules could be bent—and we do bend them. If he starts crying, it’s “Okay, okay, fine, take it. Go ahead and do what you want.”

24:32 Speaker 5 And it’s also connected to that panic we feel about crying.

24:35 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

24:36 Speaker 5 It sets us off.

24:36 Speaker 2 Right, right. And if I know the crying is going to come, I’m not frightened by it. Good—he’s a healthy child, boruch Hashem, doing what he needs to do. So, yes.

24:46 Speaker 5 I’d like to ask you about something that isn’t so timely right now—we’re right in the middle of the year—but the whole issue of children adjusting to a new school or daycare, which is...

24:55 Speaker 2 Wow, wow, that’s a question. That’s a wonderful question. I don’t know if you saw it in Neshima. I spoke about it there too. Racheli Rabinowitz interviewed me on the subject. I—I’m glad, I’m glad you asked me that. I’m telling you.

25:11 Speaker 5 It breaks my heart every single time.

25:13 Speaker 2 Here’s what I say. There’s no such thing—I’ve heard this phrase; it isn’t something I made up—“He’ll get used to it.” Excuse me. I’m sorry, and sorry again. Now, some children adjust more easily, and for some it’s hard. There was one child who has really stayed in my mind. I even remember his name was Shmuel, and I can’t remember the names of hundreds and hundreds of children. He stood one floor tile away from the door—I don’t know. He was only a year and a half old, and he didn’t stop crying. There was also something going on in the family. His father was ill, and it really wasn’t simple. His caregiver went to the Kosel to daven for him; she cared so, so much about what he was going through. After a few days, I could see this wasn’t working. I called the father in. He was terribly frightened; he thought we were going to send his son away. I said, “No, listen. If you follow my instructions exactly, he’ll stay with us.” I told him, “I know it isn’t easy. For a whole week, you bring him for one hour and then pick him up. Then we’ll make it two hours.” I watched the child gradually, gradually adjust. In the end it took a month, but it had been a terrible situation. Imagine letting a child cry and cry like that. “He’ll get used to it.” What does that even mean, “He’ll get used to it”?

26:28 Speaker 5 During that hour.

26:29 Speaker 2 So...

26:29 Speaker 5 Did he agree to stay at first?

26:30 Speaker 2 Yes, he stayed and saw that his father came back, so that already made it easier for him. And I’m telling you, afterward he was one of the sweetest children. Before that, he wasn’t at all able to look around—not at toys, not at anything. He was so caught up in his crying, and it was terrible. So I say, especially with children who come from home—say a two-year-old suddenly comes to us and his mother is still nursing him—tell me, what do you expect? What can we do for a child like that? Or he’s coming from his grandmother’s, where it’s one-on-one. It’s hard for them. It has to be very gradual, very, very gradual. And when the daycare calls and says, “Please come pick him up,” you mustn’t be angry. They want what’s best for the child, not what’s best for themselves. Think about it: this is your child’s emotional well-being. This, this, this is something that sometimes makes me cry. I want to tell you about one of the daycares—I won’t say the name. I knew the mother personally; she’s even family. Every time I came in, her child was in the infant room. He wasn’t such a tiny baby anymore—he was ten months old—but he wanted to be held all the time. I would call his mother at work and say, “Come now.” I drove her crazy. Every time I came to provide guidance, I called her in. Then, a year later, she had another baby. She stayed home for a year. She told me, “You should know, it’s only because of you.” I said, “Not because of me.”

27:44 Speaker 5 You wouldn’t let me work.

27:45 Speaker 2 Thanks to me, thanks to me. I said to her, “Well, how was it?” She said, “It was wonderful. It was wonderful.” It’s a whole different world. I don’t know. I don’t know. Moshiach, enough already—please come.

27:57 Speaker 5 Yes. Because with adjusting, ultimately, you’re saying maybe we need to do something differently. I feel it when I bring my child—I’m talking about preschool now. Even a three-year-old who’s finished daycare comes to preschool and looks at me as if to ask, “Why am I supposed to stay here? I don’t know this place.” Even though there had been some sort of introductory visit, you know, half an hour in the classroom just isn’t enough. And the teacher said to me, “All right, leave him and we’ll manage, it’ll be fine.” But I felt that I didn’t want to leave him. And inside, there are voices telling me, “Let go, come on.” And you’re left wondering what the right thing is. In the end I stayed, even though... He went out into the yard, and I told him, “I’m in the classroom.” Then I saw him peeking through the window to check that I was still inside.

28:43 Speaker 6 I want to tell you about something I do, and I can also tell you about my books. Grandma Miriam Tells Stories: I like what I call “stories about places.” For something like this, I make a story. Right at the beginning of the year, I photograph all the corners of the preschool or daycare. Then we bring it home and tell the story with the family. “Yossi Goes to a New Preschool”—that’s the name of the book. In the morning, he wakes up, washes negel vasser and eats breakfast, and then he goes to preschool. Who greets him there? Teacher Sarah—the name doesn’t matter. It all has pictures, and the book is at home. We read it at home, we read it to Grandma, we read it to everyone, and afterward he tells the story himself. He points to the place he likes best. The more verbal he is, the more he can take part in it. I’ve seen that it helps enormously, enormously. It’s really wonderful.

29:32 Speaker 5 Wow, let’s...

29:33 Speaker 6 Wonderful.

29:35 Speaker 5 Let’s show it too. I hope people can see it. There, I think so. Now I understand you. What’s the idea behind the book?

29:42 Speaker 6 Yes, all these stories are things that really happened. And listen to how clever children are. Look at the second story, about the sad trash can—the sad trash can. It came from something that happened. No, no, a few more pages. There, exactly, yes: “The Story of a Sad Trash Can.” Now, I say that what you teach a child at an early age, he’ll know for the rest of his life. I always used to tell the caregivers, “When you go out—sorry, when you go outside to the yard—always take a bag with you and say, ‘Wow, look how much litter the wind has blown into our yard. Let’s see who can help us pick it up.’” And I wrote this story. A clever child in our family, my husband Yechezkel’s great-grandson, said to me, “Miriam, you write here that all the stories really happened. Did that trash can tell you this?” A six-year-old child. At first I was stunned, and then I said, “You know what? You’re right. He didn’t tell me. But if he could talk, I’m telling you, that’s what he would say.” It was one of those moments—children take it seriously too. Every story in this book is based on things that really happened, and afterward we talk about it. Every child can take part. It’s an opportunity. After every story there’s a “Let’s Talk About It” section, with guiding questions.

31:00 Speaker 5 Education through stories.

31:01 Speaker 6 Yes, yes. It’s a wonderful way.

31:04 Speaker 5 And in the context of adjusting, for example, it’s really preparing them in advance: let’s talk about what’s going to happen.

31:10 Speaker 6 Yes, yes, that too. So you can do it before they start. On the very first day you come, you take pictures here and there with the child, and then show them to him at home. Wow, the whole family gathers and says, “Do you know he’s going to a new daycare? Look, they have this here. And these toys—how fun!” And then, little by little, he gets used to it. Yes, it’s not something you do in one shot and you’re done. It’s like us. You also arrived in a foreign country, right? Yes, on that first day, when you still don’t know who’s who or what’s what.

31:40 Speaker 5 Right.

31:40 Speaker 6 And you’re an adult, so you understand how things work, how processes unfold. The child has no idea what’s waiting for him. What do we expect from him? Such a tiny little child. What? What do we expect? Now, a little baby also needs that quiet, and there’s noise, and sometimes he has to wait for food. They all need it at the same moment. And the caregivers—I’m telling you, I salute them. There aren’t even words. There aren’t even words. I say they should have been chosen to light the ceremonial torch long ago, all the caregivers. But what do they get? What do they get? Just stories about how they did this and how they did that. I’m saying there are thousands upon thousands of wonderful women, and you never hear anything about them.

32:19 Speaker 5 Right. Educators in general.

32:21 Speaker 6 I tell the story of the caregiver who went to the Kosel to daven for that child.

32:25 Speaker 5 Wow.

32:26 Speaker 6 And there are many like her, who do all sorts of things, and when they see those children later on the street, they hug them and show them affection. Does anyone tell those stories? Does anyone say a word about it?

32:36 Speaker 5 Maybe this is an opportunity to tell everyone listening to show appreciation whenever they can.

32:40 Speaker 6 A kind word. This week I was—

32:42 Speaker 5 Like you said about the phone call, when Dina called you and said that this isn’t—

32:45 Speaker 6 Yes.

32:45 Speaker 5 It isn’t customary. What isn’t customary? It’s...

32:48 Speaker 6 This week I was at a daycare where I’d come to do a day of training, and in the middle of it, a mother came in with a tray, two chocolate milks and some cookies, and said, “I appreciate their work so much.” I—it warmed my heart so much. You don’t even have to do that. Sometimes you don’t have to bring anything at all, just write a little note: “Thank you for everything you do.” And there are parents who do that, I can’t say there aren’t. But with some parents, the first thing is a complaint. I’m not saying you shouldn’t speak up if there’s something that needs addressing, but “Why does he have a runny nose? Why did they change his clothes?” I mean, what, what, what? And this is a subject I’m getting into now, one I’m working very, very hard on: the whole subject of gratitude. Grat— I say, Hakadosh Boruch Hu gives us this from the moment we open our eyes. The first thing you have to say is Modeh Ani. And every time you eat something, you say a brachah of thanks, and still it’s so hard for us. A complaint comes immediately, immediately. I remember about twenty years ago, I was at the health clinic. I needed some test, and the receptionist was amazing. I said, “Tell me, who’s the big boss here?” I ask that a lot. She got scared, as if to say, “What do you want to say? Excuse me? Do you want to make some kind of—” I said, “I want to write to whoever’s in charge here about how efficient and wonderful you are.” And I just wrote it out by hand. I still have it at home to this day. They sent me a letter from Clalit Health Services, with copies to five different places: “Thank you, Mrs. Bloy, for taking the time to write this. It’s so important to us.” You know what? I feel like crying. I said, apparently I’m one of a kind. They don’t get

34:21 Speaker 6 letters like that at all.

34:22 Speaker 5 Things that are so ordinary, and...

34:24 Speaker 6 I also do this for my granddaughters’ teachers, for example. I called at the beginning of the year and said to the teacher, “My granddaughter just came back, and I’d asked her to come to my house after school. I asked her, ‘How was your day?’ She had fun; she had a good day. And I want to wish you that this happiness lasts all year long.” You know, she was in shock too. When you call a teacher, she immediately feels she has to— “What? That’s all you wanted to say?” Poor things, they’ve taken so many knocks already that they can’t believe someone would call just to say a kind word.

34:54 Speaker 5 The work is so demanding, too, really demanding. And you see that today they have to scrape together staff—anyone with a pulse can get hired.

35:00 Speaker 6 You know what? Daycares are closing; rooms are closing. That’s it. It’s over. So nobody—

35:06 Speaker 5 To open a daycare is really—

35:08 Speaker 6 Nobody wants to anymore.

35:09 Speaker 5 The biggest question is whether there will be staff.

35:10 Speaker 6 There aren’t any. That’s it. There are buildings, there are children, but there’s no staff. Maybe they’ll bring in robots. I don’t know. Robots are never late. They never... I don’t know.

35:20 Speaker 5 And there are plenty of children, bli ayin hara...

35:22 Speaker 6 Yes, yes, it isn’t simple. It isn’t simple. So this whole matter of gratitude, of saying a kind word, is very, very important. Ah, we wanted to talk about “less is more.” That’s important too. Less is more—less really is more. All those extra toys we think we need to buy, more and more and more. We actually use odds and ends, all sorts of odds and ends. It’s amazing, amazing. We had a new daycare that we opened, and everything was really beautiful, with all the newest toys and everything. I happened to bring some odds and ends from home too, because I had these boxes from my son-in-law. So I brought about a hundred boxes. All right, I put them off to the side, and some parents brought their children to see the place too. So I said quietly to the parents, “Watch where the children go: to the pretty dolls, the nice cars, or those boxes.” Every single one of them. It was just amazing to see. There’s that joke: you buy a child a car or a doll, and it comes in a box. They play with the toy for a few minutes, but with the box for half an hour. That’s... So what happened to me? It went like this. Mothers often call me for advice, and I’m always—I really am always very, very available for things like that. If I can’t talk at that moment, I tell them I’ll speak to them later, but it’s very important to me to help. So this mother called, and she really sounded close to tears. She said, “I have three children, and... how do I put it? I suddenly woke up and I have three children.” Like you say, it’s that kind of feeling, and suddenly I feel I can’t cope. It’s so hard for me. They make a mess, they throw everything all over the house. Really.

37:03 Speaker 6 I could see how genuinely hard it was for her. I told her, “First of all, the fact that you’re calling me means you already deserve a crown. It shows that you’re a truly special mother, that you really want things to be good. You’re not... And now I’ll give you something practical. First, after the children go to sleep tonight, gather up all the toys you have out now. If you have small bins, wonderful. If not, even bags will do. Sort them into categories: all the animals in one bag, all the cars in another, all the dolls. Put a label on each bag, or write on it with a marker. Take out only three bags. Everything else goes up into some storage space. And containers—containers can be anything. Say you have one of those family-size ice cream tubs in the summer. Wash it out; it’s a wonderful size for all sorts of things. You buy mushrooms, [unclear], whatever. Save those containers. You don’t even need to buy anything. If you want to, you can. If you want something prettier, you can buy it, but use anything that looks like you could put things in it. Even the baskets fruit comes in, the kind you buy apples in—the children love them. You just have to watch out: if one breaks, throw it straight in the garbage. The cardboard boxes vegetables come in—wow, wow, wow. That’s their favorite toy now. The idea is to have only a few things. We always thought children needed lots of variety, but they don’t. You put out just a few things. And this whole subject of play—we call it free play, but it’s never free, because we’re constantly telling the children to do this or that, and ‘well done,’ and ‘sit quietly.’ I actually did this at a daycare this week.

38:41 Speaker 6 Into several groups. I told them how hard it is, how hard it is. I said: “You’re sitting quietly now.” Once I’ve prepared everything—I call it an invitation to play. It’s like when you’re coming to a meal: “Here, look at the table. I’ve put out cakes and other things.” No, when I come in, I start arranging things so they’ll look inviting. And then you take a step back, and we write down the stories. That’s the time to document, to listen to their words and see what they’re doing. And when there’s a moment like that—say, a few minutes before they go to sleep, while they’re lying on their mattresses—I say, “Children, remember when I was writing while you were playing? Today I wrote your story. Now I want to read it to you.” Once, I really did read out a story like that. It was between lunch and nap time, and one child said to me, “Miriam, didn’t you write down that I did this and that?” I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I got my pen, added it by hand, and read the whole story again from the beginning. Then he was happy. So when I document and listen, I intervene less. And even when children quarrel, that’s part of learning. There’s a whole course at the Hebrew University called “Learning to Live Together.” When we’re constantly saying, “Okay, you go over there, and you go over there,” we’re actually doing the opposite. We’re not teaching them—we’re not giving them the chance to learn to live together. Now, I’m not talking about hitting or anything that could cause harm. Don’t hurt a friend, don’t hurt yourself, and don’t harm your surroundings. Those are the three rules. But apart from that, I’ll tell you a sweet story from one of the daycares. I even had to hold the caregiver back so she wouldn’t walk away. Two children were fighting over a little car. Now they—

40:16 Speaker 6 They were crying, but nobody hit anyone. One pulled and the other pulled and pulled, until one of them got hold of it. As soon as he got it, he started running around the room. At first the other child cried, but then he saw it and thought, “Wow, what a great idea!” He started running after him, and they both burst out laughing. I said to the caregiver, “See? See? If you had—‘No, he had it.’” It’s as if King Solomon has arrived: he had it first, he had it last. Let’s count to ten. Stop.

40:41 Speaker 7 Let’s unpack that sentence.

40:41 Speaker 6 Stop, stop. Take a step back and watch. Let’s see how they solve the problem. Sometimes, say, they have a hard time. Then I simply reflect what’s happening. “I see there’s a red ball here, and Yossi, you want it, and Dudi wants it too.” I don’t say anything else; I don’t give them advice. I just reflect what I see. They’re so caught up in the situation that they don’t even know what’s happening. You understand? This way, I give them a chance to sort of take a step back and see: “Oh.” I’m showing them what’s going on. Wow, it’s so interesting. Say there are twenty balls on the floor, but he wants the ball in the other child’s hands.

41:19 Speaker 7 Of course. That’s the most desirable one.

41:20 Speaker 6 So you see that something is going on here? He’s learning how things work in this world. How do we—say I want something: how do I go about it? What do I do? He’s learning, he’s learning, and we’re there beside them. We’re there beside them. That’s so, so important. Now, another really important thing is that we often get terribly excited. I get all sorts of videos of my granddaughters doing things, and it’s beautiful. I get so excited. But people talk the whole time while the child is playing: “Wow, how beautiful! Good for you! How beautiful!” Sit quietly. In a group it’s even worse, because then everyone stops and looks to see what the child did. Say they’re drawing: everyone is sitting around the table, you’ve put out materials, and they’re drawing. Then: “Sarah, look what I did!” “Wow, amazing!” And everyone stops.

42:08 Speaker 7 Their concentration is gone. Yes.

42:09 Speaker 6 Right. So what do I say? “Sarah, look what I did!” “I see.” You’re not responding to it. “I see”? That’s lukewarm. No, nothing has happened yet. I wait until they’ve finished, and then I say, “Now, children, let’s look at what each person did.” It changes the whole activity, because here you can do something wonderful to enrich their language. I take all the papers and point with my finger. “It says Yossi here. Yossi, is this yours?” And he’s like, “Yes, yes, yes.” “Let’s see what Yossi drew here. Yossi took the crayon and pressed so hard. Look at the line he drew from one side to the other.” Next one: “Sarah, is this yours?” “Yes.” “Sarah tapped the crayon on the page, and look what happened here—lots of dots.” You understand? And I go through everyone like that. It also makes the activity last longer.

42:51 Speaker 7 Such a small change, but—

42:52 Speaker 6 Yes, and this way I make the activity last longer. I give each child attention, and I give them language, words. They don’t know what they’ve done. Asking a child, “What did you draw?” is the worst thing you can do. Okay, I can describe what I see: “I see that today you used lots of colors and pressed hard. I see red here, and I see...” And don’t ask, “What color is this? What color is this?”

43:19 Speaker 7 Usually, when you ask them, “What did you draw?” they have no idea what to answer.

43:22 Speaker 6 No, it’s—there’s a sweet story about a grandmother who was walking with her granddaughter. She kept asking her what color things were because she wanted to see if her granddaughter knew her colors. Finally the little girl said, “Grandma, you should learn your colors.” Because what can a child think when I keep asking? That I don’t know. That I don’t know. It’s so—“What shape is this?” They told a story once, ages ago—

43:41 Speaker 7 That goes back to the guide.

43:43 Speaker 6 Yes, no, they told this story. Even now, people ask whether we teach colors. I’m like, where are you? What world are you living in today? What is this? There was a kindergarten teacher for whom it was terribly important that the children know shapes—triangles, squares, and so on. Then one of the girls went to her aunt’s wedding. What did she see? Triangular bourekas, round tables. I mean, it’s a joke but not a joke: her mind was already so focused on shapes instead of seeing the beauty of the occasion. You understand? Where are we with all these things? So yes. And that’s what I said to the mother, and, baruch Hashem, I say this: it’s like having two dishes in the sink—or fifty dishes and another five pots. Then you say, “Forget it, I’m going to sleep. I don’t want to touch this.” It’s the same for a child when there’s a huge mess. They run away. I’m still researching why it’s so much fun for them to dump everything out, but picking it up is another story.

44:38 Speaker 8 I’d love to hear the results when you have them.

44:40 Speaker 6 I make up all sorts of songs, too. So I made up a really sweet song. There’s that “Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see who’s picking up.”

44:47 Speaker 8 Nice.

44:47 Speaker 6 With that sort of boom, boom. So I made something gentler, to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Yes, that tune. Sorry. “It’s time to put the toys away, put the toys away, put the toys away. It’s time to put the toys away. Who will help me? Yossi’s helping pick up the blocks. Thank you, Yossi.” Not “Good for you.” I don’t like that phrase; it doesn’t say anything. “Thank you, Yossi.” And so on with each child, until—I want to thank every child by name for helping. It works, because they all hear that “thank you,” and then they want to help too.

45:35 Speaker 8 It really is so much gentler, too.

45:38 Speaker 6 Yes, yes. It’s not all those booms.

45:40 Speaker 8 Why, actually? I’m curious: what’s wrong with “good for you”? It’s something I heard a long time ago, and I don’t—

45:46 Speaker 6 Because it doesn’t say anything. Okay, “Good for you for picking that up,” and “Good for you for cleaning the whole house and working for five hours.” Instead, describe it. When you praise someone, describe it. You know, say you put together an incredible Shabbos meal, and someone says, “Thank you very much, everything was delicious.” Or someone comes over and says, “I—I have no words. Everything tasted so good. I could taste a special spice you put in the fish.” They give details. Then you say, “This person really noticed. They really mean it.” You understand? Not just “Good for you.” End of story. That’s it; I did the equivalent of clicking “like.” I wrote an article that I spent hours on. Write, “I didn’t like it.” That’s your right. It’s not that I’m saying I have to hear something nice. But a “like”—that’s it, end of story. Boom, and it’s over.

46:30 Speaker 8 It’s terribly shallow.

46:31 Speaker 6 Very flat. So from a young age, I want to teach a child to have words in their vocabulary. What words can they use when they want to say something is good? There are lots of words. You understand? It’s very, very important.

46:44 Speaker 8 I’m trying to sum up a little of what you said earlier. The whole “less is more” idea is really about giving them space. They know themselves better. They manage with less, but at the same time, you need to be there.

46:58 Speaker 6 To sit with them.

46:58 Speaker 8 So they feel your presence.

46:59 Speaker 6 Sit with them, if you have the time to do that.

47:02 Speaker 8 Be present without interfering.

47:03 Speaker 6 Yes. Look, let’s put it this way: starting when a child is a baby, I give him that time. Some mothers, especially with a first child, think they constantly need to... that he’s bored. A baby isn’t bored. Okay, he’s just arrived in the world. It’s like me coming to Switzerland for the first time in my life and saying, “I’m bored.” What do you mean, bored? There are mountains here, there’s this, there’s that. And then they hang up all these mobiles. It’s crazy. Imagine I’m standing on a mountain for the first time, I’m in Switzerland, and someone takes a rattle and shakes it in front of my eyes. Excuse me, go away! What are you doing to my life? So they take the child out in a stroller, and there’s this mobile blocking his whole view. My goodness, there are so many beautiful things to see here. A tree swaying from side to side, clouds, a car going by, a person walking past. Let the child look and see what’s happening in the world.

47:48 Speaker 8 Stuck looking at plastic.

47:49 Speaker 6 And then they tell you, “Wow, if he has all these things, he’ll be an Einstein.” Leave it alone.

47:55 Speaker 8 And the baby gym, too.

47:57 Speaker 6 Terrible. You know what the baby gym is? His hands. You know how, at about two months old, a baby suddenly discovers his hand, turns it every which way, opens it, closes it, and looks at it? That’s his mobile. One of the— Well, let me go back a bit. Our educational approach has actually been around for eighty years. It’s amazing; it feels like it was developed yesterday. I mean, with all the other approaches, every two or three years it’s, “No, that’s not good, do it this way now; this is good.” Whatever’s trending. Yes. There was a woman named Dr. Emmi Pikler, a remarkable woman. Eighty years ago, she lived in Hungary. After the war, she opened an orphanage that still exists today, though it’s no longer an orphanage. Today it’s a childcare center that people come to from all over the world. Just to give you a sense of who Dr. Emmi Pikler was, and how deeply she cared about children: she actually invented overalls with snaps at the top. Why did she invent that? She said, “When I change a baby’s diaper, I’m looking from the waist down. I’m not looking into his eyes at all. But if there’s a button up here, then I’ll...” That was the level of thought she put into it. Truly a remarkable woman. A woman named Magda Gerber worked with her. I recommend that everyone look up these women. Magda Gerber went to America in ’57. Her specialty was working with children with autism, and every child really was a whole world to her. Their approach was really an entire body of teaching. About—how long ago was it? Maybe ten years ago, someone came from America and I went to study with her—me, after raising eleven children—how

49:39 Speaker 6 to put a baby down in a crib, how to do these things. She called it respectful care. Anything involving care has to be done respectfully. What does that mean? I tell the child what I’m about to do. Take the simplest thing: wiping a nose. We don’t think twice. There’s a runny nose—boom, we wipe it. I always say, when we’re sitting together in a group of women, “Imagine I get up now and touch someone’s nose without saying a word to her. She’d recoil.” And children really do run away. But when I say to a child, especially an older child, “Your nose is running. Here’s a tissue. Would you like to do it yourself, or would you like me to help you?”—a lot of the time they want to do it themselves. True, they might smear a little on their cheek, but then I can say, “Oh, there’s still a bit here; let’s use another tissue.” It’s different. Or when I want to bring him over to the table: he’s absorbed in his own thoughts, and suddenly—boom—he’s moved over. Boom, he’s lifted up, he’s put down. What is that? Involve them. We want them to become independent, too. Tell them what’s happening. Of course, it all has to be done in good taste. I remember one caregiver who went into tremendous detail at breakfast: “Now we’re going to eat a long, green cucumber,” and one child said, “When are we eating?” That’s it. What I wanted to say is, I think even before the question of respect, there’s also a sense of calm here. Right. And I noticed this when we were in Ukraine for eight years. My husband and I really noticed that people there were generally more relaxed. Not now, of course, during the war. I mean... on a Sunday, for example, you’d see mothers out with strollers during maternity leave—yes, a whole year,

51:18 Speaker 6 and you can even extend it to three years. And you’d see adults explaining everything to children. At first I looked at it and thought, “What’s going on here?” They’re teaching them to notice everything. They’re constantly, really, putting what’s happening into words. Right. What’s happening around them. That’s very, very important. It amazed me, and it’s part of the culture. Very important. Very important. So she called it respectful care: explain everything you do when caring for a child, show him what you’re doing. Okay. The second thing is free movement. Every baby is born with a black box in his brain, and that box is unique to him. When he’ll stand up, when he’ll roll over, when he’ll sit up, when he’ll... We don’t know when any of that will happen, and all we want to do is speed it up, hurry him along. What’s the rush? I can walk into an infant classroom at a daycare and tell you, “That baby was sat up before he was ready,” because the way he sits, it’s as if you could just go “poof” and he’d fall over. With everything a child does—we see it with walking, for example. He starts to walk, he falls. He falls again. He won’t start walking until he feels steady enough. That thing we do, saying, “Who’s going to come to me?” and then stepping backward—I think that’s the worst thing you can do. And those walkers with wheels. No, no, no, no. She spoke about that a lot. Dr. Pikler was the kind of pediatrician who didn’t just come when a child was sick. A baby was born, and she’d come every week to see how he was doing, how he was developing, how he was growing. You understand? It was very important to her that a child’s body become healthy and strong in its own time. We’re not rushing him anywhere. Let’s see—give him interesting things to do. Then he learns to sit properly, he

52:56 Speaker 6 Learning... you understand? Here, everything is fast, fast, fast. No, no. Again, that spirit, that inner life. Yes, and the third thing is free play, as I said earlier. Free play means the child writes the script, directs it, and acts in it. We need to stop teaching children. Piaget was one of the first psychologists, a hundred years ago, to understand that a baby is a person. Until then, it was as if a baby just needed to grow up before they were worth anything, and those years were wasted. He said that when you teach a child, you take away the child's right to discover things independently, because whatever I discover on my own, I'll remember for the rest of my life. And that's so true. It's so true, and we're constantly... That really happened. Okay, so Magda Gerber came to America. Neither of them is alive anymore, but there's a woman named Janet Lansbury who was Magda's student, and a lot of my material comes from her. I also got her permission. I didn't mention this, but I've just written a book for parents called Lights in Parenting: The ABCs of Parenting with Joy. Nice name. Yes. My daughter Shoshi came up with the name, and I loved it very, very much. And who edited this wonderful book for me? My granddaughter, Racheli Dickstein. Working together was... Wow, you have all the... A dream. Talents. A dream, a dream. And for my book, Grandma Miriam the Storyteller, my granddaughter Mushki Landau worked on it. She did all the—not the editing, sorry—the layout and everything that makes the book beautiful. You'll see it later. Wow. How lovely it is

54:36 Speaker 6 that it's all... Yes. Wow, we made exactly twenty-two chapters. Each chapter begins with a letter of the alphabet. The first chapter begins with alef, the second with beis. Working with her was an amazing experience. She's truly brilliant, brilliant. Wow. I gave her pages and pages and pages, and she made something beautiful out of them. That's really happening now. I remember, as a child, we played some game in your living room. Yes, could be. And mostly on the roof. Yes, on the roof. The roof, boruch Hashem, still has lots of flowers, and it's beautiful, boruch Hashem. So yes, right now I just hope Hakadosh Boruch Hu makes it help as many people as possible. When is it actually coming out? Just now—yesterday I received the... We're sending it to China, and they sent us a sample of what the first copy looks like. A few small changes were still needed, and, im yirtzeh Hashem, it'll be out very soon. So give us the alef. Huh? You've introduced me to the letters. Yes. What's in alef, in the first chapter? I don't remember it by heart right now. We've worked on it and worked on it; it's really like a pregnancy where I've reached the point of saying, enough, I want to give birth already. I can't bear looking at it yet again. But yes. If you'd told me beforehand, I would have looked and written it down, but never mind. When everyone sees it, they'll see it. Yes. What else is there...? The tapping. Ah. I'm not letting that go. Tapping. Okay. Its full name is EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, a technique for emotional release. I came across it about twenty

56:13 Speaker 6 -five years ago, and I said, wow, this is a remedy for the days of Moshiach. What's the idea? As in acupuncture, there are points along what we call meridians. Instead of inserting a needle there, we tap with our fingers. It has the same effect of releasing those blockages. This came into the world in the late 1980s. There was a psychologist in California named Roger Callahan who had a patient named Mary. From a very young age, there was something about water she couldn't stand. Washing her hands, taking a shower, touching water—it made her feel nauseated. What could she do? And we're not just talking about someone who doesn't want to swim in a pool or things like that. This affected everyday life. At first, he tried to treat her as a psychologist. He managed to get her to sit outside the swimming pool downstairs in the building where his office was, so she could look at the water, but they weren't making progress. Then he began studying acupuncture. He didn't have his needles with him in the office, so he told her, “You know what? This point under the eye is connected to that area.” Each point is connected to a different area of the body. “Try just tapping it like this.” She tapped for just a few seconds and was suddenly stunned. I recently saw her telling the story. It's very interesting. She said, “Listen, for the first time, I don't feel that sensation.” Then she went downstairs and jumped into the pool fully dressed, like a little child, and enjoyed herself so much. Just from that? He was stunned. In English, he called it a “golden egg,”

57:58 Speaker 6 a golden egg. He said, “Oh, what I'm telling you now is worth ten thousand dollars,” because he charged ten thousand dollars to teach it. Now I hold workshops. I recently did one for all the teachers at Chabad girls' schools. I gave them a workshop explaining everything. Why? Because I want to bring it into classrooms, and I've already visited a few classes. There's one wonderful, sweet teacher I have to single out for praise: Rivka Machpud. First grade. She called me.

58:24 Speaker 9 I'm going to send this to my little daughter.

58:25 Speaker 6 She called me and said, “Miriam, I want you to come do this with my class.” I did it last week, and I enjoyed it tremendously. Those girls—their understanding! I don't just stand there and present it. I do it in a way that gives them an experience. I bring an orange that I've cut in half at home, show them half of it, and ask, “Girls, is this orange happy or sad?” In most classes, at first they think I'm not normal. What does it mean for an orange to be happy? “Happy.” Why is it happy? “Because it has lots of juice.” Good. I bring out a juicer and squeeze all the juice out. “Now it's been squeezed dry. Now it's sad; it doesn't have any juice left.” I'm telling you, it was simply amazing. Then I ask them, “Okay, tell me about things that make you happy,” and immediately they say, “A baby was born in our family.” “My aunt is getting married.” You know, you can see it. “Okay, something sad.” I specifically want examples from the playground: “Other girls don't include me.” Look at that, from first graders. Or, “I fell and got hurt.” Now, while we're doing the activity, one of the girls fell over with her chair and got a bump. I said, “Okay, now I need to show how this works.” I started gently tapping on her, and one of the girls took her outside, washed her face, and she came back okay, calmer. Then I said, “Okay, now I have the juice. Who wants the juice?” Everyone raised their hands. What do we do now? So I said, “You know what, girls? Since your friend fell, I think she deserves to have the vitamin C from this juice.” You know how children usually are: “Why her? Why not me?”

59:59 Speaker 6 But no. As soon as I finished the sentence: “I'm happy for my friend.”

1:00:06 Speaker 9 I know that line from Rivka's classroom.

1:00:07 Speaker 6 Oh my goodness, I said, “Rivka, listen, I didn't do something for you—you did something for me.” I was stunned. I said, “Oh my goodness, every home needs to hear this, starting from birth.” Being happy for others is such an important part of our lives. And why? Why is it so hard for us to be happy for someone else? What happened? Be happy that someone else has something. Wow, it was so powerful. And we didn't stop there. Afterward we did laughter yoga and laughed. We made a big circle, went into the circle, and burst out laughing. I left in such a wonderful mood and left them with lots and lots of positive energy.

1:00:41 Speaker 9 Wait, so the tapping is actually...

1:00:43 Speaker 6 So you tap on different points. Do you want to play it and then I'll do it, and we'll keep it together, or can't you?

1:00:51 Speaker 9 I can. Here we go—three, four.

1:00:58 Speaker 6 Now we'll hear a song to help us remember the points. Get your fingers ready, please.

1:01:07 Speaker 9 I want to, too.

1:01:07 Speaker 6 Ready? Let's begin.

1:01:15 Speaker 9 Oh, why did it stop? Wait.

1:01:19 Speaker 6 Tapping happily is really wonderful. You can do it alone or with a friend. Bim, bim, bam. At the beginning of the eyebrow, at the side of the eye, and the next spot is below the eye—not in it, just on the bone. Gently, please. Below the nose, in the little hollow below the lips. Bim, bim, bam. Now there are just three more points, and then we’ll have finished all the tapping. On the collarbone, below the neck—right or left, it’s the same. Below the armpit, tap with the palm of your hand. Light taps, with no force at all. On the crown—that’s what the top of the head is called—tap gently. One, two, three. And if it still hasn’t passed, we start again the same way. I didn’t send it to you, but I have a continuation of that song, which is really the tapping in the different places. It goes one, two, three, one, two, three. Three times in each place.

1:02:44 Speaker 9 That’s what you need to do, really.

1:02:45 Speaker 6 And then we—

1:02:45 Speaker 9 A line. One sequence each time.

1:02:46 Speaker 6 Yes, yes. And then we sing this song. It’s for the younger children. Yes. We are soldiers in Tzivos Hashem. Bim, bim, bim, bam, doing mitzvos all the time. Bim, bim, bim, bim.

1:03:00 Speaker 9 There’s an added part to the song here, too.

1:03:02 Speaker 6 We hug here, we hug there, we hug a friend all the time. We are soldiers in Tzivos Hashem. Bim, bim, bim, bim, bam, doing mitzvos all the time. Bim, bim, bim, bim, bam. We show love here, we show love there, we show love to a friend all the time. We are soldiers in Tzivos Hashem. Bim, bim, bim, bim, bam, doing mitzvos all the time. Bim, bim, bim, bim, bam. We give in here, like this, like this. We give in there, like this, like this. We give in to a friend all the time. One last time. We are soldiers in Tzivos... Help me. Bim, bim, bim, bam, doing mitzvos all the time. Bim, bim, bim.

1:03:47 Speaker 9 Let’s see if I remember it properly.

1:03:49 Speaker 6 That’s it.

1:03:49 Speaker 9 Wait, you do it on one side, right? Each time, here too?

1:03:52 Speaker 6 Yes, yes. Here, here. The truth is, this is really first aid. The collarbone here also comes up in chakras, and in many, many—what do you call it—all kinds of Chinese practices. So people know this spot, which is a very central point in the body. Say I feel like I’m about to explode—but don’t wait until you reach ten. I call it a scale from zero to ten, but once you pass six, let’s say, I tell the children, “I feel like I’m not calm. I’m going to do something now to calm myself down.” And then I simply tap lightly on the collarbone and breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, with a sort of audible “hah,” like “hah.”

1:04:44 Speaker 10 So there’s actually a point here.

1:04:47 Speaker 6 Oh, yes.

1:04:47 Speaker 10 There’s a point here—

1:04:47 Speaker 6 It specifically helps with calming down.

1:04:49 Speaker 10 Oh, yes, yes, yes. And each point has a different purpose.

1:04:53 Speaker 6 Look... Yes, but I don’t go into that, because then you’re so busy thinking about those things, and I don’t want that. Now, it isn’t quite so simple. I mean, that version is for young children. For older women, it actually starts with tapping on the karate point, and it always begins, “Even though...” And here I state my problem: “Even though such-and-such is happening, I accept myself deeply and completely.” Say I’m telling a story now, and—oh, no, it’s terribly interesting. Well, I have so much to say.

1:05:24 Speaker 10 Yes.

1:05:24 Speaker 6 What I’m saying is, our minds work in a very interesting way. Important things go into a drawer; unimportant things, the mind throws out. But anything traumatic doesn’t go into a drawer and doesn’t get thrown out. It sort of hangs between heaven and earth. Say something happened—I don’t know what—chicken soup was cooking in the house just when I thought a burglar was about to come into my home. Even without remembering what happened, when I smell that chicken soup, I might feel nauseous or afraid, without even... There are things I don’t even remember the origin of, but my body remembers. And that’s where we want to work on all these issues. So I say, if it’s something deeper—not something terribly traumatic, because then you really need a therapist—but if it’s something... All kinds of things have happened to me in my life, and a lot has happened to everyone. I always recommend buying a notebook, and this is something you do for thirty days. It goes more deeply into it. For thirty days, I devote twenty minutes to it every day. A quiet place, where no one disturbs me. I close my eyes and write down whatever comes up now. It could be something that happened yesterday, followed by something that happened ten years ago. It doesn’t matter.

1:06:39 Speaker 10 Intuitively.

1:06:40 Speaker 6 When I’ve finished all that, after thirty days, I start reading each story aloud to myself and seeing how I feel about that story now, on a scale from zero to ten. There was one woman once—I don’t treat people outside my family, but twice people brought me someone in a terrible state. One case was truly awful, really. A woman from one of the moshavim—it doesn’t matter who brought her to me—was in a terribly difficult emotional state. She arrived at one in the afternoon and went home at nine that night. She had to shower twice because the story was so difficult. What was her story? When she was a baby, her mother didn’t take her home. She brought her to some relatives, and all sorts of things happened. Now she was forty, and suddenly that story hit her and wreaked havoc on her. So we sat there, and I wrote a record of it. Just this week I found that record. I’m the baby now—meaning she’s speaking as the baby: “I waited for my mother’s arms. I waited to smell her scent. I waited for her heartbeat, which I’d heard throughout those nine months, and suddenly I came to a different home.” But now I’m grown up. Now I understand things differently. I understand that my mother couldn’t take me. She came to understand different things from back then and from now, back then and now, and boruch Hashem, she came through it. It was amazing to see her leave at nine o’clock a different woman.

1:08:02 Speaker 10 Wow.

1:08:03 Speaker 6 That was—wow. It was—I had the privilege of being there with her, because we went through it again and again and again.

1:08:08 Speaker 10 To relive the experience again.

1:08:09 Speaker 6 It’s that kind of thing, but it’s much faster than any other treatment. It’s amazing. Now, every year they have ten days, a sort of big conference, and I watch it online. I receive access to it. Twice I’ve bought it as well. I mean, each day you can listen for twenty-four hours for free, but afterward, if you want it, you have to pay. So I have at least a thousand dollars’ worth of material from all this at home, and it’s interesting. Doctors come, psychologists, people who work in operating rooms, all kinds of people, and each one tells how they use it. They have this saying: “Try it on everything.” Try it on anything, because what harm could it do?

1:08:45 Speaker 10 What’s it called?

1:08:46 Speaker 6 I, I—huh? EFT.

1:08:48 Speaker 10 Oh, so wait, that has to do with the tapping.

1:08:51 Speaker 6 Yes, yes, I brought it down to their level. I called it “magic tapping” for the little children. Come, I’ll tell you a story. About ten or twelve years ago, we were in Texas. My granddaughter Mushi Fagenson was a teacher then, and we came to visit her for a week. On Friday I said, “Mushi, listen, I’m bored. I’m coming to school, and I’m going to teach the whole school, class by class. I’ll go in, and we’ll do laughter yoga too.” What was lovely was that Mushi carried on doing it every morning. She taught seventh grade. A month ago she sent me a voice message. One of her former students, who has of course since married and had children, told her: “Mushi, I have to tell you this story. I’m in the mountains with my in-laws and the children, and there’s a camp here. One child had a panic attack, and I thought, ‘What can I do to help him?’ Suddenly I remembered what your grandmother taught us. I got the child through the panic attack.” It’s an incredibly powerful tool, incredibly powerful. I had another experience with a panic attack. A good friend of mine from childhood, Miriam Swerdlov, whom everyone knows, was once in Israel with her camp. She comes every year with the camp. My husband Yossel, of blessed memory, and I had taken her to a restaurant. We were sitting there and had just reached dessert when one of the girls called: “Miriam, come quickly. One of the girls has had some kind of panic attack. We’ve already called an ambulance.” So she asked me, “Do you think you can help her?” I said, “Look, I’m not giving her any medication, so if it doesn’t help, it won’t hurt.” I arrived, and the girl was lying there like

1:10:26 Speaker 6 a sack of potatoes. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t know anything about what had happened. Slowly, I went through it with her. I was tapping on myself and saying the words. After twenty-five minutes, I helped her sit up, then helped her stand, and we got her out of there without her having to go in the Magen David Adom ambulance or spend time in the emergency room. So it’s an incredibly powerful tool. And why am I so insistent about it? After the story Mushi sent me, I said, “Oh, those teachers—they need to keep doing it every day.” I just told Rivka Marcus, “Appoint one student to be your secretary. After davening, take a minute, and again when they come back from the yard. Every day when they come back from the yard, let each child clear things out.” Then I’m not carrying that sack, because we carry around a heavy, foul-smelling sack filled with all the stories of our lives. So that’s EFT.

1:11:23 Speaker 10 The daily one.

1:11:23 Speaker 6 That’s EFT.

1:11:23 Speaker 10 Beautiful.

1:11:24 Speaker 6 I ask: What do children hear at home? Do they hear complaints, or do they hear joy? It’s so, so important. I was just thinking about after Pesach—no, not after Pesach. It was after the Yom Tov days of Sukkos, when it was Shabbos, Yom Tov, Shabbos, Yom Tov. And suddenly, two days later, it was Shabbos again. If a mother says at home, “Ugh, Shabbos again. I can’t do this,” what does the child hear? What does the child hear? I remember one of my daughters, before Pesach, when she had two children. She would fill the bathtub with water, they would put on bathing suits, and she would give them soapy foam and all their toys to clean. To this day, Pesach is a wonderful experience for them, and that comes from childhood. We can’t wait until they’re grown and then tell them how enjoyable and wonderful it is. At home, parents need to walk around saying, “How fortunate we are! We are privileged! How fortunate we are! Things are so good for us. We know what we’re doing in this world; we know what our purpose is here.” That needs to be the atmosphere at home. When something happens, Hakadosh Boruch Hu wanted it to happen. Say the words “hashgachah pratis.” Everything is so precise. I simply live with hashgachah pratis. These things amaze me. Take Batsheva, for example, the driver who brought me here just now. She’s very fond of me too, and it was interesting. I said to her, “You see, Batsheva? I didn’t know anything. I invited you without asking any questions, but apparently you needed to hear a few kind words this morning. So Chani invited you to drive me.” I believe so strongly that everything has a reason. And when you feel in your very blood that Hakadosh

1:13:01 Speaker 6 Boruch Hu is there with you, He’ll arrange for someone to call you at just the right moment and say a kind word. That needs to be the atmosphere. That’s what needs to happen at home, because we’ve gotten into this habit of complaining so much. Complaints are up at the top, while saying “thank you” is at the bottom. Why? Why? It costs nothing. We spoke about this earlier: showing appreciation and thanking everyone who does things for us. For example, I’ve noticed when I ride buses that many people do say, “Thank you very much,” to the driver. Yes, it’s his job, but he did get me from point A to point B. So what? Thank you very much. You understand? It depends on us. It depends on us adults. What’s the atmosphere at home? Are there any more questions?

1:13:49 Speaker 11 Beautiful. Let’s talk about honoring parents.

1:13:51 Speaker 6 Yes, honoring parents.

1:13:51 Speaker 11 It’s interesting how these things are connected, because in the end, when I’m a mother,

1:13:55 Speaker 6 Yes.

1:13:56 Speaker 11 my relationship with my children is perhaps a reflection of something? Or...

1:14:01 Speaker 6 Absolutely.

1:14:02 Speaker 11 There’s a chain of generations here.

1:14:04 Speaker 6 Absolutely, absolutely.

1:14:04 Speaker 11 You can’t separate that connection.

1:14:06 Speaker 6 Lately I’ve been saying this a lot: everything I am comes from my father. I lost my mother when I was three and a half.

1:14:14 Speaker 11 Wow.

1:14:14 Speaker 6 Before the War of Independence, yes. My father raised me. He was thirty-two when he was widowed. There were five of us children. The boys went off to yeshivos right away, and I was with him all the time. He didn’t remarry until I got married. I didn’t even realize then what a sacrifice he had made. At thirty-two, his whole life was ahead of him. I saw so many wonderful things in him, right in front of me. He taught me not by saying, “Do this. Say thank you. Say you’re sorry.” No, he did those things himself, and they simply became ingrained in me. It’s terribly, terribly important. I say, how wisely people put it: one mother can raise ten children, but ten children can’t take care of one mother. Yes, it’s sad. It’s sad. I don’t know how we can put these things right. We have to. If we have parents, we need to set an example and show our children how we honor our parents. Not by telling them they must show respect, but by doing it ourselves. It’s very moving. I have a son, my eldest, who comes every Friday, whether it’s raining, snowing, windy, or stormy. We sit together, and he’s just so—my son Itzik. Truly, with him, everything is good and even better, and those aren’t just words. I always tell him, “When you come into the house, you bring the sunshine.” That’s how I feel. And when you leave, we’re all smiling. But that’s honoring parents. We don’t need gifts. Parents are happy when their children live together in peace. Parents are happy when their children invite one another over. That gives parents nachas. We don’t need extravagant gifts. And what I said about writing: “I wanted to tell you, Dad...” “I wanted to tell you,

1:15:54 Speaker 6 Mom...” To say, “I learned...” I’ve already said this, haven’t I? Did we talk about it, or haven’t we talked about it at all? Oh, I told Batsheva about it on the way here. If you look in my bag—I haven’t taken it out—there’s a letter. There’s the bag. I wrote this twenty-five years ago. My father passed away twenty years ago, and I’ll even read it aloud, because it really is very moving. A letter you wrote and gave him. And I read it aloud to him. My father lived in the United States, and he came for a visit. I said, “Now is the time.” I told him, “Dad, I’ve written a letter that I want to read to you.” That’s the point: to read it aloud, because there’s so much feeling in it that you can’t just say it face-to-face; you need to look somewhere else. It’s very, very hard. “To my dear father.” Even now, twenty years later, I don’t want to cry. “Over the past year, I’ve been through many changes. I’ve learned, and am still learning, to know myself and to live my life with joy, strength, and self-expression.”

1:16:52 Speaker 6 Here, you see what needs to be done. Now we tap on the collarbone. It’s calming. Okay, as I learn who I am, I recognize you and the wonderful qualities you passed on to me. How could I not remember your kindness? On the eve of Purim, you heard about a family of four who had arrived from Israel and had nowhere to live. Without hesitation, you invited them into our home, and they stayed with us for several months. How could I forget the family who came to marry off their daughter to the son of a Rebbe in America, but had forgotten to arrange a place to stay? You gave the bride’s father your room. How could I forget... He would tell this story. He had a daughter. We had one cousin who survived the Holocaust, and she lived in Tel Aviv. After my mother passed away, she came to him and said there was a wealthy family that wanted to take me in until I was seventeen. My father would always tell this story. He would stamp his foot and say, “I told her, ‘Aroys! Get out of here!’” So how could I forget how you would tell me about Rachel, who came to you after Mother passed away and suggested giving me to a wealthy family who would care for me until I was seventeen? You shouted at her, “Aroys! Gey aroys fun da!” and cared for me with tremendous devotion. How could I forget that you gave up the best years of your life, not looking for a wife because you were afraid it might hurt me? You put yourself second and me first. You made sure I always had everything a teenage girl needed. It wasn’t easy for you to be both a father and a mother, but you rose to the task with dignity. Wow. That’s incredible. This is completely unfiltered. Right, it’s really writing from the heart. I never felt deprived when we emigrated, when we moved to the United States when I was nine. I had an uncle there, my father’s brother,

1:18:32 Speaker 6 who had survived the war. He sent for us so we could come live in America. You bought me a red corduroy jumper with a blouse embroidered with red flowers, and a blue pleated skirt. They cost you a lot of money at an exclusive dressmaker’s. It mattered to you that I looked nice. In Uncle Ben Zion’s home—your brother’s—you taught me what it means to stand by your principles. During our stay there, we ate sardines, salami and bread because we were very careful about kashrus. When we walked in the winter, my hand was tucked into your gloved hand so I wouldn’t be cold. We would meet people, and you would greet them. I’d ask, “Dad, do you know him?” You’d answer, “No,” but you greeted everyone. I learned tidiness, cleanliness and cooking from you, too. Oh, I haven’t said that out loud in a long time. The house was always tidy. You cooked delicious food. We lived on Rechov HaMerkalim. I remember an incredibly good cheesecake you made in a wonder pot. However many cheesecakes I’ve tasted since, I’ve never come across that particular flavor. You went through many hardships in your life.

1:19:38 Speaker 6 My mother... I had a nine-year-old brother who was killed in the War of Independence. He was playing outside, and he was killed. And a little sister, Chana, who was younger than me. Her story was similar to that of the Yemenite children. When my mother was so ill, Chana was five months old. People from WIZO came to my father and said, “We have a place where we can care for her, and when your wife gets better, we’ll return her to you.” What could my father do? How could he care for a five-month-old baby and four other children? So he agreed. He went there every day to see her. Then my mother passed away. For seven days he didn’t go. He got up from shivah on Friday and went to see her, and everything was fine. He came back on Motzaei Shabbos, and they told him, “Sixty babies died here last night.” You know the story of the Yemenite children? The same story. So he said, “All right, give me the body. I want...” “No, she’s already been buried.” And he lived with that his whole life. He remembered her. So you went through many hardships. Mother, Aryeh—he was my brother—and Chana, whom you haven’t forgotten to this day. You gave me the tools to face the hardships I went through. I watched you and the way you acted, and I learned from you, Dad. And it’s no wonder that... It’s no wonder your grandchildren and great-grandchildren love you so much and are proud of you. Wow. And I thank you a thousand times over for the wonderful upbringing you gave me: above all, to speak well of everyone, to love others, to forgive without holding a grudge, to welcome guests, to behave honestly and to live joyfully by the work of my own hands. Dad, thank you. I think he lived about five years after that. He was already eighty-five. I wish you that Hakadosh Boruch Hu grants you many more

1:21:21 Speaker 6 years of health, joy and nachas, and that you see the celebrations of your grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. I love you very much, Mirit.

1:21:27 Speaker 3 Wow, wow, wow. That’s... How did he react?

1:21:32 Speaker 6 He just fell silent. He sat there like that, because that generation didn’t talk much. They didn’t talk; they didn’t express their feelings. It was so hard. I mean, truly, my whole life I never asked him, “Tell me about Mom.” I don’t know anything about my mother. Can you imagine?

1:21:52 Speaker 3 Wow. And all of this is really from your point of view, from what you picked up about his—

1:21:56 Speaker 6 Yes.

1:21:57 Speaker 3 About his strengths, his feelings.

1:22:00 Speaker 6 Right. So I looked at it and thought, “Wait, where did I get these things? Where did I get all this?” It’s all from him. It’s all from him. You absorb it. It stays with you from childhood. So I say again, it’s not about saying, “Do this, do that.” I saw him in all those situations: how he was always ready to listen, how he always greeted people with a warm expression. And the children, really—he would come to Israel with a suitcase full of all sorts of sweets. He would sort them out into bags so each one had some of every kind. Really, wow. Yes, so that’s it. I say, really, all our mitzvos are with us from the day we’re born until a hundred and twenty. But with the mitzvah of honoring parents, we never know how long we’ll have our parents here in this world. Of course, in the next world, too, they rejoice in our happiness and take pleasure in seeing us and all the good we do. But here in this world, we don’t know how long we’ll have them. So I say, this really gives them the feeling: “I did something here. I did something important.” He was so moved. Wow.

1:23:08 Speaker 3 I think it’s also, uh—

1:23:09 Speaker 6 And it gives you a certain feeling. So often, after a parent passes away, people say, “Oh, I wish I’d done that.” Here I felt I’d done something really important, that I’d truly told him all those meaningful things, uh—

1:23:22 Speaker 3 You didn’t keep it inside, and—

1:23:23 Speaker 6 Exactly.

1:23:24 Speaker 3 Why hold it back, really?

1:23:25 Speaker 6 Right, right, right.

1:23:26 Speaker 3 It also shows so clearly what honoring parents is about. In the end, Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave us this mitzvah because it’s also what’s healthy and right for our own souls.

1:23:33 Speaker 6 Right.

1:23:34 Speaker 3 As children.

1:23:35 Speaker 6 Absolutely, absolutely.

1:23:36 Speaker 3 I can tell you I did something similar. I don’t remember where I got the idea, but when I was a kallah, before I got married, I wrote my parents a handwritten letter about all the years they had raised and educated me, thanking them for this and thanking them for that. Before we left the house for the wedding, I left it in their bedroom. They didn’t see it.

1:23:56 Speaker 6 [unclear]

1:23:56 Speaker 3 And the next day—well, they got home from the wedding at one in the morning—and suddenly they saw it.

1:24:02 Speaker 6 How amazing.

1:24:03 Speaker 3 And to this day I say, “Wow, I’m so glad I did that.” Baruch Hashem, may they live many long, good years. But just stopping, looking back and, as you said, appreciating.

1:24:14 Speaker 6 Showing gratitude, showing gratitude, showing gratitude. And I’ll say again, it comes from home. It comes from parents demonstrating it, not just saying it. For example, when Grandma brings a gift and people say, “Say thank you to Grandma,” I don’t like that. I say, if the child hasn’t said it yet, say, “Thank you, Grandma, for buying Yossi the game. Thank you so much.” The child hears it once, twice, three times, and learns to do it sincerely. It’s like “Say sorry; give a hug.” We had a child—I’ll never forget it. Smack. “Sorry.” Smack. “Sorry.” He thought, okay, you say sorry and then you can do whatever you want. That isn’t genuine. It isn’t genuine. I want it to really come from the heart, for him to understand what’s happening here. So how will he understand? From our personal example. It isn’t hard.

1:24:58 Speaker 3 It connects to that respect for the child—the child isn’t a parrot.

1:25:01 Speaker 6 Right.

1:25:01 Speaker 3 He learns. He’s a person.

1:25:03 Speaker 6 He’s watching all the time. I used to say, he’s filming us all the time, on rolls of film. There’s no film anymore, right? But kilometers of film, all the time. He sees his mother say, “Tell them I’m not home.” Then she yells at him for lying. You understand? We do all kinds of things without realizing we’re leaving traces behind. And the child, how do you say it, fits himself into that pattern.

1:25:25 Speaker 3 Wow, Miriam.

1:25:27 Speaker 6 Wow.

1:25:27 Speaker 3 I...

1:25:28 Speaker 6 Oh my goodness, I didn’t realize I was like that.

1:25:30 Speaker 3 No.

1:25:30 Speaker 6 Because I haven’t read that aloud in a long time. You know, when you read it silently, it doesn’t hit you quite the same way. But when you say it out loud...

1:25:36 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:25:37 Speaker 6 That’s the power of it. To read it aloud specifically, you know, to read it out loud.

1:25:42 Speaker 3 Amazing. Do you have a sentence you’d like to leave everyone with, as we finish?

1:25:50 Speaker 6 I don’t know. There’s something my father always used to tell me. He would say, “Miriam, if you have small eyes, you’ll have a happy life.” Don’t keep wanting more and more; be happy with your lot. My grandchildren know that I always say to look at the half-full glass. But my niece Sheindy Wilhelm taught me something even better, one step further. She says to me, “There’s a small glass, and it’s always full.” You see? You don’t need to have half a glass; I have a small glass, and it’s full. In other words, truly be happy with what we have. I even recommend making a daily list: five things I want to say thank you for. Oh, we didn’t talk about the Queen of England’s teatime. The Queen of England’s teatime. We’ll end with that. Yes, sometimes the mother and children get home together. The mother works until four and then picks up the children, and she doesn’t know what to do first, while everyone’s crying, “Mommy, he did this to me!” Okay, just a moment. I call it the Queen of England’s teatime. England had a queen then, and I’m sticking with her. I don’t care that there’s a king now. Every day at four o’clock, it’s teatime. That’s been fixed for generations. So I say, together with the children, if they’re a little older, you can buy a nice teapot, even china cups, something special just for this. And whatever the children like—lemonade, hot chocolate, it doesn’t matter. As soon as you get home, leave the mother’s bag and the schoolbags by the door and sit down. The mother pours the drinks; you bring cookies or fruit if you want, say a brachah, eat something, and then each person shares something good that happened that day. The mother starts. If the children are really little, there are all those songs: “I thank Hashem

1:27:28 Speaker 6 for my two hands.” All kinds of songs about giving thanks. The whole thing takes ten minutes, ten minutes. There were caregivers who took this on and told me, “Miriam, you have no idea how much it changed things.” Because after those ten minutes—what does the child really want? He wants to see his mother. Now she’s here, and otherwise it’s straight into instructions and things to do. After that, the children can each go play, and the mother can prepare supper or do whatever she needs to do. It makes everything completely different. And I say to all mothers: every one of you deserves a gold crown, because you’re truly amazing. There is no role more important than this role of... How much the Rebbe spoke about the mother in the home, and about anyone involved in education. It’s so... Especially now, I say, when Moshiach needs to come, we’re on the greatest shlichus. That’s the shlichus. Right. And all these wonderful women, all the caregivers and directors who truly lose sleep over someone else’s children—may Hakadosh Boruch Hu bless you from His full, open and generous hand with everything you need. Health and nachas. Amen. And whatever else you need. And it was really... Thank you so much. Thank you, Miriam. We’re so glad—oh, I’m saying “we” on behalf of everyone listening, because I know this really is a chance to receive... You know, you’ve brought together such a wealth of life experience and knowledge and... It’s a tremendous privilege to hear you. Thank you so, so much.