Someone once asked a certain leading talmid chochom, “How do I get nachas from my children?” His answer was, “When your children know that you get nachas from them, that’s when they’ll give it to you.”
I suppose, then, we should ask ourselves: do they? Do they know we get nachas from them?
A parental counselor I know told me recently that, from what he’s seen, many parents struggle with the basic idea of enjoying their children. They’re very busy taking care of them, very devoted, very into “thinking about their future.” But they have a hard time appreciating and enjoying the positive, nice, funny, cute moments that life is full of.
Every kid gives us something to smile about. It could be a certain idea the four-year-old had that was way above his age. A misspoken word from the older one that the whole family is still quoting. A very wasteful, yet ingenious, use of an entire jar of honey to sweeten the burnt cholent. The issue is how to react to those moments in real-time and process them afterward.
A contrast helps clarify. When a child does something upsetting, even if we handled it well, it has a way of staying with us. Days, weeks, until the first grandchild. We need to tell someone. We replay it. On a scale of one to ten, that experience is running at a seven or eight.
But the moments that make us smile? We have a good laugh, and then we move on to the next parental demand. Does it last? Does it come up at dinner two days later? Is it a seven or eight? Or is it more like a three or four?
This isn’t a character flaw, just a lack of being “in the moment.” And some of us are naturally better at this than others. But all of us can learn to not let those moments get away so fast. To keep them in our back pocket, available when we need them.
If our children give us nachas when they feel that we get nachas from them, then what we’re really talking about is a feedback loop. A child does something funny or clever or kind. A parent lights up. The child sees it. The parent hangs onto the memory and brings it up somewhere down the line. The child feels remembered, and, seeing what it does to his parents, does more fantastic stuff. And on and on. The moments are already there. We just need to appreciate them.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 86.
