Reply To: Going off the Derech

Syag Lchochma-I know that sometimes abuse and privacy can go together, but in this case I think it’s just an insecurity on his part. He may be private, but he’s very verbal (or at least he used to be) and I think our home environment would have allowed him to tell us if something like that occured, chas v’shalom.

daniela- it is difficult to force compliance, since I wouldn’t want to make “taking care of him” (ie laundry, food etc) contingent upon his compliance. Maybe I’m wrong, but I prefer to try to reason with him, and treat him like the ‘adult’ he wishes to be. How does a child feel his parents’ love, if not by the things we do to take care of them?

Sending him to a family member is not an option. And yes, he does say that he wants to hang out with his friends. I tried to be the voice of logic, saying exactly some of the things you mentioned, and it’s obvious he’s not seeing the big picture, or the future.

We did speak with someone who knows my son and he said that my son, deep inside, does not want to be with this chevra. It’s just that he has a deep need to feel connected, and he doesn’t have so many friends. He recommended we try to be a stronger support to him, maybe he’s testing our loyalty.

I agree with zahavasdad about the poem. It’s not unusual for a teenager from religious families to feel that the yiddishkeit he is living, is not his, but his parents’. They don’t want to feel like they are blindly copying their parents’ will. After all, they are ‘grown up’ now, and want to make their own decisions. When and if this happens, they may test the waters, and pull back to see if this is genuinely the path they want to take. Then if they come back, it’s bc it’s their decision, not bc they were born into it, and the yiddishkeit is truly theirs