Always_Ask_Questions,
“Avira, my problem is your equating of decent behavior with getting a hat.”
Did he say this in a different thread? Because reading through this one, his example was a boy averting his eyes to avoid seeing pritzus, nothing about a hat.
“That said, why does your influence leads to their desire to get a hat, out of all things people can do to improve their middos?”
Because kids are hardwired to imitate their role models. If a boy really likes a particular baseball player, he’s going to want to wear that player’s jersey, even if he can’t smack a ball over a fence 400ft away. If he likes the Yankees or Orioles, he’s going to want a Yankees or Orioles hat to wear. If he’s inspired by his Yeshiva, he’s going to want to dress in a yeshiva style. I really don’t understand why you perceive this as bad. I see many MO families in my community with sons dressed in hats and jackets, and the parents have not torn their garments.
“Can you think about influencing them in such a way that the parent calls you to say – thank you very much, my son today said a wonderful dvar Torah, asked me to tell him about my grandfather and how he kept Yiddishkeit in Hungary, and cleaned dishes after the seudah?”
Do you think it’s an either or? And perhaps you’re putting too much of the parents’ job onto the rebbe. Parents should ask their kids for divrei Torah at the table. Don’t sit idle and wish the rebbe would do it. And I don’t expect a rebbe to know the background of every talmid’s grandparents and great-grandparents. What if the talmid is a child of BTs, and grandpa isn’t frum, and he ends up feeling left out? As for washing dishes after a seuda, again, this has more to do with parental expectations, though the rebbe should certainly be reinforcing kibbud av v’eim and helping out at home.
I have a feeling that a lot of this is a diversion. Maybe what you’re fearing is the rebbe telling his talmid that his parents’ yiddishkeit isn’t good enough?