Home › Forums › Family Matters › When a child eats traif. › Reply To: When a child eats traif.
I don’t believe in not visiting loving and close relatives, regardless of their religious affiliation(I bring my own food). I don’t believe in disabling a computer in the absence of available filters. I believe in teaching my children from a very young age what they may and may not eat, what they may and may not watch, and what they may and may not do with a computer. So far, my kids don’t eat treif, they don’t watch porn, and my computer history tells me no one has ever gone to forbidden websites. If you knew my kids, you would understand how ludicrous that thought would be. And no, they are not Yeshivish. They are however, balabatish and eidel, bli ayin hara. There are many things that they (and I) could stand to correct in ourselves, but looking at inappropriate things on the internet is not one of them.
We live IN this world, and we have to learn how to navigate the ugliness that is in it and give our kids the education and tools to fight what they will inevitably see in that world. we cannot protect them forever from EVERYTHING, without closing them off to the beauty in the world, as well.
There is a lot of good on the internet, and the idea is to help our children learn to differentiate between the good and the bad, and reject the latter, while making great use of the former. Above all, we have to not throw the baby out along with the bathwater, and all too many people are doing exactly that.