i hope for your sake and your children’s sake that all of your children will be clearheaded teenagers really.
I hope and pray this will be so, and I’ve also made a very big personal sacrifice for my children’s chinuch because of that, but ultimately “everything is in the hands of shomayim chutz yiras shemayim.”
because “nachas is not tied up only in returning to yiddishkeit” is a very very true statement.
If Yiddishkeit is of paramount importance to a Jew, then that is an absolutely abhorrent statement.
the first step an OTD kid makes to return is very often being clean, sober, or whatever else they were doing that isn’t what a Jew should be doing. and the only way that that will become ‘the first step’ is if those close to him show him that he’s giving them NACHAS, even if it’s not necessarily the most yiddishe nachas you can think of.
WE must remember that in all steps that we take we need not gefel for human beings, we need to gefel for the Aibishter and if for the Aibishter it’s not a nachas for that a Jew is sinning, and the Aibishter explicitly says so numerous times in the Torah and we are in golus because of sins, it should not nachas for us either. If an OTD kid or adult for that matter is on the road to teshuva and step one is becoming clean and sober, then there is indeed much nachas in that. But when that’s where it ends and an OTD goes on to lead an OTD life then there is no nachas for Hashem and neither should there be for God fearing Jews, until the OTD is on the real path to teshuva.