Successful Parents Quotes

“The lack of attention to Moses’s sons here and elsewhere in the Torah—essentially nothing is said about them—needs to be explained. And the explanation is probably this: They did not amount to much. This raises the interesting issue of the difficulty many children of great people face in leading successful and satisfying lives. In a book about Moses, ‘Overcoming Life’s Disappointments’, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes about this: Sometimes the father casts so large a shadow that he makes it hard for his children to find the sunshine they need to grow and flourish. Sometimes, the father’s achievements are so intimidating that the child just gives up any hope of equaling him. But mostly, I suspect, it takes so much of a man’s [the father’s] time and energy to be a great man—great in some ways but not in all—that he has too little time left to be a father. As the South African leader Nelson Mandela’s daughter was quoted as saying to him, ‘You are the father of all our people but you never had time to be a father to me.’
Kushner relates a remarkable story he read in a magazine geared toward clergy, a fictional account of a pastor in a mid-sized church who had a dream one night in which a voice said to him, ‘There are fifty teenagers in your church, and you have the ability to lead forty-nine of them to God and lose out on only one.’ Energized by the dream, the minister throws all his energy into youth work, organizing special classes and trips for the church’s teens. He eventually develops a national reputation in his denomination for his work with young people. ‘And then one night he discovers his sixteen-year-old son has been arrested for dealing drugs. The boy turned bitterly against the church and its teachings, resenting his father for having had time for every sixteen-year-old in town except him, and the father never noticed. His son was the fiftieth teenager, the one who got away.’
Of course, this was not necessarily true of Moses’s children, but the silence of the Torah concerning his children (which is not the case with the children of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Aaron) serves as an important reminder to parents who have achieved success to be sure to make time for their children. They need to try to ensure their children feel they occupy a special place in their parents’ hearts and no matter how pressing the parent’s responsibilities he or she will always find time for them.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Exodus