TORONTO – Slovie Jungreis-Wolff has noticed an increase in bored, inactive, whiny children who behave as if they are entitled.

“We’re raising one of the most selfish generations,” she said at a recent Toronto lecture. “How do such children end up this way?”

Well, parents aren’t helping matters. She has met mothers who are texting their children when dinner’s ready.

“They’ve lost the ability to speak to each other,” she said.
 
In a lecture called Raising a mensch: oy vey I’ve got kids!, the New York-based educator and author spoke recently to 200 at Uptown Chabad on Hove St. in Toronto.

She began speaking 18 years ago at New York’s Hineni outreach organization, which her mother, Esther Jungreis, founded more than 36 years ago.

Jungreis-Wolff is the leader of Hineni Young Couples and teaches classes on relationships and parenting. And she speaks from personal experience, as a mother and a grandmother.

“Every year there’s a different book out with different opinions on how to raise your child,” she lamented. “But the Torah never changes.”
Some of those moral constants in child-rearing appear in her recent book Raising A Child With Soul (St. Martin’s Press), which proposes a time-tested remedy to what plagues this generation of children – teaching gratitude, or in Hebrew, haKarat hatov.

“They absorb this lesson that we live in a disposable society,” she said. “Nothing has value after a while. Objects lost value, friendships lose value, marriages lose value.”

She spoke of how quickly parents jettison kids’ clothing that had more wear-time and how quick parents are to replace broken toys.  

“How absurd,” she said. “When something breaks, it’s right away time to buy a new one? What kind of message is that?”

The Jewish sages, she asserted, had the right idea to encourage Jews to say the Modeh Ani prayer after waking – a prayer of gratitude – to start the day in a thank-you mood.

It is never too late to teach older children gratitude.

“It just becomes more difficult. So choose one thing to teach and work on it,” she said.

Additionally, parents need to instill in their children the power of compassion, if they’re going to groom good character traits. When it comes to sports teams in the playground, for example, her advice is to pick the unpicked. Children also need to be taught to protect the more vulnerable in the classroom, as well as the shy, the friendless and the new kid in town.

“A parent wants to know: ‘My children will cry for the pain of another.’”