Before I offer my suggestions, I’d like to mention a few fundamental ideas about advice in general. Many situations need individualized help, not just general advice obtained in a shiur or from an article. This may strongly apply in this particular case. While it’s easier for people to ask questions anonymously and rely on answers which are designed to be applicable to the general public, this is not always productive.
In a case such as this, it’s important to find someone who can listen to the details of the situation, get to know the family dynamics a little, and come up with a personalized approach. What’s also important is for that someone to follow up a week or two later to hear how the advice worked out—was the person able to implement it? Did it work? What has changed? Seeking out advice without any follow-up often isn’t helpful, as the situation needs to be monitored to ensure that the advice was appropriate, and properly implemented.
In general, there is no one-size-fits-all in chinuch habanim, and that applies to parents as well as to children. Advice that is easy for one parent to implement will be very challenging for another. That’s not to say that a parent should only do what’s easy. But the person giving the advice has to know the person receiving it, in order to come up with ideas that can be put into practice.
Another pitfall to be avoided is expecting instant results. Many people assume that if the right advice was given, it should work right away, and if it doesn’t, they reason that it must not have been good advice in the first place. It can take time to see results, and again, someone who is familiar with your situation will be more qualified to know how long to keep trying something before giving up and coming up with another idea.
Just recently I spoke with a father who was having trouble with one of his sons, a young teenager who wasn’t going to yeshivah. I listened to him, gained an impression of the situation, and offered my take on what he should try doing.
A day, two days, three days passed and nothing changed. But the father figured he’d give it another few days, and lo and behold on the sixth day, the boy went back to yeshivah.
