Did you ever ask yourself what Noah and his wife, Naama, did differently than all the other inhabitants of the world four thousand years ago? Not one other couple in that era raised even one child worthy of being saved from the Flood, while Noah and Mrs. Noah merited that all their children deserved salvation. How did they accomplish this incredible feat? Think of the peer pressure they had to battle as they strove to raise honest, moral sons in a world run amok. They were a family with no role models and no peers who shared their value system, yet all of their children grew up to be upstanding reflections of their righteous parents who merited being saved from the worldwide flood.
How did they do it? We can learn a profound lesson about child raising by understanding the chronology of the period before the flood. Noah had his first child when he was five hundred years old. The rains started when Noah was six hundred years old, so his three sons at that time were around one hundred years old. Noah spent one hundred twenty years building the ark in preparation for the Flood, which means that from twenty years before the birth of his first child, and all the way through his sons’ first century, Noah and Naama’s home revolved around fulfilling God’s command, building the ark,. Their children grew up in a home that was dedicated to Hashem’s service. They were rocked to sleep as infants to the sound of their father’s saws and as soon as they grew old enough, they presumably became part of the family mission. This is the secret of their parenting.
The message for parents today is startlingly relevant. If we want to raise children of character, we must build a home where our behavior reflects our values. We all know that instructing our children to act one way while modeling another is ineffective. Noah and his wife’s incredible success in child raising reminds us that if we hope to raise children who reflect our values we must align our actions with our principles. When we don’t only speak about what’s important to us, but also act in accordance with those priorities, our children will absorb our values and grow to reflect them. The secret to raising successful children hasn't changed in four thousand years. When a home is dedicated to upholding a family's values, the children absorb and become part of that mission, in ancient times and modern ones.
Comments