How to Raise Happy Children: What is the Nature of a Child?

Children are our most precious commodity. Every good parent wants to bring up the best possible child. Children also represent our future. How we raise our children will impact how they will raise their children. Therefore, our parenting has perpetual, generational implications. But the big question is this: How do we raise healthy, wholesome children? What can we do to assure that our children will grow up in the best possible way -- confident, kind, focused on the greater good -- living up to our highest standards? This is particularly challenging in our turbulent times, faced with so many options and distractions. In this first of a three-part new course, How to Raise Happy Children, Rabbi Jacobson addresses the root of it all: what is the true nature of a child. After all, we cannot produce healthy and happy children if we don't first define the very psyche and soul of a child. Once we appreciate what makes a child tick, the unique personality of a child and his/her needs (in contrast to those of an adult), we then can identify what we must do to nourish, nurture and invigorate the child to thrive, flourish and blossom into a healthy adult. Like a flower seed that requires water and fertile soil, providing the nutrients for the plant to grow, a child needs psycho/spiritual and emotional nutrients to ensure its growth and actualization of its great potential.