Your Child Goes Digital
Say you’re the parent of a young child. A young Jewish child.
As a parent, you are faced with a number of situations that are new to you. How do you deal with a child’s anger? With a death in the family? With bedtime? With mealtime? With saying no? With saying yes?
As a Jewish parent, you are faced with even more layers of complexity, and of possibility. How do you teach about tzedakah? How do you teach a child to pray at bedtime? How do you teach about kashrut? What do you do if you must sit shiva? How do you instill a love for Jewishness in your child that will carry him or her through adolescence to a Jewish adulthood?
For almost two decades now, the education department of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism has been putting out a newsletter called Your Child, edited by Kay Pomerantz. The six-page, thrice-yearly publication is written for parents; stories include both pieces written for it and articles picked up, with permission, from other sources. The writing level is high; it’s aimed at smart parents.
Until now, parents either could subscribe directly, pay $7.75 per year, and get Your Child in the mail, or they could pick it up at their United Synagogue-affiliated preschools or other institutions.
That is about to change.
Your Child is now available on our website; you can go there directly by clicking here. The newsletter is available both in html format for easy web reading and as pdfs for convenient printing.
“Your Child focuses both on the things that parents want to know about child-raising in a Jewish context and on the things that parents can do with their kids in that Jewish context,” said its publisher, education department director Rabbi Robert Abramson.
He is excited about its move to the web; he sees it as a way to get a much wider distribution. “We won’t get any more income from it, but my goal is to have more people see it,” he said. Part of the change is practical as well; “It takes up too much time to send it out, and the cost of sending out was high. But the most important reason to put Your Child on the internet is to make it available to a wider community. Our first audience is Conservative Jews, but now other people can read it and see what we’re about.
The new format offers another reward as well. “We can have a much less rigid format,” Rabbi Abramson said. He doesn’t plan to have the newsletter much longer than it had been, at least for now, but he won’t have to cut pieces of a good story out to force it to fit onto the page. The paper will no longer be the story’s Procrustean bed.
The newsletter isn’t didactic, according to Rabbi Abramson. “We don’t tell people how to live their lives,” he says. But it does offer a point of view. “We’ve done articles about letting your kid grow naturally, without pressuring him,” he said. “We try to convince parents that you don’t worry about getting a 4- or 5-year-old into Harvard. You don’t even worry about whether the kid is reading. You just make sure that the kid sees a lot of books.
“A reader would find that we’re concerned with the spirituality of young families, and with helping them find ways to make Judaism joyful, delighted, and well-anchored in Jewish tradition.”
