“What I’d like to see at Beth Am is a grandparents club,” said Dr. Saul Wasserman, a Palo Alto child psychiatrist.
Some older folks in the audience looked at one another quizzically. Others smiled.
Wasserman was not intent on launching a club in which grandparents could kvell and share baby photos. Instead, his goal was to form a corps of older adults to provide a creative solution to a contemporary dilemma: A parent’s quality time with kids is often in short supply, and real grandparents, who might ease the burden, may live hundreds of miles away.
Speaking at a discussion on “When Kids Need Help,” one of several sessions during “Yehi Or: Shining a Light on Mental Illness,” Wasserman laid out some of the problems faced by families today.
Single parents are stressed, dads are often unavailable and youth often have little opportunity to interact with older adults. So if the grandparents don’t live locally, perhaps some older people would enjoy the opportunity to serve as volunteer mentors, sharing intergenerational activities or Shabbat dinner. Later he mentioned that only about 50 percent of children today grow up in homes in which the family dinner, with everybody sitting down at the table together, is a regular occurrence. A surrogate grandparent could fill that need, providing an informal way for kids to talk and share their concerns.
One of his concerns was with those who are reluctant to exert parental authority. He questioned parents who allow their barely teenage daughters to go off to a Shabbat service in skimpy dresses, tottering on high heels. “Traditional Judaism has a different set of priorities,” he said. “A little modesty before God is appropriate.”
In an earlier session, Wasserman discussed ways of setting limits. “Parents have the power of the purse,” but “in the liberal Jewish community parents are reluctant to use that power in situations when it’s appropriate.”
Rabbi Richard Address, director of the Department of Jewish Family Concerns of the Union for Reform Judaism, said congregations are often in a position to help families, because religious school teachers and rabbis may pick up behavioral cues when a child is going through a difficult time. Offering a booklet on self-destructive behavior, “Kedushat haGuf: The Holiness of the Body,” he noted that the Reform movement has launched an initiative to develop resources and programs for synagogues, youth groups and camps.
“Judaism,” he said, “is a contextual civilization. Rabbis know the family system. A lot of issues are exacerbated around lifecycle events — bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals.”
But those times offer an opportunity to teach text, Address said, to “broach a subject through the prism of Torah,” perhaps using a story from the Bible or a Midrash to shed light on a family struggle, providing a different perspective from that of a therapist.