Playing and Learning

Penelope Leach, Your Baby and Child

Jonathan Sacks

In one of the most famous lines in Judaism, which we say every day and night, Moses commands, “You shall teach these things repeatedly to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house or when you walk on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.” Parents are to be educators, education is the conversation between the generations, and the first school is the home.

So Jews became an intensely family oriented people, and it was this that saved us from tragedy. After the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, Jews were scattered throughout the world, everywhere a minority, everywhere without rights, suffering some of the worst persecutions ever known by a people and yet Jews survived because they never lost three things: their sense of family, their sense of community and their faith.

And they were renewed every week especially on Shabbat, the day of rest when we give our marriages and families what they most need and are most starved of in the contemporary world, namely time. I once produced a television documentary for the BBC on the state of family life in Britain, and I took the person who was then Britain’s leading expert on child care, Penelope Leach, to a Jewish primary school on a Friday morning.

There she saw the children enacting in advance what they would see that evening around the family table. There were the five year old mother and father blessing the five year old children with the five year old grandparents looking on. She was fascinated by this whole institution, and she asked the children what they most enjoyed about the Sabbath. One five year old boy turned to her and said, “It’s the only night of the week when daddy doesn’t have to rush off.” As we walked away from the school when the filming was over she turned to me and said, “Chief Rabbi, that Sabbath of yours is saving their parents’ marriages.”

Additional Penelope Leach Quotes

”Grown-up people do very little and say a great deal…. Toddlers say very little and do a great deal…. With a toddler you cannot explain, you have to show. You cannot send, you have to take. You cannot control with words, you have to use your body.”

–Penelope Leach [Your Baby and Child: from Birth to Age Five].

”Your toddler will be “good” if he feels like doing what you happen to want him to do and does not happen to feel like doing anything you would dislike. With a little cleverness you can organize life as a whole, and issues in particular, so that you both want the same thing most of the time.”

–Penelope Leach [Your Baby and Child: from Birth to Age Five].

”Loving a baby is a circular business, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give the more you get and the more you get the more you feel like giving.”

–Penelope Leach [Your Baby and Child: from Birth to Age Five].

”Your preschool child will chatter endlessly to you. If you half-listen and half-reply the whole conversation will seem, and become, tediously meaningless for both of you. but if you really listen and really answer, he will talk more and what he says will make more sense.”

–Penelope Leach [Your Baby and Child: from Birth to Age Five].