Sheltering
Preparing your kid for life by ensuring they are unprepared
One of the big slogans in frum parenting is “sheltering.” Rabbi Zecharia Wallerstein pushed it nonstop, and people repeat the word like it is a mitzvah. But “sheltering” is just a sweetened label for something far less flattering. The real meaning is simple: not preparing your kids for life.
Parents do this for two reasons. Either they have no real world experience themselves, so they have nothing to teach, or they believe that ignorance equals purity and that keeping a child clueless will somehow protect the child’s neshama. Both reasons sound holy until you actually think for five seconds. In reality, this approach creates disaster, not protection, especially today.
Most frum homes have internet. Even the ones that don’t are one cheap phone away from blowing the fantasy apart. A kid can borrow a device in school, or swap for one, or grab a friend’s unlocked phone. That one access point will undo every ounce of the parent’s carefully curated bubble. You cannot outsmart the 21st century with 19th century tactics.
A hundred years ago in a Russian shtetl, sheltering worked only because the world was literally locked out. Kids were born and died in the same village. No internet, no media, no exposure, fine. But parents pretending that Crown Heights or Lakewood or Monsey is still Kozhnitz are delusional. Kids do not stay sheltered today, they cannot stay sheltered. Pretending otherwise only hurts your own children.
I once saw a perfect example on imamother. A mother posted, with full sincerity, asking whether she should tell her twelve year old daughter about sex and periods. Other mothers with more intelligence responded that if your daughter is twelve and in school, she already knows. This mother had no clue, she thought she was “protecting” her daughter. Well surprise, surprise, her classmates unsheltered her for you!
This is the real problem. Parents tell themselves that sheltering keeps kids safe. It doesn’t. It leaves them unequipped. When the real world hits them, and it will, they enter it blind and vulnerable, with no tools, no knowledge, and no resilience. That is not protection, it is neglect dressed up as frumkeit.