How to Respond When a Child Resists Prayer or Mitzvot

I have written about how important it is to teach our children to express and recognize their emotions — not to suppress or ignore them, but first to validate and acknowledge them, and only afterward, in a second stage, to teach them how to process those feelings correctly through reason and according to Torah values.

This week, I was asked: What do we do with a child who shows disrespect or pushes back against mitzvot? For example, a child who says, “I don’t want to pray.” How can we possibly validate that? After all, this seems like the counsel of the evil inclination, and our role in education is to reject and fight such claims.

A Torah Framework for Difficult Questions

To answer this, I must begin with an important introduction.

The Ramchal, in Mesillat Yesharim (Chapter 19), asks a profound question regarding the mitzvah of loving God. God is responsible for all the good things in our lives, but He is also responsible for the less pleasant things that happen to us. So how can a person truly love the One who is fully capable of giving perfect goodness, yet withholds that goodness and instead allows pain and suffering?

It is a powerful question.

The Ramchal answers that a person should indeed ask this question — but then must answer it for himself: that everything comes from Heaven, everything is ultimately for the good, and what appears now as pain or hardship will one day be revealed as good.

We see here that there are two stages.

We are not expected to bury or ignore the questions and complaints in the heart. On the contrary, we should bring them to the surface. Of course, the goal is not to remain in complaint forever, but the very act of voicing the complaint opens the door to the answer, that every bitterness contains correction and purpose.

Anyone who succeeds in returning this truth to their heart again and again is certainly building a profound path toward love of God.

This is also what we see in King David. Despite all his faith and closeness to God, he never refrains from speaking about his pain and pleading over his suffering in many chapters of Tehillim. Denial causes resentment to build and weigh down the soul, whereas acknowledging difficulty creates an opening for healing and growth.

Guiding the Child Toward Growth

On the subject of parenting, a child who says, “I don’t have the strength to pray,” can be difficult to hear. It is very tempting to use our authority to silence the child — to scold, threaten, or simply dismiss the feeling or claim.

In the short term, this may seem to solve the problem, and we may feel justified. But in the long term, it is dangerous.

If a child learns that their feelings are not legitimate, that opens the door to much greater problems. After all, the child is experiencing a real emotion. If we interpret that emotion as proof that he is a terrible child for feeling this way, why would he continue to share with us? Why would he trust himself?

The result is painful: we have prevented him from trusting either himself or us, and we have led him toward despair.

If however are not afraid, and instead validate his feelings, we can say: “It really isn’t easy to make time for prayer. Sometimes it’s hard for us too.”

Then we move to the next stage and think together: Prayer is truly important, and as our sages teach, “According to the difficulty is the reward.” The reward is even greater when something is hard.

This can help calm the child and gives him strength to make better choices.

The very act of acknowledging the effort and the struggle is itself a major part of the solution, and it is a deeply important principle in education.