Rav Avigdor Miller on How to Get My Children Out of the Rut
Q:
How do we ensure that our children shouldn’t fall into a rut of just doing mitzvos by rote and not really appreciating mitzvos and avodas Hashem?

A:
It’s a big problem this person raises; it’s a serious problem, because that’s exactly what’s happening. Here you have a father who is a ba’al teshuva, he came from the outside. He has a whole closet full of skeletons. His mother and his father, his siblings, and his cousins – all of them! He’s ashamed to show them. You know that we have fine yeshiva men, kollel men, who are ashamed that anyone should find out what relatives they have. It’s a fact. Because they have relatives, we know they do.

And so he fought his way back to Torah and he became a big idealist and he married. He married a girl who is also an idealist. But now the children are born into it, and now begins the old process of getting into a rut again. Children are in the rut. Absolutely, it’s a problem.

And how to fight against it? It’s not simple but it most definitely can be done. You have to keep on pouring idealism into them. It’s not done, that’s the problem. You have to pour idealism into them! Fire has to be poured into them! Hislahavus, enthusiasm! You have to glamorize everything. Everything connected to Torah and avodas Hashem has to glamorized. It could be done, but it won’t happen on its own – it has to be done. All the time you must be busy pouring into the heads of your children more and more enthusiasm about Hashem.