Sharon Duke Estroff - Can I Have a Cell Phone for Hanukkah?: The Essential Scoop on Raising Modern Jewish Kids

Sure, it took a little while to get into the preschool groove, but by the time pre-K rolled around, it was essentially smooth sailing. Our kids were officially out of diapers (not counting the occasional accident), they could get dressed independently (expanding the definition of dressed to include backwards and inside out), and we'd admittedly grown attached to a few of the other preschool moms and dads.

It's not that our heads were stuck in the sand. We knew we'd eventually load our kids onto a yellow school bus and tearfully wave as they rolled away. It's just that when that day actually arrived, it felt like that cushy, comfortable rug of preschoolwhere we knew all the rules and our place in the circlewas being ripped out from under us.

It soon became clear that in the grade-school world, it was no longer acceptable to waltz our son into class two hours late because we both craved a lazy morning of pancakes and cartoons; or to hover clandestinely outside our daughter's classroom hoping to catch a precious glimpse of her secret school day. In the grade-school world, innocent-looking playgrounds house social hierarchies so complex they'd floor a seasoned political scientist, and children's academic strengths and weaknesses are clearly defined, evaluated, and engraved on permanent records.

Gone were the days of consulting books we'd raked in at the bris or baby naming giving play-by-play childrearing instructions for the first five years. Gone were the playgroups where fellow preschool moms shared handy parenting tipsgone and swapped for a twenty-five-minute kindergarten open house spent filling out questionnaires, and secretly wishing that another parent would raise her hand to ask the five zillion unanswered questions bouncing around our brains. (My neighbor says her five-year-old is reading Harry Potter, but my kindergartner has barely graduated from Bob Booksdoes he need a tutor? My daughter will be out of school for the bulk of September due to the High Holidaysdoes that put her behind the aca-demic pack before she even pulls out of the starting gate? How many play-dates should I plan to ensure my child's playground popularity? How many extracurriculars does it take to make a kid well rounded?)

(In case you're thinking that the expertise I'd gained during my decade and a half of teaching in Atlanta public schools and private Jewish day schoolsor the knowledge I'd accumulated earning the undergraduate and graduate diplomas in child psychology and education that were currently shoved in my basement under overstuffed boxes of baby clothesenabled me to hop the hurdles reserved for parents of grade-schoolers, I can assure you that this was far from the case. As I soon discovered, no matter how professional, insightful, and levelheaded I could be regarding other people's kids, I was a mess when it came to my own.)

Around the time my oldest child entered third grade, my anxiety level appeared to plateau. It's not that I'd had my five zillion questions answered or anything, it's just that I'd gotten used to the perpetual stress. But before my head had officially stopped spinning, something happened that sent it reeling all over againBrandon turned eleven. As far as I can tell, the only way to explain my son's rapid transformation is that on the eve of his eleventh birthday, an alien snuck into his room and replaced him with a rather obnoxious version of his former self. How else can I explain why the same kid who, only weeks before, loved to cuddle with me in bed on Sunday mornings suddenly summed me up as round-the-clock eye-rolling material?

My son's alien status continued to worsen. Playdates once spent racing Hot Wheels across my kitchen floor now largely took place behind closed doors. He acquired a screen name (BravesFan) and would have spent endless hours sending cryptic instant messages to his friends had I not pried him away from the computer and insisted he do his homework instead. Since the other mothers were as clueless as I was about this tweenhood thing, I had nobody to ask whether a good parent would buy her son an iPod for his eleventh birthday. Or if a twelve-year-old was old enough to receive a cell phone for Hanukkah. Considering that the bulk of the five zillion questions I had before my son was snatched by aliens remained unanswered, I had now progressed to the next levelfive zillion unanswered questions squared.

My personal plight as an elementary- and middle-school parent and the steady flow of Jewish mothers snagging me in the halls on my way to the lunchroom, cornering me at birthday parties, and sending scribbled notes on cereal-stained papers in my students' backpacks convinced me the five-zillion-unanswered-question syndrome was something of a parental epidemic within the Jewish community. When I began writing my now nationally syndicated Jewish parenting advice column, I was not surprised to find that more questions came in by the droves.

Fortunately, it was about that time that I had my epiphany at the soccer field. While I won't reveal the full details of this metamorphic maternal event until Chapter 1, I will tell you this: It served as the catalyst for the liberating realization that the antidote to this parental pandemic did not entail my personally addressing each and every one of those five zillion questions, but instead helping puzzled parents clarify their big picture and sense of purpose in parenting.

It's like the Lego sets that are stuffed into my boys' closets. When you first dump the contents of the package onto the playroom floor, you feel overwhelmed and perplexed; you don't know whether you're trying to build a castle or a spaceship. It's not until you see the picture on the front of the box that all those tiny cubes suddenly take on new meaning as the building blocks of a totally cool medieval fortress. That glimpse at the final goalwhile admittedly a bit daunting at firstultimately gives us the faith, inspiration, and direction we need to begin building our Camelot.

The grade-school parenting experience is really no different from the Lego experience. Lost in the seemingly bottomless sea of expectations and the intense pressure of raising a school-age child, we feel anxious and overwhelmed. But once we figure out the big picturewhat we really want for our kidsall those tiny pieces miraculously start to fall into place.

What exactly does the big picture on the front of our Jewish Parent Lego box look like? Taking into account that every parent is different (some go for more contemporary castles and others prefer more traditional sorts), it's safe to say that our picture-perfect edifices are not formed from T-ball trophies, flawless spelling tests, or multicolored karate belts. Rather, they are built from the ground up with hopes and dreams of raising resilient children who are geared to thrive despite the stresses inherent in twenty-first-century life; of