Family Cycles

For David Hirsch, the Dads Honor Ride was a daunting 2,300+ mile, 21-day journey to honor dads and raise awareness for the importance of fathers and father figures. With an estimated 24 million kids growing up without their dad in the home, the ripple effect is a higher incidence of drug and alcohol abuse, incarceration and crime, depression, and suicide. The cycle of father absence is devastating the lives of countless youth, crushing families, and crippling communities.

It’s all too tempting to judge when you’re not standing in someone else’s shoes. Criticizing parents is one of the easiest things to do thanks to social media’s invasion of privacy. Instead of judging how a woman decides to hold her toddler while she’s making coffee (or some other random and specific criticism), the goal should be to get to the root of common parenting issues today. Your grandparents and their parents before them were all people. They lived, breathed, dreamed, hoped, and worked.

When Naomi convinces her 95-year-old great-grandmother that it's not too late to become a Bat Mitzvah, all the cousins pitch in to help Bubbe celebrate her big day. While usually it's the grandmother that teaches the child, in this story the tables are turned and Naomi realizes that she has something very special to teach her great-grandmother.