Children's talk

At Avot 3:14 R’ Dosa ben Harkinas teaches:

שֵׁנָה שֶׁל שַׁחֲרִית, וְיַֽיִן שֶׁל צָהֳרָֽיִם, וְשִׂיחַת הַיְלָדִים, וִישִׁיבַת בָּתֵּי כְנֵסִיּוֹת שֶׁל עַמֵּי הָאָֽרֶץ, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם

“Morning sleep, midday wine, children's talk and sitting in the meeting places of the ignoramus drive a person from the world”.

Some commentators take this teaching literally, as a list of four spiritually harmful activities that we should seek to avoid. Others view it as describing a sort of rake’s progress where a person who starts the day by sleeping late in the morning will end up in a sort of spiritual wasteland, unable to raise himself to higher levels. Others again—for example R’ Moshe Alshakar and the Kli Yakar—take ‘morning’ and ‘midday’ as metaphors for one’s youth and middle age. If by then a person’s life is not on an even keel, their predicament is likely to be permanent.

There has been much discussion of the third element of this mishnah, sichat hayeladim (“children’s talk”). This term is sometimes taken to mean conversation that never reaches above the level of the purely childish (as per Midrash Shmuel) or which, which superficially mature and intelligent, focuses only on the sort of childish topics that entertain the immature mind. Avot deRabbi Natan characterizes it as conversation with children. The Avodat Yisrael of R’ Yisrael of Kozhnitz posits yet another meaning—one that is not obvious from the text: talk about one’s children and the difficulty of meeting their needs. He adds that, when a person is preoccupied with the needs of one’s children, the level of concern is constant and does not allow that person any peace of mind.

I wonder whether, when the Avodat Yisrael writes of “needs”, he is contemplating not merely material requirements but also what one’s children (and grandchildren) require in terms of their intellectual, moral and spiritual development. If we don’t attend to these matters while we can, when we have the strength and the willingness to do so, we may find that, by the time we recognize what we should have done, we may have left it too late to do anything about it.