Einat Nathan Gets Real About Parenting in “My Everything”

When Einat Nathan’s book “Haimsheli” came out in Israel in 2018, it became a national bestseller across all categories. Now, Hachette Book Group has released the book in English under the title “My Everything: The Parent I Want to Be, The Children I Hope to Raise” in the United States. Gal Gadot recommended the book to her over 50 million followers on Instagram, and publishers in South Korea, China and Holland have already acquired the rights to it.

Nathan started her career as a parenting expert 19 years ago, when she began writing an online column and received a tremendous response from fellow parents.

“The most common feedback was one of three: [They would say] ‘You made me feel so normal,’ ‘I want to wake my kids up and hug them because now I understand their viewpoint,’ and ‘Thank you so much for sharing. I think I know what to do now,” she writes.

“I decided that there is something in the way I communicate my knowledge that makes it easier for this new generation of parents. So I went and wrote the only story I could write honestly and authentically about, my story.”

“My Everything” is honest and raw, starting with Nathan’s heartbreaking story of having a stillbirth with twins at 39 weeks. She also talks about how her son was diagnosed with autism at two years old and the ups and downs of being a parent of five children. Through her experiences, she crafted her own parenting philosophy.

“There are two common approaches to parenting: One that says each child is a special snowflake and the world should celebrate their existence, and the other that says our children should not be treated like overly entitled snowflakes,” Nathan writes. “But the truth lies in between.”

She explains that it is not up to parents to fix everything for their children because it isn’t doing them any good. Children aren’t going to one day magically step up and solve their problems on their own if their parents keep doing it for them.

She explains that it is not up to parents to fix everything for their children because it isn’t doing them any good.

“What we don’t understand is that in order for [our children] to reach the point of both physical and emotional independence, we need to stop doing for them the things they can do for themselves,” she argues. “Most parents break down when their children encounter negative emotions, discomfort and frustration, and they think that it’s their job to fix everything.”

While every child is special, parents need to take a step back and comfort them when things do go awry. “Life is school, and we need to let them encounter life and be their mothership or fuel station when they come back hurting or wounded,” she writes [[YES? NO, SHE SAYS]].

Even though Nathan’s rhetoric may seem tough, she is sympathetic to the plights of today’s parents, who she said are much lonelier than previous generations because they’ve lost their tribe or village, have too much information and take on other roles aside from being parents.

“Parents today are a bit tired of the all-knowing expert that sits on a pedestal and tells [children] what to do or what not to do,” she asserts. “The thing that excites me about this book is that [to] this day, I still get emails that say, ‘I got this book from five different women this week and last week, and I bought it for four different girlfriends of mine.’ And it generated this network effect that sort of replaced that tribe we lost.”

In a time when parents are under pressure to have perfect children — and perfect lives in general — Nathan wants to let them know that they are seen, and there is a solution.

“I hope that parents will be able to get rid of the outside noise and the unrealistic expectations of having it all,” she says. “We live in a world where we think we can do everything and they can be everything. The truth is, we need to prioritize and be the architects of parenthood in our own individual household, and we can only do that when we better understand what our children need.”

Kylie Ora Lobell is a writer for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, Aish, and Chabad.org and the author of the first children’s book for the children of Jewish converts, “Jewish Just Like You.”