Wendy Mogel
Wendy Mogel, PhD is the author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 2001. Mogel is a nationally known speaker and author who looks at every day parenting problems through the lens of the Torah, the Talmud, and important Jewish teachings.
Mogel graduated from Middlebury College and completed an Internship and Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She is co-founder of the Los Angeles Association of Independent School Counselors and serves on the boards of the Center for Early Education and the Counsel for Spiritual and Ethical Education.
Mogel lives in Los Angeles with her husband, writer Michael Tolkin, and their two daughters, Susanna and Emma. On October 1, 2006, the New York Times published a profile of Mogel and her work.
“If we want to give our children what they need to thrive, we must honor their basic nature- boyish or girlish, introverted or extroverted, wild or mellow.”
“The sages advise us to study Torah lishma-"for its own sake" rather than to impress others with our scholarship. A paradox of parenting is that if we love our children for their own sake rather than for their achievements, it's more likely that they will reach their true potential.”