Don’t answer back. Touch his feet. He’s your elder, just do as he says. These are some of the first instructions an Indian child ever follows, and we are right to be a little proud of them. A child who takes them in grows up gentle with age, easy in a room full of grown-ups, no trouble to anybody. We are raising a respectful child. We are also, without intending to, raising a defenceless one.
Respect is not the same as obedience
We tend to speak of respect and obedience as one virtue. They are not.
Respect is worth every bit of the value we place on it. A child who is gentle with old people, who listens, who does not treat each grown-up as an argument to be won, is a good thing to raise, and there is nothing wrong with honouring age. But we have folded a second demand in beside it, and the two have nothing to do with each other. The second demand is: obey. Do as you are told. Don’t question. The elder is always right. Call that what it is. Not respect, but obedience, and obedience is what takes a child’s defences away.
This is not a case for a child who obeys nobody. A child still has to be kept off the road and away from the stove, and a parent is still a parent. The obedience worth taking apart is one particular kind, the total kind we reserve for elders: the rule that a grown-up’s wish for a child’s body or company can never be refused, and that an elder can never be wrong. That rule, and not a parent’s ordinary authority, is the one that disarms a child. That rule is the one to let go of.
The three ways out, and how we close them
A child in danger has, in theory, three ways out. They can refuse. They can recognise that something is wrong. They can tell. Watch what obedience does to each.
A child trained never to say no to an adult will not have a no ready on the day they need one. The word has been worn out of them years earlier, scolded away in the name of good behaviour, so that the moment they most need to refuse arrives and they reach for the refusal and find it gone.
A child taught that an elder is never wrong has no shelf to put a wrong thing on. When an elder does something frightening, the rule still says the elder is right, so the child does the only sum left to them and turns the wrongness inward. They decide they must be the bad one, the dirty one, the one who is imagining it. We have taken away their ability to even name what is happening, to themselves, in the privacy of their own head.
And a child raised to believe that carrying a family elder’s secret to an outsider is the worst betrayal going will not carry it. They can know exactly what has been done to them and still understand that saying it aloud would shame everyone and brand them the disrespectful one. The last door out is bolted before they ever reach for it.
Refusal, recognition, telling. Those are the three things that save a child, and we close all three, early, while we think we are simply bringing up someone polite.
Here is where it turns dark. The people a child is drilled to obey are, overwhelmingly, the same people who turn out to be dangerous. Abuse of children in India is almost entirely the work of someone the child already knows: a relative, a neighbour, a teacher, a man with standing in the child’s world. The 2007 government study found it. The crime records repeat it every year. The stranger is the rare case. So we spend a whole childhood training obedience toward elders, and it is the elders who are the threat. The man who means harm does not have to break anything in the child. The breaking is done, carefully, in advance, and what he is handed is a child already taught not to refuse him, not to doubt him, not to tell.
This is not a hunch. Children from homes built on strict obedience disclose later, or never. And people who abuse children tend to avoid the child who might say no and be believed, and to move toward the one who has been trained to go along.
The training is not shared out evenly. Girls get the heaviest dose of it, drilled hardest in compliance and in keeping the peace. But the son gets it too, and then gets told on top of it that a boy has nothing to fear.
It almost never looks like anything. A child stiffens when some uncle reaches for them, or hangs back, or says in their small way that they would rather not. The adult, embarrassed in front of family, snaps: don’t be rude, go. The child goes. And the lesson that lands is complete: my no was the thing that was wrong here. The child files it away, and uses it later on the next man, the one who means it. Don’t refuse him. Don’t tell.
That child was not failed by a cruel family. They were failed by a loving one, doing the exact thing loving families are told to do.
Hand the defences back
So keep the respect, all of it. Take back only the obedience. Let respect be the thing it was meant to be, which runs in both directions. This is not some foreign idea slipping in through the back door. It is what respect was before we shrank it down to mean a child doing as they are told. An elder worth the name has no use for a child’s blind compliance and would be sickened to learn it had ever been spent on keeping a child quiet. The first person a child should be taught to respect is themselves, because a child who knows they are owed respect can feel it when they are not being given any.
And be clear about whose job this is, because it is the easiest thing in the world to get backwards. None of this hands the work of stopping abuse to the child. A small child cannot fight off an adult and must never be asked to. We made that mistake once already, the whole country did, when we taught children to chant no and called it prevention while the grown-ups did nothing. This is the other thing entirely. The work is the adult’s: stop demanding the obedience, stop punishing the refusal, and turn into someone a child could actually come to.
So hand the three back. Let a child refuse, even an elder, even when it is awkward, and do not make them take it back. Let them ask why, and answer them instead of hushing them. And tell them once, plainly, in a way they will remember: if anyone, however old, however respected, ever does something that scares or hurts or confuses you, telling me is not disrespect, and I will not be angry.
If the day comes that a child tells you something, what you do in the first minute matters more than anything that comes after. Believe them. Do not cross-examine them for proof, do not go and confront the person in front of them, keep them close, and call Childline on 1098, which will help you with what comes next. Then, the next time the child pulls away from someone, let them.
There is a cost to this, and it is better to know it going in. The first time you let a child not touch some elder’s feet, the elder will be stung, the room will turn to look at you, and someone will decide you are raising a child with no values. That is the price. Pay it. The child is watching to see whether your respect for an elder counts for more than your loyalty to them, and they will remember the answer long after the elder has forgotten the slight.
A child can honour their elders and still keep their own no. That child is not worse-mannered for it. That child is only harder to hurt.
If a child is in danger or has been harmed, call Childline on 1098. It is free and open 24x7, in many Indian languages. If this is close to you and you are carrying something from your own childhood, iCALL offers free, confidential counselling at 9152987821. You do not have to carry it alone.
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