The Boy on the Burning Deck

***

Uncle OT or The Visitor as he's known to some, sent me this link
to a news article from The Guardian and asked me if I could do a post on what I thought of the subject. Looks like he's been mailing other bloggers, too! (I get the vague feeling of being back in composition class in school!)

The article is on obedience and why it's not necessarily a good thing in children. Ah well. To start with, I'm not a big fan of studies like these. Ten years down the line, it's very likely that someone else will find out that obedience makes your heart last longer or gives you a third kidney. But in any case, since I'm a parent and all and therefore qualified to be opinionated, I shall air my views.

Obedience works on hierarchy. Basically, somebody who is bigger/richer/older tells someone else who is smaller/poorer/younger what to do and expects the latter to follow those instructions because the former knows better (by virtue of being bigger/richer/older). It's a different thing when this is an employer-employee situation because the employee is paid to obey (even then, we must Facebook at work). 

As far as obedience in parenting is concerned, it is all about someone who is bigger and older telling someone who is smaller and younger what to do. As children, we're all taught to obey our elders and we're also duly made to read a hundred moral stories in which an annoying boy called Ramu with a neat haircut wins a medal for being obedient. But life is rarely as simple as a Ramu story. 

Funnily, the value of disobedience was taught to me by none other than my mother. When I was in Class I or so, we had this story called The Boy on the Burning Deck in our English reader. Now the actual story has a war background and all, but the story in our reader was simply about a boy on a ship who was standing on its deck because his father had asked him to do so. The ship bursts into flames for some vague reason and the father dies off. But this painful boy, instead of escaping when given a chance, chooses to stand on the deck and die because his father told him to stand there and not move. As five-year-olds, we were all expected to burst into tears at the death of this very noble child. My mother, after explaining the story to me, told me very clearly that in the event of a fire, she hoped I wouldn't be an idiot and stand somewhere just because she'd told me to. 

When we talk about how important it is for adults to cultivate obedience in their children, we assume that the adults in question are wise individuals who know and understand the world. Sadly, this is not always the case. Age, in my opinion, is rarely a qualification for wisdom. Everything around us ages, including the furniture, and one does not automatically become wise by defeating death one extra year. If this had been the case, we wouldn't have so many old people spending a good amount of time calculating the number of minutes by which their morning coffee was delayed because their modern daughter-in-law woke up only at 6 AM. Unless a person actively chooses to grow from life, the years do nothing to his/her intellect. Old people are just like young people. Some are wise, some are not. Some are painful, some are fun. 

Similarly, with parents, not all parents know what's best for their children just because they are parents. I'd like to distinguish between good behaviour and obedience here. Good behaviour is to do with social interactions. A child who insists on keeping his/her shoes on and jumping on somebody's white couch, in my opinion, deserves a whack (okay, a very light whack AFTER you've told the kid to geddofff a million times...don't call Childline yet). Good behaviour is necessary to cultivate in children because otherwise, we'll have a world full of unbearable adults whom we can't even whack. An intelligent child will figure out pretty quickly that good behaviour often works in its favour if the parents are supportive, appreciative, and exhibit good behaviour themselves. 

Obedience, on the other hand, works on the principle of threat and becomes a personality trait. It is a 'do-this-or-else' hierarchy and if the child falls in line all the time, it simply does not get the chance to think for itself. A well-behaved child needn't always obey what his/her parents say. Likewise, a poorly-behaved child could very well take up Engineering because mommy told him to.  As parents, we all have an idea about what we want our child to be. This is not wrong. But it's equally important to encourage the child to figure out what it wants to be. When you become a parent, your entire world shrinks to that of your child's. You are forever occupied in trying to do your best for it. For your child, however, the world is expanding and you are increasingly becoming irrelevant. This is inevitable and should be so. Even though I consider myself to be pretty broadminded, I'm quite sure GBM will someday shock and scare me by wanting to do and doing things that I wouldn't have done myself. It would be okay in her world and not okay in mine. And that should be okay.

When a child is old enough to have opinions (and even my two-month old has opinions on which part of the house she wants to tour), there will be instances when disagreements occur. But even if you disagree, do it with respect. Be willing to consider the possibility that your child might be right even if you don't understand how. Parents are often dismissive and forget the fact that children remember. If you are not willing to consider your child's opinion because s/he is a pipsqueak, remember that you are setting an example for the child who will not consider yours because you are an old fogy. And worse, you might bring up a child who does not value anybody's opinion.

I thought back to my own childhood when OT sent me this link and tried to imagine what my life would have been like if I'd been obedient and listened to everything that my parents, teachers and elders had told me. I concluded that I'd have been an unhappy Physics school teacher who had no clue about her subject. 

Moral: When there is a fire, get the hell out of there.