,Abhi mummy’s slippers will be thrown from the top of Atlantic!” (Mummy’s flying slipper will reach me across the Atlantic.)
The chat history of my cousins’ group on WhatsApp, rather appropriately named “We Are All a Little Mad Here”, is dotted with such messages. Whatever be the context, the mother’s flying slippers is a ubiquitous and strong metaphor there. Or a memory, even a false one. Whether they used the slippers on us or not is debatable, especially in front of the softly-parented grandchildren. Tiger moms have transformed into soft bunnies.
Most of us have an extra dose of our parents’ faults. We have tried our best to raise our children in a manner diametrically opposed to how we grew up. We have learned to cultivate high emotional responsiveness, non-punitive discipline, and an emphasis on children’s autonomy. We express our frustrations only in therapy rooms and nowhere else. We seem to be following the soft-parenting rulebook like an annoying front-bencher, yet we are scared and struggling. What are we doing wrong?
The only answer one can come up with is flawed selectivity. But we aren’t alone here. For example, Rousseau’s 1762 text Émile, Or Treatise On Education is often invoked as a foundational text for child-centred education. He famously argued that children are naturally good and corrupted by society, and that education should follow the child’s natural development rather than impose premature moral constraints. However, Rousseau did not advocate laissez-faire parenting. On the contrary, he emphasized the idea of guided freedom. A careful structuring of the child’s environment so that natural consequences, rather than arbitrary authority, teach limits. Neglecting this and equating freedom with the absence of boundaries, we turn away from Rousseau’s core insight. The result is not the preservation of natural goodness, but the cultivation of dependency and impulsivity. These traits are what Rousseau explicitly warned against in adults who never learned self-restraint.
In Plato’s RepublicSocrates describes the degeneration of democracy into tyranny because, without habituation to reason and order, the soul becomes disordered. Applied to parenting, Socratic thought suggests that children require paidia or reasoned guidance. Shielding children from discomfort prevents the development of sophrosyne (moderation), leaving them ill-equipped for ethical deliberation and civic life.
Research after research, it has been established that the most effective (whatever that means) parenting style is authoritative (high warmth, high structure), as opposed to permissive (high warmth, low structure) and authoritarian (low warmth, high structure). Parenting styles, support, and parental beliefs bricolage children’s internal working models that they use later in life as adults. We, the children fleeing the flying slipper, don’t seem to get it right somehow. The recent total social media ban for children in Australia is making us happy because someone else is the bad guy. We can’t bear to be the reason why our children need therapy. We are ever present, ever loving, ever listening. We grew up hearing “No” and feel like a failure when we have to repeat it.
As the global festive season, overthinking parents’ nightmare, closes in on us, family dynamics become inescapably real. Rights and duties versus rights and wrongs. Economic determinism seeps into emotional uncertainty. Probably many of us have read our Diana Baumrind or Laurence Steinberg and know that parenting involves discipline, but the latter cannot be effected through coercion. We are torn between empathy and impulse, not just the children’s but our own, too. How do we survive this pandemic of parenting crisis? Maybe it’s not a collective crisis, and this author is overthinking it. Maybe our friends in good houses are doing great.
But a recent unpleasant experience with a teenager, fortunately another person’s child, where they nonchalantly told off an adult in public because the latter tried to question their “authority” on the matter of nuclear physics, has suggested otherwise. Our children depend on us. Their moral development cannot be outsourced or avoided. We may have ditched the slippersbut let’s pull up our socks and shine our shoes.
Nishtha Gautam is an academician and author. The views expressed are personal
