It takes a village

A few minutes back, I see a little girl of 3 or 4 stepping off the curb at the traffic light, and there's no adult in sight. So instinctively I wag a finger at her, sternly telling her to stay on the pavement. She obeys immediately, with a guilty look on her face.

So then I am thinking to myself while walking the rest of the way home that these days you don't really see any children being admonished or told off by some unrelated grown up, when the kids are seen making some wrong move in public. We all want to be seen as politically correct. Even when parents are present and don't lift a finger to quieten a screaming child in a restaurant or to shake their head at a kid busily exploring the inside of her nose while being introduced to people in public, other adults will sit there, beaming beatifically at the "little angel". Their attitude seems to be either that this is none of their business or a quiet feeling of heartwarming schadenfreude.

In either case, kids get to feel that whatever they do is perfectly all right, and that they are generally free to create any ruckus anywhere anytime. If this was all there was to it, I could still console myself that the world will just have to adjust itself to several more ill-behaved grownups 20 years later. But serious implications can happen if such acquiescence continues to be extended towards antisocial or even reckless tendencies. Consider the example I started off my blog with. A kid that steps off the curb unattended and survives will be encouraged to do the same thing again and again. Oh, maybe that sort of behaviour does explain jaywalkers in Calcutta!

Previous generations would never have stood for this sort of mollycoddling. A firm whack on the side of the head was due to any kid that dared raise his voice in public, even if the administerer was someone not directly related. Horror of horrors, the parents would never take the side of the kid, as & when they got to know of it. It would be the principle that mattered, not the individuals involved or their relationship to the parents.

It does take an entire village to bring up a child.