Of leniency and lawbreaking

In all fairness, I should perhaps begin by underscoring the fact that I have no intention of pretending that all acts of leniency inevitably lead to lawbreaking and crime. I have seen children of lenient parents turning out to be fairly well disciplined and responsible about what they do and say. I have seen a whole lot of them do very well in life and become outstanding citizens. At the same time, it is important not to overlook the fact that when leniency seeks to ignore the minor forms of lawbreaking or even to encourage them to a certain extent, we may indeed be paving the road to future lawbreaking and crime.

At my present age of four score and four years, I have had the opportunity to observe at least three generations very closely on human behaviour and the prevailing trends of change, leniency, tolerance and an increasingly liberal attitude to smaller forms of lawbreaking that are generally ratiolized as being uvoidable in a fast-changing but corrupt society. Way back in the 1940s and 1950s, I saw total intolerance of wrongdoing and objectioble behaviour by children on the part of their parents. I have seen parents compelling their children to apologize to someone they had spoken to harshly. I have come across parents who have made an errant son walk back to a friend’s house to return some very inexpensive toy that he had brought home without anyone having given it to him. Those were the days when the value system was very rigid, and no wrongdoing on the part of children, however trivial, was tolerated by parents. Children were also asked to visit their relations during important festivals like Bihu and Durga Puja and to pay respects to elderly relatives at all times. By the look of things, there were few acts of wrongdoing as serious as being disrespectful to elders. The children of that generation were also very well trained in the handling of money, and parents were rather strict about not permitting any kind of waste. I recall that children of that generation rarely had more than three or four sets of dresses which they were enjoined to look after carefully so that they did not have to ask for any replacements within the year. Another important aspect of discipline within the home was to entrust specific allotted domestic tasks to the different children. I grew up in a home where great importance was attached to work. And being the only boy among three children, my regular duty was to go to the market every afternoon on my cycle and to do the daily shopping of vegetables, fruit and meat or fish. One of my uncles had given me an imported bicycle bought for the princely sum of Rs 56 so that I could pedal down to school every day and do the daily vegetable shopping. Since we did not have running water in those days, I also had to draw bucketfuls of water from the pond at home whenever the domestic help was absent. This was the rule also for the chopping of firewood whenever the person who normally did it was absent. My two sisters also had well charted out the domestic duties related to the kitchen and the dining room in addition to work like washing utensils and sweeping the floors whenever any of the domestic help failed to turn up for work. In retrospect, our childhood days prepared us very well for much of the day-to-day work that adults are often required to do.

Over the years, and with successive generations, I have noticed how parents have turned far more indulgent and lenient towards their children as far as work is concerned. In fact, today one of the status symbols of present-day Assamese society is that children of well-to-do families have the liberty of growing up without having to do any work related to the smooth running of a household. As I have had occasion to remark earlier, this is an indulgence that is likely to do incalculable harm to such children when they grow up because with every passing year it has become more and more difficult to find efficient domestic help. When these children grow up, they will probably discover that it is virtually impossible to find any willing domestic help in Assam and that if such help does become available they would have to pay salaries that would make a big dent to their own earnings. I have always been amused by the fact that most Assamese young men who were totally unwilling to do any work at home, change miraculously when they start living in western countries and discover that it is almost impossible to afford domestic help on a daily basis. They learn to wash dishes and clothes in machines and do an unbelievable gamut of domestic work by themselves. 

But the parental leniency that I am talking about is of far greater significance when it comes to overlooking or brushing aside minor acts of lawbreaking on the part of their children. This is a trend that is beginning to be more and more common among doting parents. One bit of ratiolization—which is sometimes even articulated in the presence of their children—is that they too had broken some rules when they were as old as their children are now. This is certainly the most unfortute kind of indulgence that parents can spoil their children with. There are two specific areas where such indulgence is most often encountered. One is parents allowing their children to drive motorcycles and cars much before the legal age at which driving licences are given. This is the kind of indulgence that has led to a whole lot of tragic and fatal highway accidents often involving young drivers without driving licences. What is perhaps even more unfortute is that even when the children attain majority and are entitled to get driving licences, these licences are given to them without any driving tests. As such, teegers take to driving at high speed on highways without the expertise or ability to control their vehicles when the possibilities of accidents erupt. Of late, our highways are teeming with 10-wheeler dumpers carrying earth that are driven at high speeds and are certain killers whenever they collide with any other vehicle. I have had to revert to the subject of highway accidents time and again because of the large number of tragic but avoidable deaths that occur on our highways every day. Given the present scerio, parents should be far stricter about not permitting minor children to drive, no matter how insistent the demands may be from their offspring. This is a matter concerning the safety and the lives of their children, and responsible parents cannot afford to be lenient in such matters just to please their offspring. 

The other area of unholy indulgence concerns the consumption of alcoholic beverages. I know of parents who share their evening drinks with sons who are too young for alcoholic drinks and who have never been told anything about responsible drinking. The inevitable result of such attitudes is that children who are not grown up enough to be fully aware of the effects of alcohol tend to drink in order to have the pleasant sensation of being drunk. This is rather irresponsible conduct for parents. They should refrain from getting their children to join them in their evening drinks until they are old enough to earn the means of drinking with dignity and responsibility, so that they are sure of never being drunk.

What is certainly most unfortute is a situation where the two areas of indulgence combine to make the situation far more hazardous. I have in mind the situation where underage and untested car drivers drive when they are drunk. When such situations are condoned or sometimes even indirectly encouraged by parents, the parents themselves become the architects of their tragedies. That is when they have their own acts of indulgent leniency to blame for the deaths of their near and dear ones. One expects adults with grown-up children to be far more careful about their notions of lenient and indulgent behaviour with children when misdirected leniency and indulgence can lead to the most tragic deaths of their progeny. There is absolutely no excuse for such misdirected indulgence which many parents regard as displayable status symbols.