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We were somewhere between Gangtok and Ravangla, in the lower Himalayas, when the conversation turned to children.
It was the winter of 2018, and I was part of a field immersion program run by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. A handful of us - students, academics, a few curious international exchange students - had been traveling through Sikkim, visiting schools, interviewing teachers, and trying, with limited success, to understand how education unfolds in the mountains. We had just returned from a cluster of government schools on the edge of Khangchendzonga National Park, where children recited poems barefoot on polished mud floors and multipurpose teachers switched roles fluidly between maths, history, and language.
That evening, the mist curled through pine trees in Ravangla, a small town known for its monumental Buddha statue that gazes out over the hills with the sort of indifference only stone can afford. We sat in a modest guesthouse drinking tongba, a millet-based warm drink. Among us was Claire, a French national in her late twenties, unmarried at the time, not particularly interested in parenting, or so she thought.
She had spent the day speaking to a group of middle-schoolers who had, quite casually, mentioned that many of them still shared sleeping space with their parents or grandparents. What struck her wasn’t the intimacy, but the normalcy. In France, she explained, children are gently nudged into sleeping on their own by three months. “Isn’t autonomy the point?” she asked, genuinely puzzled.
I offered the usual cultural explanations. Indian homes are crowded. Emotional ties are extended. Interdependence is valued. Children grow out of it eventually. But I could sense that her question wasn’t about sleeping arrangements. It was about something more subtle, something harder to explain.
That night, and for many nights after, her question lingered: When do children become independent? Who decides? And how does that shape the kind of adults they become?
The Illusion of Instinct
In India, we don’t really talk about parenting. We do it, inherit it, improvise it. It is passed down through casual authority, not conscious reflection. Most people assume it comes naturally, like lactation or attachment. You become a parent, and so you must know how to parent.
This assumption, as comforting as it is misguided, has enormous implications. We train to be engineers, artists, or policy-makers. But we assume we’ll know how to raise a human being, simply by virtue of biology or culture.
Parenting is treated as private labor, often gendered, occasionally sanctified, but almost never studied. And yet, it shapes the first experience of power, the first encounter with empathy, the first sense of self-worth. If schools are where citizens are schooled, homes are where they are formed.
In the absence of any broader discourse, Indian parenting today seems caught between a past it hasn’t examined and a future it doesn’t quite understand. What emerges is an awkward hybrid: high on love, low on reflection.
The French Mindset
A few years after that trip, Claire suggested to me a book to read: Bringing Up Bébé, by Pamela Druckerman. The book, part memoir and part anthropological reportage, chronicles the author’s attempt to raise children in Paris after having grown up in the United States.
Druckerman noticed that French children slept through the night early, played independently, and waited patiently in restaurants while their parents finished three-course meals. Their parents, meanwhile, were not frazzled or guilt-ridden. They seemed calm, present, but not obsessed.
What she uncovered was not a parenting “method” so much as a cultural orientation. French parenting, she observed, is anchored in le cadre, a firm but flexible frame within which children are given room to grow. It was about setting boundaries, not issuing commands. Letting children cry a little. Teaching them to wait. Believing that boredom, frustration, and delay are not traumas but thresholds.
There’s a moment she describes as le pause, a tiny interval between a child’s demand and a parent’s response. It’s not a power play, but a slowing down. An expression of confidence in the child’s capacity to self-soothe, to wait, to cope.
The French, she suggests, assume competence in the child. Americans, increasingly, assume fragility.
Reading the book, I thought again of Claire’s bewilderment in Ravangla. Her question had never been about where children sleep. It was about how societies calibrate dependency and release, how they encode authority and autonomy.
America’s Anxiety and Japan’s Trust
This debate is not limited to France and India. In Japan, children walk to school unaccompanied by the age of six. They clean their own classrooms, sort trash, and are trusted with responsibilities that would cause panic in other societies. The psychologist Takeo Doi (1973) describes a concept called amae: a kind of indulgent, early dependence that eventually gives way to responsibility through communal trust.
In the United States, the situation is quite different. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that modern parenting and schooling practices are producing children who are less resilient and more anxious. They identify “safetyism” as a cultural force, a belief that children must be protected from discomfort, disagreement, even boredom.
The result, they suggest, is a generation that is ill-equipped to cope with complexity or contradiction.
India, meanwhile, is suspended in a strange paradox. Parenting here remains an unquestioned domain, both sacred and invisible. Yet in the cities, particularly among the upwardly mobile, parenting is also becoming neurotic and performative. Influencer culture has transformed parenting into a curated aesthetic. Every act of care, from breastfeeding to bedtime, is now a potential reel.
Parents swing between over-control and under-presence. Children are coached, corrected, celebrated, and surveilled. They are taught to perform well but not to wait well. They are trained to win but not to fail.
The child, once seen as a gift, now often feels like a project.
Our Forgotten Philosophers of Childhood
Ironically, India has no shortage of parenting philosophy. It’s just that we’ve forgotten it.
Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, envisioned education as a form of aesthetic emergence. At Shantiniketan, children wandered under banyan trees, learning through song, play, and silence. He believed that rhythm mattered more than routine, and that childhood was not a dress rehearsal for adulthood but a stage with its own dignity.
Jiddu Krishnamurti went further. He argued that comparison and fear were the primary tools of conditioning, and that true parenting required unlearning. To raise free children, adults would have to become psychologically free themselves.
Gijubhai Badheka, a largely forgotten educator from Gujarat, blended Gandhian ethics with progressive pedagogy. He wrote that storytelling, affection, and rhythm were the most important tools in a child’s moral and emotional development.
And then there is the legacy of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, who saw education not as instruction but as unfolding. They wrote that a child is not an empty slate, but a psychic being on a journey. Education and parenting should not impose, but awaken.
Each of these thinkers asked us to step back, to listen, to trust. And, crucially, to pause.
Parenting as the First Politics
Parenting is not just emotional labor. It is a moral infrastructure. It is where the first encounter with power takes place. Where language is learned, and so too silence. Where obedience and dissent are first modeled.
If we raise children who fear mistakes, we may create adults who fear freedom.
If we never let children wait, we risk raising citizens who cannot tolerate democracy.
The stakes are not merely personal. They are civilizational.
The Power of the Pause
What Druckerman observed in French parenting, and what Tagore, Krishnamurti, Sri Aurobindo, and The Mother echoed in their own ways, is the art of the pause. The moment of restraint before interference. The willingness to wait before solving. The decision to trust, even when afraid.
This pause is not passive. It is an active stance rooted in presence, not control.
We do not need more parenting hacks or viral tips. We need a new grammar of attention. One that values reflection over reaction, curiosity over comparison, and freedom over fear.
Perhaps what our children need most is not our constant effort, but our conscious restraint.
A Final Note from the Mountains
At the beginning of this year, Claire and I reconnected over a video call. She was now a mother of two, speaking to me from her apartment in Lyon, the walls behind her plastered with children’s drawings. She was still thoughtful, still observant, though perhaps less surprised by cultural differences than before.
“I think I understand it better now,” she said. “Back then, I saw dependence. Now, I see continuity. Maybe the secret is not doing more, but doing less, with more faith.”
As the screen froze and unfroze with the usual minor delays, I thought of the children we met near Khangchendzonga. They walked to school through trails of fog. They carried younger siblings without complaint. They played cricket with bamboo sticks and bottle caps.
There were no apps, no curated routines, no hashtags.
Only rhythm. Trust. And pause.
We just have to remember how to listen for it.