Stand Against Parental Impunity
Imagine I forced you to practice another religion's rituals. Or I cut you off from the external world, coercing you to break friendships or relationships. Or I throw you into a re-education camp because I disagreed with your political or religious beliefs. Most people would strongly (and rightly) condemn these violations.
They happen every day, though, under a more respectable label: parenting.
I’ll start with the disclaimers. There are many well-adjusted families where parents are kind and understanding. And there are many families with much more serious issues than the ones I'll talk about here, issues that we all agree are horrific.
What is less talked about, and yet so prevalent, is the more silent type of abuse: parents misusing their position of power over children; stifling, threatening, hurting them.
Every other person of my generation I know describes their relationships with their parents as controlling, fearful, or otherwise problematic. This ratio is abnormally high - especially considering that these are the people who brought us into the world. Why is this happening?
Culturally, we wave off these problems as “teenage rebellion”. That is a reductive (and offensive) view of a serious problem - where children feel suffocated, but largely don’t have a voice, and parents feel empowered to deny basic rights afforded to all human beings. We can disagree about the causes, but it is laughably ignorant to deny that the problem itself exists.
I volunteer at an organization that advises and helps young people in difficult homes. Almost every day, a new case comes in. Girls being denied an education due to their parents' hyper-conservative beliefs, people who are being forced into marriage, or not being allowed to marry the person they love. Occasionally, there is serious physical abuse; last month a seventeen year old called me, a bloody gash on his right cheek. Keep in mind that the people who come to us are a very small - English-speaking, Reddit-using - subset of the actual population.
And of course, these are only the “urgent” cases. The majority of toxic parents do much (seemingly) less grave things: forcing their kids into careers they have no interest in, or isolating from their friends or the internet, or the omnipresent “beating”. In old journal entries from 2021, I’ve written with great horror about how here in India, violent physical abuse is normalized - in cinema, common speech, homes. Today, that has somehow become the least shocking thing I deal with.
Should children attempt to question any of these dictates, the response from their parents is swift and ruthless: crackdowns, boycotts, constant taunts and attacks. It's almost incredible from a political lens - it's gruesome to see that the ugly, cruel, political tactics used among nations are routinely used within families.
Or if the child has become financially independent, it's not unusual (I wish I were exaggerating) for parents to threaten to commit suicide - especially when a person wants to marry someone they disapprove of. What the hell? None of this should be normal.
But it is. And throughout the world, parents get away with these crimes (we really should start calling it for what it is) in large part because of their financial power over children.
Another, more subtle, reason is the cultural buy-in: the idea that parents have the right to fully control their children’s lives - in particular, “discipline” them when necessary without question. I call this doctrine parental impunity.
Nobody deserves impunity.
This is a world for all of us, and we all deserve to live without fear and undue restriction.
In the many conversations I’ve had about child rights, there are a few arguments usually brought up supporting parental impunity.
The most common one, of course, is that “parents deserve respect”. I agree - even if you were to discount the amount of effort and care they’ve put into us, parenting is an intensely difficult job, and I don’t envy the people doing it.
What I don’t understand is how respect translates to excusing self-evident displays of power, or arcane, cruel, punishments, or that “get out of the house then” is a casual expression of anger in Indian households.
What makes this ironic and a little sad is that the values we’re talking about here - compassion, justice, equality - are values culturally embedded in children by parents. Almost no “toxic parent” would allow any other person to treat their children the way they treat them. It’s just that they somehow have excluded their own behavior from the judgement list.
Another oft-repeated defense is that parents always want the best for children, and “they know better, right?”. This does sound sensible at first. But this misty-eyed portrayal of parents fails to acknowledge that they too are in fact human beings, and even if we agreed that they have the best of intentions, they still routinely mess up. I’m not trying to vilify parents - I just want us to stop deifying them.
Nor am I, as detractors often claim, implying that teenagers are never at fault (we often are). I am also not denying our tendency to over-react to things, or our insane ability to so confidently wallow in stupidity. My point is that all of that is irrelevant.
This isn’t really about parents vs. children. It is about the fact that when you give a class of people unrestricted power, they will - inevitably - abuse it. Husbands, landlords, teachers, employers, governments, or parents; the same rule applies. The obvious solution - also the idea powering most modern democracies - is to ensure that no single class or individual has unrestricted power.
That is all I’m asking for: accountability. Yes - in most cases, parents do love us, they do want the best for us. But good intentions do not justify wrong actions. Yes, in all conflict, there are two sides that hurt each other. But even if true, “disrespect” cannot be used to justify ruining lives. Conflict is complicated, especially so in something as delicate as a family - but there must be boundaries, we cannot allow people to so irreverently hurt other people at this scale.
Sometimes I think of how similar child rights is to the early days of the feminist movement. Like children, women faced serious issues domestically. These transgressions rarely came to light because they are within the home; the family unit, defended by society and protected by the law. It was not until women started earning and becoming financially independent, and then politically independent - through the right to vote - that things started to change.
I believe that things will similarly change for children too. This obviously won't happen overnight. We need to speak up, call out and condemn individual instances, help out people suffering. We should no longer choose to close our eyes.
A full century after women in most democracies got the right to vote, we are so far away from an equal world. Today, in 2025, marital rape is still not a crime in this country. The fight for equality is an unbearably slow one, and often very disheartening. But that's also why this work is so important.
Funnily, there is legal buy-in to these ideas already - at least in the international arena. The United Nations Convention on Child Rights is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, signed by every country in the world.
Article 13 reads, with characteristic grandeur, “The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers”. Article 14 goes on to defend religious freedom, 16 protects privacy, 17 the access to “information from the internet”, 19 the protection from “physical or mental” violence.
It's pretty inspiring to think that every head of state in the world got together in the same room and pledged to deliver all of these things, even if we're nowhere close to achieving them.
Political and economic trends will change over the centuries. But what we can do today is reduce the cultural acceptance of parental impunity. We would never accept these violations between adults. We shouldn't accept them between parents and children either.
Families are not exempt from moral standards. They never should have been.
Tonight, yet again, many hundreds of children will go to sleep crying, alone and afraid. Tomorrow, yet again, dozens of would-be marriages, close friendships will be torn apart. And today, we celebrate Children’s Day. The suffocating barrage of slogans will start soon: “the future belongs to you”, “the hope of tomorrow”.
But children don’t live in tomorrow; they’ll be adults by then. They live and suffer today.
happy children’s day, everyone.
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