The third in our Heritage Month series, What We Carry Forward
Let’s start with respect, because it is owed. Our grandparents raised children under conditions most of us cannot imagine. They parented through forced removals, migrant labour, Bantu Education, and households stretched across provinces. They kept families intact with almost nothing. Whatever else we say about their methods, they got us here.
But a family inheritance is like a house passed down through generations. Some of it is solid: the foundations, the stone walls, the workmanship you could not afford to replicate today. Some of it is asbestos in the ceiling, installed by people who genuinely believed it was the best material available. Honouring the builders does not mean leaving the asbestos where it is.
Three beliefs worth examining
“It never did me any harm.” This is the most common defence of harsh physical discipline, and it is also the least testable, because it asks the person who was hit to judge the damage.
Elizabeth Gershoff’s meta-analyses, drawing together decades of studies across tens of thousands of children, found that physical punishment is consistently associated with more aggression, more antisocial behaviour and poorer mental health, and with no improvement in long-term obedience. South African law has moved with the evidence: corporal punishment was banned in schools in 1996, and in 2019 the Constitutional Court ruled that the common law defence of reasonable chastisement in the home was unconstitutional.
Here’s the part that matters for a Heritage Month conversation. Our grandparents were not cruel. They were using the only tool their own upbringing handed them, the way you would use a blunt knife if it were the only one in the drawer. We have better knives now. Keeping the blunt one out of loyalty helps nobody.
“Children should be seen and not heard.” In a home with eight children, three rooms and one exhausted adult, this was practical management, not philosophy. It kept order when order was survival.
But a child who is never heard does not become quiet. They become a person who cannot say what they need, and that follows them into marriages, workplaces, and consulting rooms decades later. Silence at fourteen becomes silence at forty, when it costs far more.
“We don’t talk about that.” Money troubles, illness, a family member’s struggles, the parts of the past that hurt. Silence feels protective, like drawing curtains against the sun.
Children notice the curtains anyway. They don’t get the explanation, so they supply their own, and children almost always cast themselves as the cause. An unexplained silence in a home works like a gap in a story: the reader fills it in, usually badly.
What to keep, fiercely
This is not a demolition job. The same inheritance carries things worth defending with both hands.
The extended family that raises a child collectively. Respect for elders as genuine reverence, not fear. The conviction that education is the door out. Hospitality that feeds a visitor before asking why they came. Humour that survives what should not be survivable. Faith that carried people through decades with no evidence things would improve.
Renovating a house means knowing which walls are load-bearing. Ubuntu is load-bearing. “Because I said so” is not.
How to sort one from the other
Ask three questions of any inherited practice:
- What was it for? Most harsh customs were solving a real problem under real constraints. Name the problem honestly.
- Does that problem still exist in my home? Often it does not. The strictness that kept a child safe on dangerous streets in 1978 may now be mere strictness, with the danger gone and the fear left behind.
- Is there a better tool available? If yes, use it, and say so plainly to your children. “My mother did it this way, and she loved me, and I’m doing it differently” is one of the most generous sentences a parent can say. It honours the person and retires the practice in the same breath.
Try this at home
Write down two columns: what I want to keep, and what stops with me. Do it honestly, then share one item from each column with your teenager. They will remember that conversation for a very long time.
In the Grade 8 classrooms where Rudder4Life works, learners are asked which values they carry because they chose them, and which they carry because nobody ever put the bag down. It is a quiet question that changes posture.
You are not the end of a tradition. You are the editor of one. Every generation gets a turn with the pen, and the good news is that your children are watching how you use it.
#WhatWeCarryForward, then #HeritageMonth #ParentingTeens #PositiveDiscipline #FamilyValues #BreakingCycles #YouthDevelopment #SouthAfricanParents #Rudder4Life