My Father Never Argued with His Father. I Argue with Mine. My Son Argues with Everyone.

How comfortable are you with hierarchy, authority

The obedience shift across generations — created with Claude

The complaint came home on a Tuesday.

My son doesn’t pay a lot of attention in class – he gets bored easily and then stops engaging with teachers.

It was not the first time. I have tried reasoning with him, warning him, rewarding him and explaining why he needs to listen. It works for two or three days. Then the subject stops exciting him, and he stops listening again.

There is a particular tone teachers use when they say “he doesn’t listen”, a tone that suggests you have failed at something ancient and obvious, something your own mother managed without a parenting podcast.

The Obedience Index

That evening, I was scrolling X when I found a tiktokish video someone had posted on “obedience index” (Geert Hofstede’s ⁠Power Distance Index), measuring how willing people in different countries are to follow authority without questioning it. It is likely to impact how people innovate. how comfortable they are with hierarchy and in turn with inequality.

India sat near the top, around 77. The global average hovered at 59. Denmark, and much of Western Europe, sat down near 30.

I stared at it for long because according to this index, I come from one of the most obedient cultures on earth. And yet I keep failing to produce one obedient child.

The Complex Indian Relationship with Obedience

I grew up touching the feet of elders. Not as ritual performance but as reflex – you saw a grandparent, an uncle, even your fathers friend, and you bent. You did not answer back. Answering back was a character flaw.

My father took this further than I ever could. In front of my grandfather, he did not open his mouth except to say yes. Not out of fear, exactly. Out of something the index would call obedience and he would have called respect.

And yet, stand at any traffic signal in India and watch what happens in the four seconds before the light turns green. Watch the scooters bleed through the red, the auto inching into the intersection, the collective, cheerful contempt for the rule. We are, apparently, the most obedient people in the world, and we cannot wait for a light to change.

So the index is measuring something, obedience to people. What it misses is that this has almost nothing to do with obedience to systems.

We defer to the person in the room – the elder, the boss, the uncle – and we negotiate with everything else.

A Dane, I suspect, has it exactly reversed: argue freely with your father, but stand at an empty crossing at midnight waiting for the green man.

Indians are obedient to faces and titles, not to structures. And even that is coming apart, one generation at a time.

The Generational Shift

My father: silent before his father. Me: born decades later, given just enough rope to be what my parents called vocal – I could disagree, carefully, at the right moments, in the right tone.

Every disagreement was still a small transaction, paid for in advance with good behaviour. Case in point – when I wanted to marry the person of my choice I could navigate it relatively easily because of the decades of goodwill I had acquired over the years by being a god studious daughter.

Is the Index Falling?

I would like to believe so. Three generations, one household: 77, then something lower, then whatever number my son is busy driving toward.

And I do not know where I sit on this. I still do not know if my son’s questioning is healthy, the future, a feature and not a flaw.

Some days I believe that.

Other days I hear myself say because I said so – words I swore off, words that worked on me – and I understand, for one hot second, exactly why my father kept his mouth shut in that room.

It was easier. It was quieter. Somebody had already decided everything, and all you had to do was bend.

What unsettles me is not that my son won’t obey. It’s that I can’t tell what I actually want from him. When I ask him to listen, am I asking him to consider – or to comply?