Let Families Raise Their Children:
A Cross-Cultural Reflection
Parenting is one of the most difficult jobs in the world. It is a role where one learns while on the job. Though the experience of ancestors often helps, every generation faces its own unique challenges, making each parental journey distinct. Parenting is serious business. It does not help when media mocks or trivializes it. It becomes a wake-up call when even foreign governments begin to ridicule the media doing this mockery. This is particularly evident now as Russia openly criticizes Western—especially American—media for eroding family values, or perhaps more precisely, for reflecting the lack of them.
On careful examination, a critical lesson emerges for the West: the balance between state and family in shaping future generations demands urgent reflection. True prosperity goes far beyond material accumulation. It includes a nation’s ability to cultivate human potential, foster self-reliance, and maintain a resilient social fabric. This final “yellow rose” is a direct appeal, born from India’s contrasting experience, to our Western counterparts: please let parents do their job, as governments have arguably faltered.
Parenting in India
In India, despite myriad challenges, the bedrock of human capital formation remains the family unit. Driven by aspiration and deeply rooted cultural values, Indian parents take primary responsibility for raising, disciplining, and educating their children. This foundational social contract remains largely free from pervasive state intervention in parenting. Parents instill ambition, demand academic excellence, enforce discipline, and guide their children toward productive lives.
This family-led cultivation of human potential is a continuous, self-propelling engine—producing generations of resilient, resourceful, and globally competitive individuals. The state typically intervenes only in cases of clear danger, neglect, or crime, thereby respecting the family’s fundamental autonomy in day-to-day upbringing.
Parenting in the West
Contrast this with the trajectory in many Western societies. Often with benevolent intentions, governments have expanded their mandate into the minutiae of child-rearing. Child protection services, social work agencies, and educational institutions are vital for safeguarding the vulnerable. However, they have collectively created an environment of pervasive oversight and, at times, intrusive scrutiny over parental decisions.
Disciplinary practices, moral guidance, and even definitions of appropriate upbringing are increasingly shaped by bureaucratic norms and state-appointed experts—individuals who may lack the nuanced understanding of specific family dynamics or the lived realities of parenting.
The unintended consequences of this overreach subtly erode human capital by undermining parental authority. The result? Less discipline, weaker life skills in children, and rising confusion in youth. More concerning is how this environment makes many parents feel compelled to prioritize avoiding legal or institutional trouble over directly guiding or disciplining their children. In effect, the state begins parenting, while parents retreat into caution.
The Media’s Role: Undermining the Family Ideal
Compounding this problem is the influence of popular media, especially Hollywood and Western television, which has steadily eroded the image of the family as a nurturing, disciplined, and resilient unit. Very few reputable films or television series today portray parenting in a dignified or aspirational light. Instead, fathers are often depicted as foolish or absent, mothers as overwhelmed or neurotic, and family structures as fractured by default. Married couples are rare; divorce, dysfunction, and casual relationships dominate the narrative landscape.
Across multiple spin-offs of CSI, there is not a single functional marriage portrayed among the core characters. In House M.D., the brilliant but misanthropic doctor treats family ties as liabilities. In NCIS, the lead character often mocks marriage and actively avoids emotional connection. The Good Wife—despite its title—depicts a crumbling marriage marred by adultery, a toxic mother-in-law, a manipulative mother, and a son who, after admission in college, runs away to Paris with an older woman, abandoning his family altogether and wasting hard earned tuition fee deposited by mother. List of such negative TV shows is endless.
This cultural messaging matters. It subtly rewires public expectations—especially in younger generations—about what is “normal” or “desirable.” When nearly every on-screen family is broken, chaotic, or mocked, real families feel less confident, less supported, and more uncertain in their roles. Media no longer reflects social reality—it reshapes it, often in ways that devalue stability, patience, and generational responsibility. In this way, the cultural ecosystem itself becomes hostile to effective parenting.
This cultural collapse has been explored in “Hollywood may follow down the cliff after Urdu cinema (Bollywood),” which provides a broader reflection on how glamorized decay can corrode social values over time.
The Loss of Unconventional Brilliance
Crucially, the very children who are often labeled as “delinquent” or “rebellious” are frequently among the brightest and most intelligent. Their non-conformity may not stem from misbehavior but from boredom with outdated systems, frustration with perceived inefficiencies, or from neuro-divergent minds that struggle within rigid educational and social molds.
Consider historical figures like Albert Einstein or modern innovators like Elon Musk, whose unconventional thinking may well have been stifled under today’s regimes of excessive oversight. State systems are often ill-equipped to nurture this brilliance. Instead of recognizing potential, they opt for quick labeling, disciplinary action, or exclusion.
This risks squandering the cream of society—the very individuals who might otherwise become innovators, problem-solvers, or visionary leaders. Losing them to apathy or alienation represents a tragic and irreparable loss of prime human capital.
A Humble Plea: Rebalancing the Relationship
The plea to the West is simple and sincere: Trust parents to do their job. Recognize the inherent capacity of families to nurture and guide their children—even those who challenge conventional norms. While safety nets and protection are absolutely necessary, broad, daily state intrusion into parenting undermines the one institution most capable of raising resilient, disciplined, and ambitious citizens.
Western societies may wish to begin reviewing policies that encroach on parental discretion. Fostering renewed trust in families—rather than trying to legislate over them—can help rediscover a powerful, organic source of national strength.
By stepping back and allowing families to reclaim their core responsibility, the West might reawaken a tradition of human-centered richness—one that no government program, however well-funded, can fully replicate.
