Free The Seventeen Traditions by Ralph Nader

gave new meaning to the word “homework.”

8.
The Tradition of Discipline
    M y siblings and I were raised to have respect for our mother and father—a respect born of our generations of family tradition, but also earned on a daily basis by their example. Yet of course we got into mischief, as all children do. And when we did, there were consequences.
    Mother and Father followed a finely calibrated series of parental reprimands, a system that we learned early and became accustomed to heeding. It started with a sudden stern look—and often that was enough to change our young minds before things went any further. When the look alone didn’t work, theyrelied on a sequence of three Arabic reprimands. The mildest was skoot or skiti (male or female), the next stage was sidd neeyak or siddi neeyik, and the third level was sakru neekoon. Translated loosely, these meant “hush your mouth” in varying degrees. If that didn’t work, we might be told to leave the dinner table and/or go to stand in the corner by the sewing machine. Or we might be assigned a chore, to drive the point home in another way. Our parents rarely spanked us, and when they did, it was no more than a gentle smack on the rear. Then as now, too many children have been picked up and shaken—as toddlers, even infants—or beaten by parents losing their self-control and abandoning themselves to rage. My parents were horrified by such behavior.
    But they knew the importance of enforcing their commands around the house. As my mother was known to say, “If parents don’t discipline, or they’re indecisive about it, their children won’t respect them.” It wasn’t enough to issue a reprimand, in other words—not if the parent merely unravels it a few minutes later by apologizing (even tacitly) and fawning all over the child. Any child who’s treated that way is being trained in the ways of manipulative behavior. “Children are clever,” Mother said, “they watch their parents and can take advantage where they see weakness.”
    Instead, my parents chose to show us where we had gone wrong, and they often did so by relying on traditional proverbs. The supply of proverbs at their disposal was countless, and they wielded them effortlessly. These sayings, which came from arich oral tradition, drew on the imagery of the past to reframe all manner of human behavior for the generations of the present and future. The villagers and peasants of their Lebanese mountain towns would have known hundreds of these proverbs; our Aunt Adma knew more than a thousand. (Think a moment: How many proverbs can you call to mind, beyond Benjamin Franklin’s homilies—“A penny saved is a penny earned” or “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”?)
    My dad, who worked seven days a week at the restaurant, used proverbs constantly. To a child talking silly, he would say (in Arabic), “Jokes are to words as salt is to food”—that is, don’t overdo it. To a child who’d put off his chores too long, the apt and famous proverb was, “Wait, oh mule, until the grass grows up.” When generosity was called for, he would say, “Empty hands are dirty hands.” Such proverbs were admonishments, to be sure. But they also managed to teach and uplift our horizons at the same time—far more than the staccato barking of parents who shout, “Stop it! I said stop it!” or “Cut it out, now, or you’ll be sorry,” and then have to repeat themselves over and over while the child ignores them. Dad was a devotee of the Socratic method; he loved nothing more than to pose a provocative question and then let it hang in the air. Once, when he noticed a bunch of teenagers in his restaurant laughingly pouring pepper in the sugar bowl, he came over to them and quietly asked, “Why are you insulting your parents?” as he took away the sugar bowl.