Free The Seventeen Traditions by Ralph Nader Page A

Instead of asking them to leave, he merely walked away, leaving them to ponder over his words.
    Both my father and my mother were highly sensitive to the weakening of parent–child relationship in modern society—to the threat the marketplace posed to the concept of parental authority. Even back in the 1930s and 1940s, my mother noticed that some caring parents were afraid of their children, afraid of how they might react if they were disciplined. She noticed even more fear as she grew older, and often commented that “Americans are afraid of their children.” She believed that children who see that their parents are afraid of them will try to control their parents, who will then begin to lose their parental moorings as a result. We were always astonished to hear a classmate slinging harsh words at his parents. To be sure, we weren’t always privy to what provoked such outbursts; we just knew that in our family there were lines you never crossed. (Only later did we realize that such behavior could be symptomatic of child abuse behind closed doors—though the parents we observed never treated their children brutally, at least in public.)
    When we ran afoul of our own parents, did we get a chance to argue our case? Not in trivial, run-of-the-mill situations, but when there was a meaningful disagreement at stake, yes. “When my children would explain [themselves] to me,” my mother once said, “I would sometimes find that they were right, but I also explained my position.” Mother believed that a child should understand why he’s being told no, or yes. She always valued a good argument on a worthwhile subject. But she also believed that a child shouldn’t be allowed to argue for argument’s sake.
    As we grew into our teenage years, our parents were more willing to engage us in back-and-forth dialogues on our little domestic controversies. But they also had subtle ways of reminding us how much they labored for our well-being, and how many years of knowledge had gone into their positions. We often, if not always, gave them the benefit of the doubt. We respected their authority, never calling them by their first names no matter what our age. But we never became overly dependent on them, either. Their unassuming confidence only enhanced our own self-confidence—until we began to seem overconfident, in which case they were quick to reply, “So, since you’ve got all the answers, you don’t have any more questions, eh?”
    There was one respect in which Mother and Father showed absolutely critical self-discipline, and that was in their interactions with each other. As children, we were aware of occasional friction between our parents. We could sense the mood changing when that occurred. But the conflict never spilled out in our presence, for our parents believed that any such display would have reduced our respect for them. They were able to keep their differences very private from us and from their friends, in part because the differences between them were mostly ordinary tensions that worked themselves out in the course of daily life. For them, the well-being of their children, which took priority over petty disagreements, served as a kind of universal solvent, dissipating any lingering tensions.
    This mutual self-respect came home to us whenever we were at our friends’ homes and witnessed sharp exchanges andvitriol between their parents. Sometimes, just walking the residential streets, we would hear shouting from one home or another. Once, as I was walking downtown to do an errand for my mother, I saw a door fly open, and a husband rushed out shouting curses, with his wife right behind him throwing miscellaneous pots and utensils at him along with a stream of invective. There was nothing like that kind of spectacle to help a boy appreciate his parents’ efforts to preserve their emotional self-control.
    As my mother often said: “If you make