Parenting & Family Quote by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Colette slips a blade into a velvet glove: the line looks like a mild etiquette tip, then quietly reorders the family hierarchy. “Occasionally” and “politely” aren’t softeners so much as tactical permissions. She’s not calling for adolescent tyranny; she’s authorizing a rare but necessary correction, a controlled breach in the assumption that age automatically equals authority. The sting is in “put parents in their place,” a phrase usually reserved for disciplining children. Colette reverses it to expose how much parenting can drift into entitlement when it goes unchecked.

The intent is less rebellion than calibration. Colette’s children aren’t overthrowing parents; they’re reminding them that power in a household is provisional, not divine. “Not a bad thing” is especially telling: she frames the act as healthy, even socially beneficial, as if the family needs small doses of accountability the way a body needs vaccines. The subtext is that parents, like all adults, perform roles. They can become addicted to the performance of being right, being owed, being the center. A child’s polite pushback punctures that theater without turning the home into a courtroom.

Context matters: Colette wrote in a France still thick with patriarchal norms and bourgeois respectability, where “good children” were often defined by obedience and silence. Her work repeatedly prizes lived truth over propriety. Here she’s smuggling that ethic into domestic life: real respect isn’t fear. It’s a relationship sturdy enough to survive being questioned.