Parenting & Family Quote by Alice Miller

Every culture loves a one-way street, and Miller is pointing at the traffic signs. “Honor your parents” is among the most socially protected moral instructions in the West, reinforced by religion, law, and small-talk guilt. By contrast, “respect the child” rarely appears as a commandment because it threatens the neat hierarchy that keeps families legible to outsiders: adults as unquestioned authorities, children as incomplete people.

Miller’s intent is not to romanticize childhood; it’s to expose a moral asymmetry that quietly authorizes harm. The line carries her broader project: showing how societies dress obedience up as virtue, then treat a child’s protest as ingratitude or pathology. If honoring parents is taken as sacred, parents become insulated from scrutiny. The child’s interior life - fear, rage, shame, even basic preference - gets recast as insolence. That’s the subtext: the ethical problem isn’t just individual cruelty, but a culture that pre-loads loyalty onto the powerful party.

Context matters. Miller, a leading critic of “black pedagogy” and punitive childrearing, wrote in the shadow of 20th-century European authoritarianism and the postwar tendency to normalize violence as “discipline.” Her argument links private family order to public political order: training children to submit without question is a rehearsal for submitting to institutions later.

The quote works because it sounds like a simple observation while smuggling in an indictment: we have commandments for deference, not for care. And that imbalance doesn’t just shape families; it shapes what society is willing to see.