Growing up, I remember being told:

Stay in a child’s place.

And as a child, okay. I understood the general idea.

Adults are talking.
Don’t interrupt.
Listen.
Respect your elders.

Cool.

But here’s the part nobody really talks about.

Apparently, that child’s place does not have an expiration date.

😂

You can be grown.

Paying bills.

Raising children.

Making decisions.

Living an entire adult life.

And somehow, the minute an elder disagrees with you, there is this unspoken reminder:

You are still the child here.

Not necessarily in those exact words.

Sometimes it’s tradition.

Sometimes it’s a look.

Sometimes it’s:

I’ve been here longer than you.

Or:

You’ll understand when you get my age.

Or my personal favorite:

I’m just trying to tell you what’s best for you.

And that is where I start having questions.

Because yes, you have lived longer than me.

But you lived your life longer than I’ve lived mine.

That does not automatically make you the expert on mine.

Experience gives you perspective.

It does not give you ownership over somebody else’s decisions.

And somewhere along the way, I think we confused the two.

We taught children to respect elders, which makes sense.

But then respect became never question them.

Never disagree.

Never correct.

Never say, That may have worked for you, but it does not work for me.

Because apparently age means authority and authority means being right.

But does it?

An elder’s job was to live their life.

To make mistakes.

To learn.

To figure out what worked for them.

To build whatever life they could from the information, opportunities, pain, and circumstances they had.

And ideally?

Take what they learned and hand the wisdom down.

Not hand the control down.

There is a difference.

Because what if the greatest thing an elder can teach you is not:

Do exactly what I did.

What if it is:

Here is what I learned. Now go figure out what works for you.

That feels more like guidance to me.

And maybe that is where we have gone wrong.

We have sometimes treated obedience as proof of respect.

But adulthood requires judgment.

It requires mistakes.

It requires making choices that somebody older than you might never make.

Hell, sometimes it requires doing the exact opposite of what generations before you did.

That does not automatically make you disrespectful.

Sometimes it means the lesson worked.

Maybe they survived so you could have choices they never had.

Maybe they fought for you to have a voice and then got uncomfortable when you actually used it.

Maybe they taught you to think for yourself and never considered the possibility that one day you might think differently from them.

That is the uncomfortable part.

Because eventually the child becomes an adult.

And the relationship has to grow too.

Respect should remain.

Love should remain.

Listening should remain.

But the hierarchy?

At some point, that has to change.

Because I can respect your years without surrendering my adulthood.

I can listen to your wisdom without making it my command.

I can appreciate the road you traveled without being required to walk the same one.

And I can love you deeply while still saying:

That is not the life I want for myself.

Maybe staying in a child’s place was never supposed to mean staying small.

Maybe the whole point of raising children is eventually watching them become people whose decisions no longer belong to you.

And maybe the hardest part of being an elder isn’t teaching the younger generation how to listen.

Maybe it’s learning when to let them speak.

— UT
Without the I.