By Rakesh Singh
In the quiet hum of a transatlantic call, my son, freshly graduated from an American university, his voice laced with the crisp confidence of a STEM dreamer, posed a question that pierced the heart of every parent: “Why do you trust us so much, even when we might fail you?” He spoke of third variables beyond control: addiction, bad company, the siren call of a world that doesn’t honour the sacrifices etched into our sleepless nights. “You invest everything,” he said, “like a company piling liabilities in hope of a payoff that may never come.”
I had no clever rebuttal, only the raw truth: We trust because we must. We trust the upbringing we poured into you, the values we whispered in the dark, the respect we modelled in every compromise. We trust that the space we gave you will echo back as reciprocity. Yet, in that moment, I felt the tremor of a widening chasm-a generation gap where no bridge of love and commitment seems long enough to span.
Hours later, as I grappled with his words, another call jolted me. A colleague, his voice thick with resignation, was grappling with his resentments. His daughter had selected her life partner, a boy she loves, and was scripting their union with a modernity that left little room for the elaborate rituals our generation clings to.
“She’s leaving us with so few options,” he said, echoing a sentiment I suspect simmers in countless parental hearts. Our children, deciding their subjects, their countries, their universities, their spouses, even the aesthetics of their weddings, seem to have outpaced us entirely.
Where we once guided, we controlled, and we decided everything, they now lead, often dismissing our social fluency with elders as quaint, if not obsolete. Why does this shift feel so abrupt, so disorienting? Why can’t we, who navigated wars, economic upheavals, and societal revolutions, keep pace with their quiet rebellion?
The answer lies in the velocity of their world. Our generation grew up in ecosystems of scarcity, scarce opportunities, scarce information, scarce choices. We parented with the gravity of that reality, building fortresses of discipline and tradition to shield our children from the chaos we knew too well. But they were born into abundance: abundant knowledge at their fingertips, abundant pathways across oceans, abundant ideologies clashing in real time. The internet didn’t just inform them; it emancipated them.
A single click connects them to a global tribe that validates their instincts, often louder than our cautious counsel, and advises of sceptical parents. Where we saw risk in uncharted love or foreign degrees, they see possibility. Where we sought continuity in cultural rites, they seek authenticity in minimalism. The gap isn’t merely generational; it’s existential. We measure success in stability; they measure it in self-actualisation.
Yet, this chasm wounds because trust is a two-way currency, and we feel shortchanged. We reshaped ourselves, learned their slang, tolerated their silences, funded their dreams across continents, expecting, perhaps naively, a mirror of accommodation.
When my daughter bypasses the grand feasts we envisioned for her wedding, or when my son questions the blind faith we place in him, it isn’t ingratitude; it’s a redefinition of legacy. They aren’t questioning us; they’re reinterpreting the contract. The third variable my son warned of isn’t just external temptation; it’s the internal evolution of what “family” means. To them, respect isn’t deference; it's autonomy granted and received. Love isn’t an obligation; it’s a choice reaffirmed daily.
So why do we still bet everything? Because parenting was never a balance sheet. It’s a leap into the abyss, a defiant act of hope that the seeds we planted will withstand storms we can’t predict. Companies hedge with contracts; parents hedge with faith. We trust our children not because failure is impossible, but because love demands we believe in their capacity to rise.
The ache of this gap is the price of that belief. It stings when they forge ahead without glancing back, when their weddings lack the elders we reverenced, when their careers prioritise passion over proximity. But in their boldness, I see the best of us, our resilience, our hunger for meaning, amplified.
To bridge this divide, we must meet them not in our nostalgia, but in their now. Listen without an agenda. Celebrate their scripts, even when they rewrite ours. And trust, fiercely, foolishly, that the values we instilled weren’t in vain. They may not host the feasts we dreamed of, but they’ll build tables where love sits unforced.
The gap may widen, but love, if we let it evolve, can stretch across any distance. In the end, our greatest liability isn’t their independence, it’s our refusal to grow with it. Let’s keep betting, not on control, but on the unbreakable bond that says: “I trusted you to fly, and I’ll be here when you choose to land.”
(The author is DIG in CRPF and wrote 10 books)
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