What Children Were Told, and Why

Children received household knowledge in a compressed form: short instructions, warnings, rhymes, and stories with a rule inside them. Do not go out with wet hair. Do not sleep right after eating. Do not sit in the draught. Finish the food on your plate. Wash your feet before coming in. The instruction arrived without justification, because a rule a child can repeat travels further than a reason a child cannot follow.

Some of these instructions encoded plain practical concerns of the time — hygiene in households with animals and unpaved yards, the risk of the open flame or the well, food scarcity that made waste serious, and keeping small children where adults could see them. Others carried ritual or social meaning: what to touch, what to eat with which hand, what to say before eating, when to be quiet. In many households the two kinds were spoken in the same tone, which is why they were remembered together.

Storytelling did a lot of the work. Grandmothers were often the household's storytellers, and cautionary figures, moral tales and local legends attached rules to memorable images. Older children then repeated the rules to younger ones, which is how instructions spread sideways as well as downwards.

The result is a distinctive kind of inheritance: adults across India carry vivid childhood instructions whose reasons they never learned, and which they may repeat to their own children with the same certainty. Some hold up as ordinary common sense, some were specific to a way of living that no longer exists, and some were simply local belief.

They survive strongly in speech and in habit. Read them as cultural memory and as parenting history rather than as health rules, and take anything concerning a child's health, feeding or development to a paediatrician.