Conspecific Honorifics

Scott Hardie | December 28, 2024
Should children be raised to call their parents Sir and Ma'am? What about other senior relatives like grandparents, aunts, and uncles?

Erik Bates | January 27, 2025
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Samir Mehta | January 27, 2025
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Scott Hardie | January 27, 2025
I don't know about its possible use in other places, but it's definitely a Southern thing. Around here, I observe a lot of Southern kids saying "Sir" and "Ma'am," which is one thing to teach your kids to say to strangers and teachers and other adults, but another thing to teach them to say to yourself, their parent!

Kelly and I got into a debate about the pros and cons of it. She can't get behind any rigid enforcement of a social hierarchy based on age and "respecting your elders." She has seen too much abuse and exploitation of younger people by older people (she's worked with abused kids), and worries that teaching them "Ma'am" and "Sir" at a young age primes them for being taken advantage of. Me, I say the terms are useful up to a point -- parenting depends on your kids not realizing that they can ignore your directives, so reinforcing the pretense of authority can help -- but respect is a two-way street, and a parent or anyone else who abuses or exploits you is no longer worthy of that sort of deference. (Besides the age hierarchy, those terms also reinforce the gender hierarchy by implication that there is a strict binary into which everyone is sorted, a paradigm that ultimately harms anyone who isn't a cisgender man, and there's more to dislike where that came from.)

I guess it comes down to the individual family. We knew one family whose four kids under ten were all extraordinarily well-behaved: They were courteous to parents and guests and each other, they followed directions the first time with no whining or procrastinating, and they played quietly and cleaned up after themselves. We've also seen little hellions that shouted, broke things, interrupted everyone, complained about seemingly everything, coughed and sneezed without taking precautions, and more. I don't know how the former family did it and how much the individual personalities of the parents and kids factored into it, but I can't help but remember that the former used "Sir" and "Ma'am" and other subtle forms of respect, while the latter did not. :-\

Erik Bates | January 28, 2025
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Samir Mehta | January 28, 2025
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