This story by Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, is one of the most powerful examples of effective parenting I have ever heard. By one simple act, his father taught him a critically important lesson that, unfortunately, many people never grasp.
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Manilal Gandhi
When I was sixteen years old, we lived in South Africa about eighteen miles outside the city. One Saturday my father had to go to town to attend a conference and he didn’t feel like driving so he asked me if I would drive him into town and bring him back in the evening. My parents also gave me many small chores to do in town, like getting the car serviced and the oil changed.
When I left my father at the conference venue, he said, “At five o’clock in the evening, come here and pick me up, and we’ll go home together.”
I said, “Fine.” I rushed off, did all my chores as quickly as possible, left the car in the garage—and went straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a double feature that I didn’t realize the passage of time. The movie ended at 5:30, and I came out and ran to the garage and rushed to where Dad was waiting for me. It was almost six o’clock when I reached there and he was wondering what had happened to me. The first question he asked me was, “Why are you late?”
Instead of telling him the truth, I lied to him, and I said, “The car wasn’t ready; I had to wait for the car,” not realizing that he had already called the garage.
When he caught me in the lie, he said, ‘There’s something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn’t give you the confidence to tell me the truth, that made you feel you had to lie to me. I’ve got to find out where I went wrong with you, and to do that I’m going to walk home.” There was absolutely nothing I could do to make him change his mind—and I couldn’t leave him and go away. For five and a half hours I crawled along in the car behind Father, watching him go through all this pain and agony for a stupid lie. I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again.
It’s almost fifty years since the event, and every time I think about it I still get goose bumps. That is the power of nonviolent action. It’s a lasting thing. It’s a change we bring through love, not fear. Anything that is brought by fear doesn’t last. But anything that is done by love lasts forever.
