The places we call home

She trembled before she spoke. Not because she was cold, but because she was afraid someone would see her talking to me.

I am a woman. She is fifteen. We were sitting in a public coffee shop, yet before answering my simple question — how are you? — she looked around to make sure no one was watching. Then she asked, quietly, "Are you a therapist?" and almost immediately added, "Can you prescribe antidepressants?" She had ten minutes before her family returned from the gym in the same club, and in those ten minutes she emptied what sounded like a life lived in caution.

She lives with her parents, her grandmother and an older brother. Her father is a civil servant posted out of the city. Her mother holds a master's degree in education leadership. She studies all day and recently failed an exam. "It's the end of my life," she said, without drama. Sensing the fear in her body, I asked whether she still gets beaten up. She nodded. When I asked if it was a one-off, she said no, rather the most recent time was two weeks ago, paired with taunts and comparisons.

When she tries to break silence on her abuse and mental state, it shifts to gaslight, with her mother reportedly saying, "I wish I die this second," then pivoting to, "Everything I do is for you. I only want the best for you." Her father believes her mother's version of events. Her brother, modern enough to have a girlfriend, tells her depression is not real. And I could not help but wonder whether he would respond the same way if his girlfriend said she was struggling. When I asked how she copes, she said she uses nicotine patches because they make her feel "alive".

That is the story. Now let us examine what it reveals.

On paper, this is a stable, educated household. A government post. A postgraduate degree in education leadership. Yet inside it, physical and psychological abuse, humiliation and emotional reversals are tools of control. When the outcome of "education leadership" within one's own home is volatility and intimidation, we are forced to confront a difficult question: what exactly have we been educated in?

Across South Asia, physical discipline has long been normalised as character-building. Fear has been framed as respect, shame marketed as motivation, obedience mistaken for virtue. But decades of psychological research have shown that chronic humiliation and corporal punishment do not produce resilience; these produce anxiety, hypervigilance and, often, quiet rebellion.

According to WHO, one in seven adolescents globally lives with a mental health disorder. In societies where stigma and access barriers remain high, most struggle in silence. Inside homes, distress is still dismissed as attitude, and aggression is reframed as love.

If all this is justified in the name of education, the logic collapses further. A child studying from fear does not internalise knowledge; she memorises to survive. A child who associates performance with emotional safety does not become curious; she becomes cautious. When schools become refuge from the home, the home has already failed its most basic function.

So what exactly are we building? Households where children rehearse sentences before speaking? Living rooms where achievement outweighs attachment? Or families where provision replaces presence and literacy substitutes for emotional maturity?

This is not an attack on one parent. It is an invitation to collective honesty. Parenthood is not merely about producing results. It is about shaping the nervous system of a human being. If that system is shaped by unpredictability, intimidation and shame, it adapts not into strength, but into survival.

When she walked away from that coffee shop, nothing in her life had materially changed. The only difference was that, for ten minutes, she was heard without being dismissed.

She looked lighter.

We measure households by income, by credentials, by grades pinned to refrigerators. Perhaps we should measure them differently. Can a child speak there without trembling? Or speak at all for that matter?