Monthly Archives: September 2026

A Good Life

Does Hitting Kids Actually Teach Discipline? Here’s What the Research Says

If you were born in the 80s, 90s or before in India, this will sound familiar: a teacher’s danda across the palm, a parent’s chappal reaching for you mid-argument. It wasn’t cruelty, as most of us understood it growing up – it was just discipline. Normal. Expected, even.

I believed that too, for a long time. But the research on this – and there’s a lot of it – tells a very different story.

What the research actually says

The most comprehensive body of work on this question comes from Elizabeth Gershoff, a researcher at Columbia University. Her first major meta-analysis, published in 2002, reviewed 88 studies and found corporal punishment associated with ten negative outcomes in children – increased aggression, poorer mental health, weaker parent-child relationships, poorer moral internalization – against exactly one desirable outcome: increased immediate compliance (Gershoff, 2002).

In 2016, Gershoff and her colleague Andrew Grogan-Kaylor went further, analyzing 75 studies spanning 50 years, 13 countries, and 160,927 children. The finding held: spanking does not improve children’s behavior in the long term. It’s not linked to better moral internalization, not linked to reduced aggression. If anything, it’s linked to worse outcomes across the board (Gershoff & Grogan-Kaylor, 2016).

This is correlational research, not a randomized controlled trial – you can’t ethically randomize which children get hit for a study. But the consistency of the finding across five decades, a dozen-plus countries, and multiple independent research teams is about as strong as correlational evidence gets.

So if punishment doesn’t actually improve behavior – why does it cause harm? The answer lies in how a child’s brain responds to stress.

Not all stress is bad – but some of it is dangerous

I first came across this framework while studying at Harvard myself. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, led by Dr. Jack Shonkoff, has done foundational work on how children’s stress response systems develop. Their framework identifies three distinct types of stress, not a simple good/bad binary:

  • Positive stress: brief, manageable challenges such as the first day at a new school, or an injection at the doctor’s office. With a supportive adult nearby, the child’s stress response activates briefly and returns to baseline. This is a normal, even necessary, part of healthy development.
  • Tolerable stress: more serious difficulties such as the loss of a loved one, or a frightening injury. If it’s time-limited and buffered by a caring relationship, the child’s brain and body recover without lasting damage.
  • Toxic stress: strong, frequent, or prolonged activation of the stress response – without a supportive relationship to buffer it. This is what causes lasting harm to developing brain architecture (Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, 2020).

Punishment delivered in fear, especially repeated punishment without a secure, connected relationship to buffer it, risks pushing a child’s stress response toward the toxic end of that spectrum – the one Harvard’s own research identifies as damaging, not the manageable kind that’s a normal part of growing up.

Discipline through connection, not punishment

None of this means discipline itself is the problem. Children need boundaries – that part hasn’t changed. What the research actually challenges is the method: punishment versus connection.

Listening to a child. Understanding what they’re actually feeling. Relating to them instead of just correcting them. This is what the evidence points toward as the thing that actually works.

Here’s why the early years matter so much: India’s own National Education Policy 2020 states it plainly, in its opening section – “over 85% of a child’s cumulative brain development occurs prior to the age of 6, indicating the critical importance of appropriate care and stimulation of the brain in the early years” (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2020, Section 1.1).

This is precisely why the policy places such heavy emphasis on Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) as a foundational pillar of India’s education system. Whatever the exact figure, the underlying point holds: the foundational years of a child’s life shape everything that follows. That’s precisely why how we respond to a child in those years – with punishment, or with connection — matters more than almost anything else we do as parents.

Two books worth reading

If you want to go deeper on this, two books are worth your time:

“The Whole-Brain Child” by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson – a genuinely actionable guide to how a child’s brain develops and matures, with practical strategies grounded in neuroscience.

“The Danish Way of Parenting” by Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Dissing Sandahl – an exploration of why Denmark consistently ranks among the happiest countries in the world, and what its parenting culture (built around empathy and connection rather than punishment) might teach the rest of us.

References

Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University. (2020, January 6). A guide to toxic stress. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/guide/a-guide-to-toxic-stress/

Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviors and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 128(4), 539–579. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.4.539

Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of Family Psychology, 30(4), 453–469. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000191

Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. (2020). National Education Policy 2020 (Section 1.1). https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf (The ministry was renamed the Ministry of Education shortly after NEP 2020’s publication, in August 2020.)

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INDIA

Two Days Before My Harvard Graduation, 19 Children Were Shot Dead. Here’s What It Taught Me About Indian Schools.

Two days before my Harvard graduation, 19 children were shot dead in their own classroom, in the United States.

That’s the day I realized American schools aren’t as great as they seem – and Indian schools, whatever their real flaws, might actually be doing something right for our kids.

This isn’t a comparison of Harvard to anything. Harvard is a university; this is about school education – the K-12 years that shape a childhood. What follows are three specific, documented reasons I’ve come to believe the Indian school system, for all its problems, protects children from things the American system currently doesn’t.

One: physical safety

Gun violence is one of the biggest challenges facing schools in America today.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, which has tracked gunfire on school grounds since 2013, there were at least 144 incidents of gunfire on K-12 school grounds during the 2023–2024 school year — a 31% increase from the prior school year, and the second-highest total since Everytown began tracking in 2013 (Everytown for Gun Safety, 2024).

Growing up in an Indian school, that specific fear simply never existed for me and fortunately it also does not exist for young kids today as well. What hurts more, honestly, is how normal this has become in America – lockdown drills are now a routine part of childhood for millions of American kids, the way fire drills are everywhere else.

The tragedy that I am referring to in this piece – the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022 – killed 19 students and 2 teachers, making it one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history (Britannica, 2025).

Two: racism

Indian-American and Asian-American kids in U.S. schools report facing racial hate speech and harassment at rates that should alarm anyone paying attention. A 2024 peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that even in the years before the pandemic (2015–2019) – a period often assumed to be calmer than what followed – roughly 1 in 15 Asian American adolescents reported being targeted by hate speech at school (Gee, Cooc, & Yu, 2024).

Some of this starts as early as middle school. In an Indian school, a child doesn’t have to carry that heavy of a weight just for being who they are.

Three: the lunchbox moment

There’s a quieter but deeply specific cost too – one many Indian-origin kids growing up in the U.S. know by heart. It’s called the “lunchbox moment”: opening your tiffin at school, and hearing something like “ew, what IS that?” I can attest to this considering that my nephew is in middle school in Phoenix, Arizona and we have discussed this issue with each other.

One Indian-American, describing this exact experience to NPR, recalled it plainly: his mother would pack him “a deliciously cooked Indian dish,” and when he opened it at school, classmates would react with open disgust (NPR, 2024).

Enough of that, enough times, and kids stop packing dal. Stop packing achar. Some stop wanting to be who they are, at least at school. In an Indian school, I don’t remember me or my friends having to hide what’s on our plates. In fact, eating together, with different kinds of food cooked by our mothers, was something we looked forward to.

Some Indian-Americans report never feeling this shame at all, and a few writers have pushed back on the “lunchbox moment” becoming an overused, flattening trope for the entire immigrant experience (The Counter, 2020). I’m not claiming every Indian-American child goes through this – only that it’s real, common, and documented enough that dismissing it would be its own kind of dishonesty.

So why does this matter?

None of this means Indian schools are without their own real challenges – there’s still meaningful work to do to strengthen the system for every child. This isn’t a claim that one system is flawless and the other isn’t.

It’s a claim against those who believe that everything that is happening in Indian Education today is terrible and everything foreign is wonderful. It is also a claim that made me and my wife give up on the American school education because we got worried for our (future) kids being brought up in America.

It is because of these three specific things – physical safety, freedom from racial targeting, and not having to hide your own culture to belong. An Indian school childhood offered something an American one, for many kids, currently doesn’t.

Safety. Belonging. Not having to constantly prove you’re allowed to be in the room. That’s what I mean when I say Indian schools might be getting something right.

References

Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund. (2024, August 16). As back-to-school season kicks off, new Everytown report finds 31 percent increase in gunfire on school grounds during 2023–2024 academic year. https://everytownsupportfund.org/press/as-back-to-school-season-kicks-off-new-everytown-report-finds-31-percent-increase-in-gunfire-on-school-grounds-during-2023-2024-academic-year/

Gee, K. A., Cooc, N., & Yu, P. (2024). Hate speech against Asian American youth: Pre-pandemic trends and the role of school factors. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 53(9), 1941–1952. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-024-01987-8

Robb Elementary School shooting. (2025). Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Uvalde-school-shooting

Some Indian American Democrats see themselves in Harris. Others see the limits. (2024, October 8). NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/08/nx-s1-5131223/some-indian-american-democrats-see-themselves-in-harris-others-see-the-limits

Not all immigrants have a “lunchbox moment.” (2020). The Counter. https://thecounter.org/immigrants-lunchbox-moment-ethnic-food/

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A Good Life, INDIA

Three Things I Wish I’d Learned in School

What are the three things you wish you’d been taught at school — things that could have changed your life, had you known about them sooner?

I’ve been sitting with that question for a while now. And for me, the answer keeps coming back to the same three things, none of which showed up anywhere in my actual education.

One: The life of Swami Vivekananda, and Karma Yoga

I came across Swami Vivekananda at a point in my life when I was genuinely struggling to figure out what I was meant to do with it.

Vivekananda was born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta in January 1863. He became a disciple of the sage Ramakrishna, and in 1893 he travelled to the United States to speak at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where his opening address made him something of an overnight sensation in the West. Over the next four years he lectured across America and England, and in the winter of 1895–96, working out of a rented room on West 39th Street in New York, he delivered a series of talks that a stenographer named Joseph Josiah Goodwin transcribed and published as Karma Yoga in February 1896. He returned to India in 1897, founded the Ramakrishna Mission that same year, and died in 1902 at just 39.

Karma Yoga is, at its heart, about work — but not work in the way we usually think about it. Vivekananda’s argument, drawing on the Bhagavad Gita’s famous instruction that a person has a right to their actions but never to the fruits of those actions (Gita 2.47), was that the quality of a life isn’t measured by outcomes achieved but by the spirit in which the work itself is done. Do the work fully. Release your grip on how it turns out. That’s the discipline.

I won’t pretend I fully live this. But encountering that idea — that your worth isn’t contingent on results you can’t fully control — gave me something I hadn’t found anywhere else at that point: a sense of purpose that didn’t collapse every time an outcome didn’t go my way.

And here’s what stays with me: for a thinker this central to modern Indian thought — someone whose birthday is marked as National Youth Day, whose Chicago address is still taught in comparative religion courses around the world — he was barely a footnote in my own school textbooks.

Two: Swabhava and Swadharma

The second thing comes from the Bhagavad Gita as well, from its eighteenth chapter.

Swabhava is your intrinsic nature — the particular mix of temperament, inclination, and aptitude you were built with. Swadharma is the duty, the role, the path that flows naturally from that nature. Not the path someone else thinks you should take. Not the path that looks most impressive. The one that actually fits who you are.

The Gita is remarkably direct about this. In chapter 18, verse 47, Krishna tells Arjuna that it is better to imperfectly follow one’s own dharma than to perfectly imitate someone else’s — and that acting in accordance with your own nature carries no fault, even when it’s flawed (a related formulation appears earlier too, in 3.35). A few verses earlier, in 18.41 through 18.44, the text describes how different temperaments naturally incline toward different kinds of work — not as a rigid caste prescription to be read literally in the modern world, but as a genuinely useful idea underneath it: people are wired differently, and trying to force everyone through the same narrow definition of success is a category error.

I think about how much of modern education — and modern career advice — runs in the opposite direction. Pick the prestigious path. Follow the template. Optimize for the outcome everyone agrees is impressive. Almost none of it starts from the question the Gita starts from: what is your actual nature, and what work genuinely flows from it?

I don’t think this is a minor idea. I think it’s one of the most important things a young person could be taught — early, and taught well — before a decade of external pressure teaches them to ignore their own nature entirely. It deserves to be central to how we think about education, not a footnote in a philosophy elective nobody takes.

Three: Meditation

The third thing is meditation — and I mean the plain, undramatic version of it, not the version that gets caricatured. Not sitting cross-legged, chanting, performing serenity. Just the practice of noticing where your mind has gone, and gently bringing it back to the present moment. Again. And again. And again.

This isn’t just a spiritual claim anymore — it’s a reasonably well-studied one. A review of the research by the American Psychological Association found that mindfulness-based approaches show real, measurable effects on reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, and that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in particular has shown significant success in reducing relapse for people with recurrent depression (American Psychological Association, 2019).

But for me, the case for it isn’t really the research. It’s that meditation carried me through some of the hardest points in my life — points where very little else did. Not by making the difficulty disappear, but by giving me a way to be present with my own mind without being at its mercy. That’s a skill. Like any skill, it can be taught. And like most genuinely useful skills, it wasn’t taught to me until I went looking for it myself, well into adulthood.

Why this matters

None of these three things were part of my formal education. All three shaped my life more than most of what was.

I don’t think this is a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s unique to me. A curriculum built entirely around measurable outcomes — grades, ranks, placements — will always struggle to make room for ideas like these, because none of them are easily testable. But “easily testable” and “actually important” have never been the same thing.

If I had to make one argument today, it would be this: alongside the syllabus, there is a case for teaching people who they are, what they’re actually suited for, and how to sit with their own minds. Those aren’t soft add-ons to a real education. For a lot of us, they end up being the entire foundation everything else stands on.

References

American Psychological Association. (2019, October 30). Mindfulness meditation: A research-proven way to reduce stress. https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47; Chapter 3, Verse 35; Chapter 18, Verses 41–44, 47.

Vivekananda, S. (1896). Karma Yoga. Longmans, Green, and Co. (Lectures delivered New York, December 1895–January 1896; transcribed by Joseph Josiah Goodwin.)

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INDIA

Before You Film the Broken Toilet, Meet the Teacher Behind It

You’ve probably seen it by now — people walking into government schools with a camera, asking teachers why the toilets don’t work, why the walls are broken, why things haven’t changed. And honestly? Asking for better schools is a good thing. India needs this conversation.

But before going further, here’s the scale of what we’re actually talking about.

The scale

India runs over 14 lakh schools in total. Of these, over 10 lakh — 10,05,245, to be exact — are government schools, according to the Ministry of Education’s own UDISE+ 2025–26 data. Those government schools alone are staffed by roughly 51 lakh teachers, based on the finding that government schools employ 50.9% of India’s more than 1 crore total teachers.

That’s the system at the center of this conversation.

The problems being pointed out are real

Broken infrastructure, missing basics — genuine gaps still exist across a system running over 10 lakh schools. Running something at this scale is hard, and there’s real work still to do. That part of the conversation is fair, and it’s worth saying plainly: wanting better schools is right. Asking the hard questions, pushing for better infrastructure, better resources, better systems — that work matters, and it shouldn’t stop.

What the cameras don’t show

Here’s what I don’t see enough of in this conversation: the person standing behind that broken door, doing their best with almost nothing.

Teachers don’t just teach. Many schools across the country — most of them government schools — run with just a single teacher. As of UDISE+ 2025–26, that’s 1,00,843 schools nationwide operating on a single teacher’s shoulders.

And it’s not even just teaching. These same teachers also take on responsibilities the country genuinely needs — election duty, census work, Aadhaar enrollment drives, community surveys. Important work. But it adds to everything already asked of them. India’s Right to Education Act technically restricts non-academic work assigned to teachers to elections, the decennial census, and disaster relief — but in practice, the range of civic and administrative tasks teachers take on has grown well beyond that, from voter list verification to government scheme surveys to mid-day meal monitoring.

What hundreds of school visits taught me

I’ve visited hundreds of government schools myself — in Rajasthan, in Bihar, in UP. And what stayed with me wasn’t the broken benches. It was the teacher who’d travelled two hours to get there. The one running a class of four grades at once. The one who was also, somehow, the person the whole village turned to for getting a child’s Aadhar card made.

I walked away inspired more often than I walked away disappointed.

The point

So yes — wanting better schools is right. Ask the hard questions. Push for better infrastructure, better resources, better systems. That conversation matters, and it shouldn’t stop.

But somewhere in that demand, let’s not lose sight of the people already giving everything they have to make it work anyway. Most of these teachers aren’t the problem. They’re doing their best with whatever they’ve been given.

And that deserves a little bit of our empathy too.

References

Kashmir Reader. (2026, May 4). Election duty, Aadhaar verification, census work: Govt school teachers are losing classroom time. https://kashmirreader.com/2026/05/05/election-duty-aadhaar-verification-census-work-govt-school-teachers-are-losing-classroom-time/

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2025, August 28). UDISE+ 2024–25: School education report.

Press Information Bureau, Government of India. (2025, August 28). Ministry of Education releases report on Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2024–25 on school education of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2161543&reg=3&lang=2

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2026, July 7). Report on Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2025–26 on school education in India.

Right to Education Act, 2009, (India). Restrictions on deployment of teachers for non-educational purposes.

The Federal. (2025, October 1). Students schemes, tree plantation and blood donation to census, poll duty — what’s keeping teachers busy. https://thefederal.com/category/the-eighth-column/govt-govt-aid-public-schools-teachers-non-academic-work-burden-elections-census-209448

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