For Their Own Good

6 min read

Just now

Listen

It begins quietly, the way most authority does. A small decision spoken in the tone of care. The phrase arrives like reassurance, calm and ordinary, meant to soothe whoever hears it. But when care and control speak the same language, it takes courage to hear which voice is which.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

“For their own good.”

Four words that can stop a room. They carry history without announcing it, all the weight of rules made in the name of protection. The phrase lives in the pauses between adults. It travels through reports, through closed doors, through conversations that mean to help but rarely ask.

It sounds gentle. The kind of sentence you might trust without thinking. A promise that the hard part has been considered, that somebody else has measured what is best.

It sounds like kindness. It feels like certainty. And it closes the conversation before it begins.

Adults use it easily. It carries the weight of reassurance, the promise that what follows is necessary. It lets worry wear the tone of wisdom. In schools, in offices, in living rooms, the words travel fast. They tidy up uncertainty. They turn a decision into virtue.

Each time it is spoken, something smaller disappears. A pause. A question. The chance to ask what good actually means. The phrase decides it for you. Good becomes obedience. Care becomes compliance.

Most people who use it mean well. That is what makes it so hard to challenge. The sentence sounds like safety even when it isn’t. It tells the speaker they have done right, and the person it is said about that their voice can wait.

The language is old. It has defended classrooms, churches, hospitals. Every place where authority meets vulnerability has borrowed it. The words survive because they sound selfless.

The phrase grows with a person. In childhood it means eat your greens. In adolescence it means stay home. At adulthood it becomes advice wrapped in warning. It never quite disappears. It only changes volume.

Sometimes a child learns that waiting is the safest answer. They nod, agree, keep their tone even. They say they are fine. They say they understand. The words sound steady enough to satisfy the room. Afterwards, when the door closes, they let silence finish the sentence.

There is always one voice that lands louder than the rest. It does not have to shout. It simply keeps speaking until everyone else grows careful. Plans are written. Signatures follow. The phrase appears again, for their own good, printed in black beside a date and a name.

Before it reaches that point, there is usually a spark of risk. Something real. A moment that frightened the adults enough to build a wall around it. There was reason to be afraid; the danger was real enough.

Once risk is written down it does not fade. It becomes the lens through which everything is seen. Even the quiet days are measured against the fear of repetition.

The people who say the phrase are not cruel. They are frightened. Sometimes fear makes love sound like control. It can feel safer to speak for someone than to hear what frightens you in their voice.

They fear what might happen if they are wrong, if they let go too soon, if the person they love fails in full view. The phrase steadies their own hands more than it steadies the child.

After fear, procedure. Process has its place. Some structure is needed to keep people safe. Inside the system the rhythm repeats. Letters thank families for their patience. Meetings begin with appreciation and end with delay. Forms ask for the same story a little differently each time. The word good moves through all of it. It excuses the distance between intention and care.

The phrase has a long reach. It has excused punishment in classrooms, correction in hospitals, reform in faith. It has been spoken to prisoners, to patients, to children who did not yet know the rules. Every generation finds new ways to dress it. The words survive because they sound righteous. They let control wear the mask of care.

Get Ken O’Brien’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Sometimes the words have meant what they claimed. There are moments when restraint is care, when holding on is the only way through. Good can mean protection, but only when the person being held still understands why.

In one meeting the sentence arrived exactly on time. For their own good. The room nodded. The language moved faster than thought. Everyone wanted to be kind but nobody wanted to be wrong. The file thickened by another page.

Between meetings the idea of good keeps changing hands. For one person it means safety. For another it means progress. For another, quiet. Nobody means harm, yet the word fills every space until there is no room for the child themself.

A father watches from the edge of the process. He has been here all along, learning the limits of what he can say. He tries to measure when to step in and when to stay quiet. He wonders whether silence is respect or surrender. He keeps asking where the line sits, between caring for and caring over, between presence and intrusion.

He has said the phrase himself. The first time without thinking, the second because it worked. It felt useful then, a way to calm a storm. Only later did he hear the echo and recognise the quiet it left behind.

He sees how protection can become a habit. Once a person has been rescued often enough, people stop checking whether rescue is still what they need. Safety becomes the story, not the state. It can feel like a kindness and still hold them down.

He thinks about the teachers, the counsellors, the neighbours, all of them trying to help, all of them trapped in the same story. Each one certain they are doing what is right. Each one holding a different map of what good looks like. None of them matching.

But peace is not the same as safety, and silence is not the same as calm. A life shrinks a little each time those things are mistaken for one another.

The phrase returns in smaller ways, quieter now, closer to home. It hides in advice that sounds like permission, in kindnesses that ask for obedience in return. The safety nets hang too far below to catch anything but a fall. The child learns to predict the pattern and to step aside before it reaches them.

The father begins to see the shape of his own part in it. The times he thought caution was care, or that waiting was patience, when really it was fear. He knows how easy it is to mistake endurance for understanding. He wonders how many times good has been used to cover guilt.

The child has learned to read the room before speaking. To measure how much truth will be tolerated. To save the full sentences for later, when they are alone.

Some nights the father imagines what it would look like if good were defined from the inside out. If it meant freedom enough to say no. If it meant a kind of safety that left space to risk. If it meant a voice that was not edited before it reached the air.

Perhaps good is not safety but recognition. Perhaps it begins the moment someone is trusted to name what hurts and what helps.

Good should not mean compliance, or calm, or the kind of peace that erases a person. It should not mean the quiet that follows exhaustion. It should mean movement. It should mean truth spoken without fear of punishment.

Maybe the world can learn new language. Words that do not need permission hidden inside them. Words that keep the person at the centre of the sentence. It would take patience. It would take faith. But most change begins when we stop mistaking authority for care.

For their own good should not mean obedience disguised as protection. It should mean room enough to speak and to be believed. It should mean that help offered does not require surrender.

Later the child sends a song. No caption. Just sound.

The father listens. The melody rises, dips, and steadies again. There are no words, only breath, and in it a trace of something freer. He does not try to decode it or attach meaning.

He lets it exist without supervision.

He listens twice. The second time he stops trying to find a message inside it. The music is enough. It is the first thing in a long time that arrives without instruction, without the weight of being good. It only asks to be heard.

They only ask to be heard.