There’s a question that has been sitting at the back of my mind for years, tugging at me each time I revisit an old Amar Chitra Katha (“ACK”) comic:
Why did all that mythological violence — heads rolling, blood spurting, rakshasas sliced cleanly into two symmetrical halves — feel perfectly normal when I was eight, but deeply questionable when I saw my kids reading the same?
Back then, it didn’t occur to anyone that anything in ACK needed a parental advisory warning. My entire generation read these stories and turned out fine. (Or fine-ish. Some of us have a lifelong preference for dramatic eyeliner, but that feels unrelated.)
In fact, if someone had asked my eight-year-old self whether the violence in ACK bothered me, I would’ve stared at them in total confusion — mostly because no adult in my life had ever used the word ‘violence’ to describe a decapitated asura. And honestly, I was too busy being fascinated by the biology-defying rule that every drop of spilled blood from the aforementioned demon instantly spawned a fresh batch of asuras.
It’s like the stories got absorbed without getting analyzed. Or was that just me, never the brightest lightbulb in the chandelier?
A global pattern of pragmatic childhoods
Across large swathes of the non-Western world, children grew up inside the full, unedited flow of adult life. Childhood in these societies wasn’t treated as something fragile or sacred; it was simply life, scaled to a smaller body. And those illustrations in ACK of demons, decapitations, and dramatic deaths were part of the cultural terrain.
This leads us to the heart of the matter. This universal pattern had a simple philosophical backbone: Life wasn’t something to be softened for children.
Children were expected to step into life.
No one ran to label ordinary experiences as trauma, anxiety, overstimulation, or developmental threats. Adults assumed children’s psychological baseline was healthy unless proven otherwise.
In short: earlier generations treated children as inherently strong. Modern frameworks treat them as inherently vulnerable.
So why didn’t we get traumatised? Because we didn’t know we were supposed to. That’s it.
Today’s parents are more sensitive to sensitivity
This is the part none of us like to admit. Children have not changed as dramatically as parenting cultures have. We have inherited:
- a therapeutic vocabulary
- a fear of psychological harm
- anxiety about developmental impact
- an expectation that childhood must be curated, not simply lived
These ideas shape the way we interpret our children’s reactions. Where our parents saw “a story,” we see “a stimulus.” Where they saw “a normal fear,”
we see “a potential imprint.” Where they saw “kids will cope,” we see “kids might internalize this.”
Some of this caution comes from wisdom. Some from cultural drift. Some from modern insecurity disguised as good parenting. And some from the universal human urge to correct our parents’ mistakes, real or imagined. It’s complicated.
But complexity aside, one thing is clear: Our eyes changed. Which makes the same comic look different.
Maybe the real shift isn’t in the children at all. It’s in us.
So yes, maybe we’re overthinking it. Maybe we’re not. Maybe we’re simply parenting with a new set of tools that come with their own blind spots.
But if ACK never traumatized us, it wasn’t because we were superhumanly resilient. It was because we lived in cultural worlds that treated children as fundamentally capable — worlds where stories were stories, feelings were fleeting, and demons were just narrative obstacles waiting to be dramatically dismembered. And honestly, that worldview had its merits.
Not that I’m recommending we go back to completely hands-off child-rearing. but sometimes a comic is just a comic. Even if it contains enough gore to make a modern parent clutch their pearls and Google “developmental impact of mythological violence.”
