What are the important qualities of a good son or daughter? Have these qualities changed or remained the same over time in your culture? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
In Mongolian culture, a child is regarded as a good son or a daughter if they have the following trait: being respectful to their parents, elders and the mother nature. This criteria for measuring a child’s well-behavedness has been preserved until this time, and in this essay I will give few reasons why that is the case.
One of the main reason why it hasn’t changed is due to the fact that our parents and grandparents also grew up under these standards and teachings. They themselves were called good children when they showcased these before-mentoined traits, so when the time came for them to educate their own children on qualities of a good child, they passed down the standards taught to them.
Another factor is that Mongolian people value respecfulness more than anything. In Lunar New Year, we pay respect to our elders first by going to their home and asking their wellbeing, and giving them gifts. In buses, it is severely frowned upon if we don’t give our seats to the elders. And our respectfullness isn’t only limited to our grandparents either. We also pay respect to our mother land by the means of specific acts such as building a small rock monument on a mountaintop, or “giving” milk to the sky(Tenger) by splashing it upwards. We pay respect to our ancestors by hanging their portraits on the wall of our homes. Because respectfulness is so deeply embedded in almost every aspect of our culture, we grow up to value it more than anything.
Every nation and culture has their own valued traits that they teach to their children, and we Mongolians have valued respectfullness for a long time. This valued trait has remained the same over the years due to our parents’ and elders’ influence, and the general importance it has to our culture.
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