“We are not other people.” Long ago, that reply used to come frequently from the lips of Betsy, the mother of six children, presumably when they argued about what other kids were allowed to do.

At Betsy’s recent funeral, one of her daughters recalled this as one of her mother’s favorite lines. Predictably, the recollection provoked laughter from relatives and friends assembled in the church.

The reason we laugh at such lines, it seems to me, is that Betsy’s thoughts ─ if not her exact words ─ were so much a part of many of our own childhoods.

My mother, for example, often told my siblings and me not to think that, because other kids were allowed certain liberties, we also were entitled to them. The words were different but the message was similar.

One of my strongest memories is hearing another approach: holding up members of another family as models of good behavior. In this instance it was not my mother, however, but rather my Aunt Mary who appealed to us to emulate these paragons.

A lifelong resident of Peabody, Mary knew virtually all the other longtime middle-class families of that city. Among them, she most admired those who led orderly, respectable lives. She especially prized those children ─ and they must have been rare even then ─ whose manners were proper and genteel.

That’s why, whenever she was confronted with what she considered bad manners on the part of her nieces and nephews, she would urge us to emulate the Duffs. Those children knew how to behave, at least as she reported it.

We never saw any of the Duff children, and so had no reliable means of verifying the truth of our aunt’s chosen examples. However, you can bet that we were mighty skeptical about the Duffs. We had basic confidence in them as children: most probably they knew how to get out of line just as well as we did, if not better.

Our aunt was an idealist, whereas we kids were solid rationalists. It stood to reason that those Duff kids, in real life, were no better behaved than we were. Possibly, they were even worse than we were, though we had no way of proving this.

Aunt Mary used the myth of the perfect family as a method of ensuring that her nieces and nephews would eventually prove to be, if not perfect, at least better. For her, comparative exhortation was her device to ensure our improvement.

In any event, we Griffins were quite ready to quarrel with the code of behavior that stood behind our aunt’s hopes. We would later describe this code as Victorian, outmoded even in the 1930s and 1940s when my brothers and sisters and I were children.

After all, thanks to Aunt Mary, there were finger bowls at dinner in my grandmother’s house. On such occasions we would mischievously affect to drink the water rather than dip our fingertips into it. We made a joke of them, but that never seemed to offend or upset our aunt.

At other times we received admonitions from our aunt for fighting with one another, indulging in loud outbursts of ridicule, or even talking back to adults. The Duffs, of course, would never indulge in such behavior.

Almost surely, however, she would remonstrate with us and invoke her model family. “The Duffs would never do that,” she would protest, and we would, almost ritually, reject this affirmation.

Often we would go on to make fun of those Duffs, something easy to do because we were never to meet a single one of them. Perhaps they have now grown into later life as models of maturity.

Our grandmother, with whom Aunt Mary lived, would never join in the modeling that her daughter held up to us. Perhaps that qualified as one reason why our grandmother enjoyed universal popularity among us. She was always ready to accept us as we were.

Yet, our aunt was popular, too, because we tolerated her foibles and took pleasure in making fun of them. She provided us with fodder for talking about how unrealistic some adults could be.

Interestingly, my aunt’s approach to childhood conduct appears opposite to Betsy’s, quoted earlier. Betsy was saying in effect, in this family we have our own code of conduct. Don’t tell me what other kids are allowed to do; we are different.

Though my own mother stated it differently, we held to the same principle. Just because other kids are allowed to do something does not entitle you to that same action. You are not they; their parents may have good reason for doing something that we do not allow here.

Some 70 years later, I can look back on such ideology as inoffensive and even charming. Then, however, like my brothers and sisters I would sometimes chafe at the restraints that discipline imposed and the rationale that justified them.

Richard Griffin