15T methods for early children's care and education in an Indigenous community in Flores, Indonesia

Indigenous parenting traditions offer a powerful alternative epistemology, yet scholarship on such traditions remains limited. This study explores how parents and cultural leaders in Manggarai, Flores, Indonesia, perceive and practise the 15T method, an Indigenous parenting framework consisting of fifteen Manggarai-language concepts beginning with the letter T. Drawing on a ethnographic engagement that included two months of intensive immersion, daily participant observation, and ten in-depth interviews with cultural leaders, a religious leader, a cultural expert, and parents, we analysed data using reflexive thematic analysis. Our findings reveal that the fifteen T concepts cluster around four interrelated dimensions of parenting: (1) foundational training of the body and basic capacities (Titing/Toting, Tanang); (2) the transmission of wisdom through advice and modelling (Tong, Tamang, Toming, Toing, Titong); (3) the cultivation of character and social bonds (Titing/Tatang, Tatong, Toto Nai Bakok); and (4) prohibitive moral principles expressed through the prefix toe (“do not”).