“parenting for peace”
by inbal kashtan
This article appeared in Paths of
Learning (spring 2003) and California Homeschooler (October 2002). It
is republished with permission. Portions
of this article appear in “Parenting from
the Heart: Sharing the Gifts of Compassion, Connection, and
Choice,” a booklet about parenting with NVC available in
[our
bookstore] (August 2003).
As the United States stands again on the brink of war, I seek
ways to contribute to our collective ability to resolve conflicts
nonviolently. What resources and skills do we need, as a society, to
sustain peace? How can parents contribute to society’s transition to
nonviolence? What can we teach our children that will really make
the world different for their generation?
Several months ago my son, now four years old, asked me to read a
book about castles that he had picked up at the library. He picked
the book because he loves the Eyewitness series and was methodically
going through as many of those books as we could find, irrespective
of their subject matter. I didn’t like this one. It depicted not
only castles but also knights, armor and weapons of all kinds used
in battles in centuries past.
I am not ready for weapons. One of the things I enjoy about my
son not going to preschool and not watching TV is that his exposure
to violence has been extremely limited. He has never said the word
“gun” or played pretend violent games—yet. He doesn’t know about war
and people purposely hurting one another—yet. But here was the
castle book, and he wanted to read it.
I am not trying to shield my son from the reality of violence and
suffering in the world—but I am in a (privileged) position to
choose, often, how and when these realities enter our lives. I read
him some of the book, with numerous editorials. But when he asked to
read the book again a few days later, I found myself saying that I’d
rather not. When he asked why, I told him that I feel a lot of
sadness about people being violent with one another because I
believe human beings can find peaceful ways to solve their
conflicts.
Questions, of course, ensued. In response to one of my son’s
questions, I shared with him that my sadness was related not only to
the past, when there were knights and castles, but to the present as
well: people in the area where I grew up, Israelis and Palestinians,
are also fighting. “Why are they fighting?” my son asked. “Because
they both want the same piece of land and they haven’t figured out
how to talk about it,” I replied. “I’ll teach them!” he volunteered.
“What will you teach them?” I asked. “I’ll teach them that they can
each have some of the land, they can share,” he replied easily. “The
only problem,” he continued,“"is that I don’t know how to find
them.”
I felt a mixture of joy and grief at his words. How wondrous to
hear from my son—and from so many children—a desire to contribute to
the world and a trust in the possibility of solving conflicts
peacefully. Yet how apt his words were—“I don’t know where to find
them.” How do we find the hearts of “enemies” so we can reach them
with a message of peace? How do we find our own hearts and open them
to those whose actions we object to profoundly?
This search for our own and others’hearts is at the core of my
hope for peace has been the greatest influence on my parenting,
including the decision to practice attachment parenting when my son
was a baby. It has also led me to teach a process called Nonviolent
Communicationsm (developed by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg and
taught around the world). I lead workshops for parents, couples,
teachers, social change activists, and others who want to connect
more deeply with themselves and with others and who want to
contribute more effectively to mutual understanding, safety and
peace in families, schools, organizations, and in the wider
world.
My experience convinces me that what happens in our families both
mirrors and contributes to what happens in our societies. Just as
“enemies” fail to see each other’s humanity, so we, too, at times
fail to relate with others, even loved ones, with compassion.
Probably the primary challenge most parents tell me about is that
though they yearn for peace and harmony in their families, they find
themselves getting angry with their children more often and more
quickly than they would like. Because the problem-solving model we
follow so often relies on threat of consequences or promise of
reward, it’s almost guaranteed that anger will crop up regularly.
For what children learn from this model is not cooperation, harmony
and mutual respect; it’s more often the hard lesson of domination:
that whoever has more power gets to have his or her way, and that
those who have less power can only submit or rebel. And so we
continue the cycle of domination that is leading human beings close
to self-destruction.
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What alternative do we have? As parents, we have a remarkable
opportunity to empower our children with life skills for connecting
with others, resolving conflicts, and contributing to peace. Key to
learning these skills is our conception of what human beings are
like. Nonviolent Communication teaches that all human beings have
the same deep needs, and that people can connect with one another
when they understand and empathize with each other’s needs. Our
conflicts arise not because we have different needs but because we
have different strategies for how to meet our needs. It is on the
strategy level that we argue, fight, or go to war, especially when
we deem someone else’s strategy a block to our own ability to meet
our needs. Yet Nonviolent Communication suggests that behind every
strategy, however ineffective, tragic, violent or abhorrent to us,
is an attempt to meet a need. This notion turns on its head the
dichotomy of “good guys” and “bad guys” and focuses our attention on
the human being behind every action. When we understand the needs
that motivate our own and others’behavior, we have no enemies. With
our tremendous resources and creativity, we can and—I hope—we will
find new strategies for meeting all our needs.
We can teach our children about making peace by understanding,
reflecting, and nurturing their ability to meet their needs while we
also understand, express and attend to our own. One of the needs
human beings have is for autonomy, for the ability to make decisions
about things that affect us. This leads us on a path of
self-interest and a search for confidence and power. Yet if we
nurture this need in our children to the exclusion of others, it can
be difficult for us to get our own needs met. Thankfully, our need
for autonomy is balanced by another shared human need, for
contribution to others. This need leads us on a path of
consideration, care and generosity to others. Nonviolent
Communication enables us to look at both needs (and many others) and
find a way to balance them with each other so that we recognize our
need to give, to consider others and contribute to them, as an
autonomous choice. When giving is done freely, out of mutual care
and respect, it does not conflict with autonomy and choice but
rather complements them.
From this perspective, parents may find that we don’t need
punishments or rewards in parenting our children—we can instead
invite our children to contribute to meeting our needs just as we
invite ourselves to contribute to meeting theirs: with joy and
willingness instead of guilt, shame, fear of punishment or desire
for reward. This is not permissive parenting—it is parenting deeply
committed to meeting the needs of both parents and children through
a focus on connection and mutual respect.
Transforming parenting is hugely challenging in the context of
the daily, overwhelming reality of parenting. Yet this
transformation enables a profound depth of connection and trust
among family members. Perhaps more poignantly for me, choosing to
parent this way gives me hope for peace for our world—perhaps for
our children’s generation, perhaps for future generations, when
human beings have learned to speak the language of compassion.
As the world enters our home and my son’s exposure to life’s
realities grows, I hope he will sustain these lessons and carry them
into his own life. I hope he will know that the path to peace is
most effectively followed not by rewarding the “good” guys and
punishing the “bad” ones, but by striving to find strategies that
will meet people’s needs—not just our own, but everyone’s. I hope he
will have the confidence and trust in his own peaceful resources and
in human beings’capacity for peace. I hope he remembers that we can
find other people’s hearts by seeing their humanity.
© 2002 by Inbal Kashtan Inbal
Kashtan is the Parenting Project coordinator for the Center for Nonviolent
Communicationsm and the
co-founder of BayNVC. Inbal facilitates public workshops and
retreats as well as trainings in organizations, co-leads an NVC
leadership development program, and creates curricula for learning
NVC. She is the author of Parenting from
the Heart: Sharing the Gifts of Compassion, Connection, and
Choice, a booklet about parenting with NVC. Inbal's greatest
teacher for the past several years has been her son, who is
mentoring her on what it means to live nonviolently. [to top of
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