Peace Quest Chapter 1:

Creating a Culture of Peace for Children

    The United Nations has declared 2001 to 2010 The International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World.33 This initiative is based upon eight principles for transforming cultures of war into cultures of peace:

• “instead of enemy images, understanding, tolerance & solidarity;

• instead of armaments, disarmament, universal & verifiable;

• instead of authoritarian governance, democratic participation;

• instead of secrecy and propaganda, the free flow & sharing of information;

• instead of violence, dialogue, negotiation, rule of law, active nonviolence;

• instead of male domination, the equality of women;

• instead of education for war, education for peace;

• instead of exploitation of the weak and of the environment, economies of peace with equitable, sustainable development.” 34

    These principles are worthy and essential desiderata. With the exception of the seventh principle about education, they all focus upon the realm of interactions among adults and do not directly address how adults treat and raise children. I believe this subject merits deep consideration and is of the utmost importance. Therefore, I recommend and will discuss the implications of a ninth principle:

•instead of punishing, shaming, neglecting, abusing, traumatizing, and exploiting children, child rearing characterized by gentleness, nonviolence, and respect.



Parenting for Peace

    Parenting that truly serves children’s innate needs can, perhaps more than any other activity, contribute to peace on all levels—personal, interpersonal, and social. This does not mean that parents should intentionally socialize their children to become peace builders when they grow up. That would only be the imposition of a preconceived parental agenda onto children. Rather, parents who are emotionally mature and who feel joy in raising their children creatively and nonviolently are in the process of laying the intrinsic foundations for future peace.

    In offering the following description of what I consider essential features of an ideal type of parenting, I am fully aware of how daunting and difficult it can be at moments to raise children, even under the best of circumstances. Children’s energies are strong, and their needs are genuine and intense. Parents are rarely well prepared, either by their own upbringings or by subsequent education, for the daily tasks of attending and responding optimally to their sons and daughters during the children’s different developmental stages.

    Often parents do not receive the emotional and practical support they need themselves from other adults in order to be at their best with their children. At times, financial, family, and social stresses further add to parental difficulties in being attentive and emotionally available to children. Parents under stress largely revert, for better or worse, to the model of how they were treated as children, unless they have somehow learned innovative responses and coping skills.

    The subject of parenting is complex because of a wide range of individual and cultural variance. Nonetheless, I believe a profile of healthy parenting has been emerging in the psychological, sociological, pediatric, and biological literature. This provides a touchstone for what I am calling peaceful parenting. By pointing in this direction, I am seeking to establish conceptually the profound connection between parenting and peace in a culture.

    Children who are wanted, warmly nurtured, affectionately held and touched, validated, and loved from the beginning will grow up with an innate sense of self-worth and security.35 They will experience the inner peace that comes with feeling loved for who they are. Having been attended to with empathy, they will naturally treat others empathically. The ways of empathy will be patterned into the limbic and cortical areas of their brains, the tissues of their bodies, the balance of their hormones. Recognizing and caring for others’ feelings will appear natural to them because they learned this in their earliest days. Empathic parents can be in touch with their children’s feelings only to the extent that they are in touch with their own, so they will be able to express these feelings openly, honestly, and appropriately, including how they set appropriate limits and boundaries for their children. In this way, the parents will be emotionally genuine role models for their children. Children who grow up with such empathy and honesty will have easy access to their own feelings and needs, in other words, their core selves, and they will express themselves honestly. Since their pains, fears, anxieties, and bodily needs were from the beginning responded to with compassion, they are likely to extend compassion to others. Having been raised nonviolently, they will themselves be inclined to be nonviolent. Being secure and accepted for who they are, they will have access to their creativity, unhampered by self-doubt and anxiety about the value of their creations.  Since their own needs for the primary gratifications of love and nurturance will have been fulfilled, they will not be driven to compensate with the secondary gratifications of inordinate power, prestige, and wealth for themselves. They will be compassionately concerned that others’ needs be well met. Such children are fortunate with regard to the benefits their upbringing confers on their physical and emotional well-being.

    As we have been treated in the formative period from conception to about the age of three, so we tend to treat others, based on implicit emotional memory patterns encoded in the limbic brain.36 A broad base of clinical, neurobiological, psychological, and sociological research demonstrates how human character is formed in our earliest few years of life. The import of this research is too little known and understood outside of limited academic, professional, and intellectual circles. Even where it is generally known, its extensive significance for politics, economics, peace, and security may be neglected. However, this research signals that nurturing child rearing is potentially the most significant evolutionary factor for desirable social change and peace.

    Some of this research is in the relatively new field of prenatal and perinatal psychology.  This research has been providing ever more persuasive data that parental health, habits, feelings and attitudes at the time of conception, the period of uterine gestation, and the process of labor and birth exercise highly formative influences on later human behavior.37 Patterns established during this time begin to define the quality of attachment and early and later child-raising relationships between parents and their children. Writers such as the late anthropologist Ashley Montagu, the French obstetrician Michel Odent, the author Joseph Chilton Pearce, and the visionary humanist Laura Huxley, among many others, have been calling attention to the need to love our children from “before the beginning”38 and to continue loving them unconditionally throughout life.

    Peaceful parenting is a key to transforming war cultures into peace cultures. Such monumental change is not an easy process. Realistically, we must recognize that many societies and cultures on earth are, to varying degrees, militarized and prone to war and other violence. Truly peaceful parenting, therefore, most often takes place within contexts that are not peaceful. Some people may worry, therefore, that children who are well loved and raised gently will not be tough enough to cope with the harsher realities of a violent culture. To the contrary, I believe that children who have not been traumatized by their parents will be better able to cope with whatever comes their way because they will have access to the full range of their natural feelings and will have better communication and problem-solving skills. These children will be able to learn to interact with other kinds of people who were raised differently.

    Individuals who have been raised according to similar modes of parenting form what Lloyd deMause, the founder of psychohistory, has called a psycho-class,39 which is composed of individuals with similar character traits because they had experienced similar modes of upbringing. What I am describing as peaceful parenting is equivalent to what deMause has called the “helping mode”40 of parenting. This style of child rearing facilitates the child’s becoming a highly integrated, individuated self, with a potential to become, if he or she chooses, a peace and justice activist. Helping mode parents do not try to shape their children according to preconceived conformist goals. Rather, they nurture the vitality and individuality of their children. These parents neither abuse nor neglect their children, but support them to develop their own potential.

    In our present society, some parents, who are a creative minority, have found their way to this peaceful, helping mode. They co-exist with other parents who run the gamut of parenting styles that deMause has identified as infanticidal, abandoning, ambivalent, intrusive, and socializing.41 It is outside the scope of this work for me to describe these other modes.  deMause’s original, iconoclastic writings explain what his research has revealed about these modes, both in the past and now. Each culture has within it members of different psycho-classes, and many political and ideological conflicts can be viewed as clashes between psycho-classes.

    Peaceful parents and their children need to be resourceful in coping with social institutions controlled to some degree by people whose characters were formed under the sway of less supportive parenting modes. This poses challenges and leads in itself to conflicts, which call upon the peacemakers to deploy skills in communication and problem solving. Since few children have been raised with empathy, nonviolence, and creativity, few adults are ready and able to be peacemakers. As Donald Winnicott observed, as few as 30% of adults in the Western democracies are emotionally mature enough to function democratically because they were habituated to authoritarianism in their families of origin.42 According to empirical research by Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad, children who were raised by harshly punitive parents grow up to be adults who favor war, capital punishment, and authoritarian politics.43 Such adults, arguably, often dominate the world’s political institutions. deMause assembled evidence this was the case for America’s war-making presidents, including John F. Kennedy,44 Lyndon Johnson,45 Ronald Reagan,46 George H. W. Bush,47 and Bill Clinton.48 Therefore, those who are peacefully oriented by virtue of the loving nurturance in their upbringings or later life experiences will need to deal with existing power structures and conflicts. The paradox remains that it is adults habituated to a less than peaceful collective past who are responsible to raise peaceful children for a better future. This may be challenging, but it is possible. Conscious and feeling parents can raise their children nonviolently if they learn how and sincerely want to. Humanity’s hope is in children who are brought into the world and guided lovingly. Gandhi expressed it this way:



    “If we are to teach real peace in the world we shall have to     begin with children; and if they will grow up in their natural     innocence, we won’t have to struggle; we won’t have to pass     fruitless resolutions, but we shall go from love to love and     peace to peace, until at last all the corners of the world are     covered with that peace and love for which consciously or     unconsciously the whole world is hungering.” 49

    

    What does parenting for peace look like in practice? The following are some of its dimensions.

• Conscious pregnancy: Research has shown that children whose conception is desired and for whom the pregnant mother has a positive attitude, later in life show lower incidences of juvenile delinquency, self-destructive behaviors, and violent criminality.50

• Gentle, natural childbirth: Cultures that produce warriors as the dominant adult male character type show patterns of disrupting childbirth and making it excessively traumatic for mother and child.51 The earlier and more severely a child is traumatized, the more prone that child will be to grow into an adolescent and adult capable of violence, unless the trauma is healed. Whether at home, at a birthing center, or in a hospital, childbirth needs to take place in a physically and emotionally safe atmosphere where the mother is free from unnecessary, stressful interventions, and where the child is supported with as gentle a transition as possible from the uterine water environment to an air environment. The newborn needs, unless there are compelling contraindications, to be placed on the mother’s body, first the abdomen, then the breast.52 The umbilical cord must not be cut until it ceases pulsing and begins to contract and shrivel, which signals that it is no longer delivering oxygen. The lighting and sound levels in the room need to be soft and subdued.  The baby must not be left in isolation, but needs to sleep with the mother.

• Ending and outlawing genital mutilations of both males and females: Male circumcision and female genital mutilation are extremely traumatic and harmful practices that show ancient and deeply embedded cultural biases against the healthy enjoyment of mature sexuality. Pleasure-hating cultures are more likely to produce individuals with suppressed resentment and rage that can be mobilized in the violence of warfare.53

• Promptly and appropriately comforting infants and children when they express distress through their cries and nonverbal behavior.

• Feeding infants when they signal they are hungry, rather than following an arbitrary schedule.

• Outlawing and ending the corporal punishment of children: Corporal punishment refers to any action of a parent, other adult, or caregiver that intentionally inflicts or causes pain or physical discomfort in a child for the purposes of punishment or containment. Corporal punishment includes, but is not limited to, spanking, slapping, smacking, hitting, shaking, biting, shoving, or pulling a child; denying, restricting, or rationing a child’s use of the toilet; forcing physical exertion, requiring a child to remain motionless, or isolation of a child in confining spaces; denying a child access to needed water, food, or sleep. Such treatment is potentially traumatic even if it does not meet the legal requirements for a definition of child abuse under current legislation.54 When corporal punishment is considered legitimate in a culture, it teaches the young that when they have authority, they too will have a right to inflict pain on the bodies of others. This is incompatible with a culture of peace.

• Intervening with education, help, and, if necessary, restraint whenever children are being abused. Members of the family, neighborhood, and community have a right and responsibility to intervene whenever they are aware that children are being neglected and abused. Relevant social service agencies need to be enlisted.

•  Educating parents to guide their children constructively and to refrain from nonverbal and verbal behaviors that shame children. If we feel shame, we experience a painful, demoralizing sense of being personally flawed, inferior, unworthy of love, bad. Shaming behaviors include making invidious comparisons with others, insults, name-calling, put-downs, sarcasm, shunning, neglect, threats, and mockery. Violent criminals are usually ridden with shame.55 Parents need to validate, not shame, their children.56

• Unconditionally supporting parents, especially mothers, for the first three to five years of a child’s life.

•Carrying infants in contact with the parents’ body, such as in soft sling-carriers, rather than distant and alone, as in hard, removable plastic car seats.

•Parent-child centers in all communities to teach how to raise children lovingly and nonviolently.

• Involvement of fathers in child rearing.

• Socially assuring that parents have adequate resources to provide for their children through guaranteed jobs or income with dignity.

• Treating boys and girls equally with respect to encouraging both self-determined initiative and the expression of feelings.

• Parental setting of clear limits and boundaries, along with dependable schedules.

•Wholesome nutrition.



Communication

    Good parental communication skills are essential to parenting for peace, just as good communication skills are central to cultivating peace in all our relations. Many programs exist to teach such skills that help to reduce and resolve conflict and to promote peace.  These programs usually share a common core based on honesty and empathy. When adults practice peaceful communication, their children learn it effortlessly, especially when the adults’ words are congruent with their core feelings and actions. The earlier in our lives we learn the paths of peace the better and easier it is for us. Regardless of how we were raised, we can learn to communicate in ways that increase the likelihood of peace.

    At the same time, it is important to be aware that new patterns of verbal expression can be used either sincerely or manipulatively. Language skills are based in particular areas of the neocortex but do not necessarily affect the deeper lying limbic level, where our emotions are generated, or the underlying brain stem where our survival instincts and reactions to threat and trauma are lodged. A training course in peaceful communication may be necessary, but it is not sufficient to make a person peaceful on all levels of being. For such a transformation to occur, healing relationships and practices are also needed, as discussed in the following section on how adults can grow to be more peaceful.

    Our nonverbal communication gives our deepest, most telling messages. Peaceful demeanor is communicated through genuinely relaxed tone of voice and musculature, by a friendly, respectful look in the eyes, by spontaneous, responsive smiling when appropriate, by open posture, by safe boundaries, by attending fully to others and being sincerely interested in them. Peacefulness is an embodied condition of inter-human warmth. It cannot be conveyed by a training course or learned from reading a book. It has to do with our full development as human beings and our emotional health.

    Verbally we can learn progressively to stop using hurtful, aggressive words and to communicate in healing, peaceful ways. Words that are likely to increase conflict and violence are those that shame, blame, judge, intimidate, threaten, terrify, exaggerate, generalize, distort, insult, and demean. When we hear such words, whether as children or adults, our dignity and personal security are threatened, so we are liable to go on the defensive and to react in kind. In such circumstances, escalating tensions can lead to violence.

    When we empathically observe others, listening to their messages, feelings, needs, and requests, regardless of how well or ineptly they express themselves, they will likely perceive they are being respected and understood.58 We also can respond more appropriately when we sense their frame of reference and what the situation means to them. This usually increases the likelihood they will feel inclined to listen to us. Part of the art of listening empathically involves not taking personally what comes from other people’s distress or their limited understanding of us. We can clarify our position later and better if we do not leap into defending ourselves, but rather attend first to understanding the other party as clearly as possible and communicating this understanding back to them. For most of us, this is not an easy art to learn. If we are not able to practice it consistently, we need to accept our own limitations and foibles and still try our best to enhance communication and develop our skills, however slowly.

    Honestly expressing our own observations, understandings, feelings, needs, and requests, without judgments, is the aspect of peaceful communication that complements empathy.  Both our attending and responding contribute to potentially peaceful outcomes in conflict situations, especially when our minds and words are free of judgment or coercive desires. When parents practice such communication, relations between them and their children are relatively free of power struggles and can be remarkably deep and trusting.

    It takes a lot of actual practice in relationship with people who themselves are skilled in peaceful communication for us to learn this language if we are not already fluent in it.  Therefore, I do not intend to try to teach it here, but only to point to its importance and to highlight its essential principles. I recommend that readers interested in exploring or being trained in peaceful communication contact the Center for Nonviolent Communication and work with the books by Marshall Rosenberg59 and Lucy Leu.60

    Having summarized the general principles of peaceful communication, I would like to give two scenarios of a situation between a parent and child. In the first, the parent speaks in a harsh and hurtful way, and, in the second, in a supportive and empathic one.  In both instances, a boy comes home from school with a note from the principal saying he has been suspended for fighting in the corridor after lunch.



Scenario 1:

    The mother reads the suspension notice and reacts. (M = mother; S = Sam).

M: “There you go again. You can’t keep out of trouble.”

S:  “But, Mom, I was only…”

M:  “Stop it!  You’re always making excuses.”

S: “That’s not fair. You don’t even know what happened.”

M: “Fair? What do you know about fair? The last thing I need is more stress. People will think I don’t know how to raise you.”

S: “Please, Mom, listen to me a minute.”

M: “You’re just like your father. I never should have married him.”



    In the interaction above, the mother shows no empathy for her son. She demeans, blames, generalizes, distorts, and threatens. She is preoccupied by her own image rather than concerned for Sam. To ward off her own underlying shame, she displaces it onto her son.  She brings up unresolved bitterness about her marriage, which makes it possible for the boy to infer that she regrets he was ever born. Too many children are chronically mistreated like this by unhappy, immature parents. Such child-rearing models the opposite of the attitudes and skills needed for a peaceful culture.



Scenario 2:

The mother reads the notice and responds.

M: “What happened, Sam? You look upset.”

S: “Yeah, Mom, I’m really angry. You know those three big guys I told you about, the ones who have been picking on my friends and me?”

M:  “I remember.”

S: “Well, after lunch, I was going to my locker when they surrounded me and pushed me against the wall. They started shoving me, called me a wimp, and said they were going to punch my face.”

M: “That must have been scary. You’re shaking.”

S:  “Yeah, I was scared. I had to do something to get out of there. I pushed their leader aside, and he fell down. The others were startled and stepped back, so I got away and started running down the hall.”

M: “Why were you suspended?”

S: “That’s the part that makes me mad. A teacher came by right when I escaped and took us all to the principal. He wouldn’t listen to me about what happened. He said we all broke the rule about not fighting in school, so we were all suspended.”

M: “Wow. I can understand why you’re angry. It’s so unfair. You want to have a principal who at least cares to hear what went on before suspending everyone, huh?”

S: “Yeah, if he would just LISTEN to what happened! That’s all I’m asking!”

M: “It sure is frustrating, isn’t it, not being able to get your story heard? Would you like to talk some more about this and maybe we can come up with an idea of how to approach the principal so he’d be willing to hear what you have to say?”



    In this second dialogue, the mother asks respectfully for her son’s story and makes empathic observations about how he appears to her. This invites him to share his real feelings, which she validates. She listens and responds supportively and offers to be her son’s advocate with the principal. A child who receives this kind of unconditional parental trust and love is learning the ways of peace.



Self-worth

    Peaceful parenting, as I am describing it, instills in children a resilient sense of self-worth that can endure for life. When we humans value our own lives, we are more likely to respect others’ lives also, so we will strive to make peace. When we do not believe in our own worth, we are likely to project that intolerable sense of worthlessness onto others, so we make conflict and war.

    A sense of self-worth means perceiving ourselves to be worthy and capable of surviving, thriving, and receiving love. When our sense of our own value is intact, we will defend ourselves to the best of our ability if our physical or psychological integrity is threatened. While people who enjoy a sense of self-worth are more peaceful, this does not imply being defenseless pushovers. Feeling self-worth is based on being in touch with our own feelings and needs, knowing they are valid, and being skilled in actualizing ourselves and protecting our interests. Of course, we need a life context in which this is possible. When the drive to self-actualization is thwarted, conflict arises. People imbued with self-worth will be more creative in dealing with conflict.

    Since we treat others similarly to how we feel about ourselves, people who feel their own worth will recognize it in other people, animals, and all of nature. If we feel worthless and undeserving of love—in other words, shamed and humiliated—this is intolerably painful, so we try to rid ourselves of the shame in myriad ways, including projection, that are destructive of self and others.

    The sources of self-worth include being raised with love as children; being validated in communication with significant others; close, warm family and friendship ties; education that addresses our learning styles and needs and empowers us for meaningful activities; actualizing our skills in achievements, work, and hobbies; and therapy if we have suffered a wound to our self-worth. It can also include meditation as a practice of self-affirmation and a way of feeling inner peace, harmony, and stability. Ultimately, self-worth comes from feeling loved unconditionally. If we are adults who did not receive the gift of self-worth from our caregivers, we need to validate and love ourselves unconditionally, but we cannot do this without the support of at least one other human being who can give us unconditional love.

    Feeling self-worth is tantamount to being at peace with oneself. With a solid sense of self-worth, we do not need to hide who we are from others, as people do when they suffer from shame. Likewise, with self-worth, we do not feel threatened if others, out of their shame, project negative attributes onto us. Self-worth gives us a strong sense of boundaries, so we can recognize other people’s projections and lack of boundaries as their problems. If they behave insensitively toward us, we can choose to part from them or to inquire about their needs and perceptions without losing our sense of self and our rights.

    When I asked a group of elders associated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an ecumenical peace organization, to tell stories about what they had learned about peacemaking in their lives, the African-American psychiatrist, Margaret Lawrence, 82 years old at the time of our dialogue, reflected on a childhood incident. Her best friend had been a white girl her age named Elizabeth. One day Elizabeth announced to Margaret, “My mother said I can’t play with you any more.” In her innocence, Margaret asked, “Why?” Elizabeth answered,“ Because you’re a nigger.” Dr. Lawrence reflected, “How was it possible for me to be a peaceful person at nine-years-of-age in Vicksburg, Mississippi? How was it possible to feel relatively peaceful even with Elizabeth when that happened? My thesis is that the possibility of peace comes from having loving relationships within the family. Whatever happens outside, one can still know oneself as a valuable person as long as there are loving relationships there.” 61 In other words, Margaret Lawrence was able to deal with Elizabeth’s demeaning rejection and to put it into perspective because she was well loved at home and therefore had a strong and stable sense of her own self-worth.

    Adults can support children’s sense of self-worth by listening when children speak, attending to their genuine needs, and treating them with respect. Richard Deats remembered how devalued he felt as a young child when sitting at a luncheonette counter and noticing that adults were always served first, even when they arrived later than he. “Because I was a kid, I wasn’t important. Kids many times don’t feel they have worth until someone makes them feel important.  That’s the beginning of inner peace.” 62 This inner peace and the self-worth that arise from being loved and respected in childhood are the foundations upon which outer peace is built.



Education

    Schools are often places where many children feel judged and shamed, unfortunately.  Therefore, it is hard for children to open up and discover who they are, how they feel, and what their callings are. I wish schools were safe havens where children and youth could unfold their intellectual, artistic, scientific, musical, athletic, and other potentials without risk to their physical safety or sense of self-worth. For too many children that is not the case. In the schools of 20 U.S. states (as of 2010), punitive paddling, an intrinsic assault on human dignity, is still legal and practiced. Bullying is also rampant in the schools. As I wrote in The Plague of Violence, “One out of 11 students in 6th to 10th grade reports being a victim of bullying at least weekly. In each of the recent incidences of teenage mass killers in the schools, the murderers … had been the objects of ridicule and humiliation from classmates, which no doubt exacerbated shame they already suffered from earlier child abuse.”63 A million children brought guns into schools in 2001. Teachers grade and rank students in invidious ways that leave most feeling at best mediocre and inferior, while a few are rewarded with honors that may lead to hubris—though at the same time their deeper emotional and developmental needs may be neglected. Such factors do not promote peace in the culture as a whole.

    Schools are far from all bad, of course. For countless students they have been a place of self-discovery, growth, and opportunity. Humane and sincere teachers try their best to help each of their students, but the system itself often has many dehumanizing features about which many authors have written.64 If schools are to contribute to a more peaceful world, which they could do to a much greater extent, I recommend the following:

• Making corporal punishment in all schools illegal;

• Training teachers and administrators in Nonviolent Communication or an equivalent approach to communication that validates and respects people;

• Educating children about the norms of peaceful family life and how to identify and report abuse if they or any of their friends are being abused;

• Training teachers first and then having them train students in emotional literacy;65

• Teaching peace studies and conflict resolution skills in age-appropriate ways.  Many programs, such as those developed by Educators for Social Responsibility and Teaching Tolerance, already exist and have much to offer. In higher education, there are currently 381 peace studies programs, and students, teachers, and scholars of peace studies are affiliated in the Peace and Justice Studies Association;

• Taking children’s different learning styles into account. We humans function differently from one another in ways that are equally valid. Measuring all children by the same limited standards can be hurtful to some. Several researchers have developed different credible and worthwhile models of the diverse patterns of human intelligence. Among them are Howard Gardner’s views on what he termed the eight multiple intelligences;66 the Myers Briggs Type Indicator of 16 personality types with their distinctive interests, needs, and learning styles;67 Educational Kinesiology with its 32 profiles of nervous system organization and consequent learning styles and needs.68 Dr. Richard Haier of San Diego, through use of PET scans, determined that when people are constrained to function in modes that are contrary to their natural type, their brains need to work up to 100 times harder than they would normally.69 I believe that forcing children to perform in ways that are not natural to them and judging them for it causes untold frustration in schools and leads to a less peaceful world;

• Attending to the entire range of children’s developmental needs, including emotional and physical, as well as cognitive;

•  Allowing children the freedom to go to the bathroom whenever the need arises;

• Assuring that all children get plenty of healthy, preferably non-competitive, exercise;

• Having full-spectrum lighting in classrooms, which is less stressful than conventional lighting;70

• Ascertaining that all children are getting good, nourishing food and drinking adequate amounts of pure water;

• Removing high-sugar, high-fat, artificial-ingredient-laden junk food from schools;71

• Eliminating all forms of shaming and humiliation;

• Engaging students in goal-setting, self-evaluation, and individually appropriate learning tasks, along with collaborative projects;

• Having teachers give qualitative observations and evaluations from which students and their parents can actually learn what the teachers valued in the work and how they think the students’ skills could be improved, rather than quantitative grades and ranks that are divisive and from which little can be learned.



Peaceful Play and Entertainment

    Childhood is normally a time for, among other things, exploring the world, bonding with peers, learning social norms, and developing skills through play.  In our culture, sports, television, movies, listening to music, and video games are among the most popular forms of play and entertainment in which children are involved. Unfortunately, through these activities they are exposed to many influences that increase the incidence of violence and prepare     them more for war than for peace.

    As stated above, children’s viewing of televised violence has been shown to increase aggressiveness, violence, and insensitivity to suffering. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry joined forces in the year 2000 to testify before Congress about the conclusive findings of over 1,000 studies on this subject.72     One study demonstrated positive effects from curtailing children’s television watching. Researchers from Stanford University conducted a project at two comparable elementary schools to see whether reducing children’s television viewing and video game playing would lead to their behaving less aggressively. One school was the experimental site, the other the control site. One-hundred-ninety-two children were observed, and researchers first determined the children’s baseline levels of verbal and physical aggression. With parental permission, the experimental group pledged to limit television watching to only 7 hours per week for a 20-week period. At the end of that period, the results for the experimental group were impressive. On the average, physical aggression was reduced by 40%, verbal aggression by 50%, and the children who had been the most aggressive at the start showed the greatest improvements.73 Children in the control group showed no improvements. This study demonstrates the need and potential benefits for efforts in communities throughout this nation, and others, to inform parents and educators and to build a movement to eliminate, as much as possible, children’s viewing of violent television programming.

    Violent video games have not been as extensively studied as television violence, but they are arguably even more dangerous than television because they are interactive. Psychologist David Grossman has described how a 14-year-old shot to death 8 of his classmates with a deadly precision that few trained policemen or soldiers could replicate.74 The boy had no training in marksmanship, but he was experienced in playing violent video games. This is a chilling example of how playing at violence not only can warp the minds of psychologically unstable children who are at-risk for violence but actually provide them with the lethal skills to cause irreversible, tragic harm to others. In view of such evidence, it is tantamount to criminal neglect for this culture to allow such “games” to be marketed in a free-enterprise system unrestrained by ethical boundaries.  Dedicated activism needs to delegitimize violence as entertainment for children, whether that violence is conveyed in movies, television, video games, or music lyrics.

    A culture’s sports reveal its prevalent values. The more violent and war-prone the culture, the more physically aggressive its sports are.75 In U.S. culture, several popular sports, including football, ice hockey, boxing, and wrestling involve brutal, potentially harmful physical interactions among competitors. Violence often erupts among players and fans.76 The emphasis on winning can reach obsessive levels of intensity. Research into the effects of sports participation on U.S. children has revealed that for many children “the pressures associated with sports produce low self-esteem, excessive anxiety, and aggressive behavior.” 77 Parents and coaches who value winning and aggression, despite token words about fair play and fun, appear to be the main sources of these pressures.  Increases in sports injuries, as reported by physicians, also appear due to the athletes’ increased anxiety, aggression, and feeling under pressure to win. When children, who may emulate professional athletes, witness the “borderline violence” already present in sports boil over into bloody brawls, they are exposed to negative role models.78 The sports culture of the U.S. and elsewhere appears to have gone to unhealthy extremes and is clearly in need of reform.

    In a culture of peace, the most popular sports would be more cooperative and esthetic, and less brutal. Sports can be energetic and challenging without being combative. This is one more example of how childhood activities, some of which continue into adulthood, can become more oriented to peace.