PEACE AND CHILD-REARING
by Anita Remignanti, Ph.D.
Parents are well-meaning and sincere human beings who set out to raise their children in the best way they can. Children are small human beings who come into this world well-equipped perceptually and emotionally to learn from their parents. From birth children behave in a myriad of different ways depending on what they need and how they feel. All of children's initial behaviors are neutral, they are clearly not bad and in some behaviors we can see motives which are intended to aid or help others. When a baby grasps a glass object and lets it smash to the floor, most adults will agree there is no harmful intent. Interpreting baby's behavior gets more difficult for parents as s/he grows and learns. A two-year old who throws herself onto a crowded supermarket floor in a fit of rage is acting developmentally appropriate. It is often hard for mother to remember this because the event is upsetting and disruptive, not to mention embarrassing.
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http://www.wipa.org/peace_and_cr.htm
Child Raising In Non-violent Cultures
SOME CULTURES on our planet are, or have been, basically non-aggressive, non-violent. That is, adult behavior includes few, if any, examples of war, homicide or intentional injury - physically or psychically - to other human beings. Cooperation, rather than competition, is the modus operandi, in contrast to our mainstream Western cultures. Why are there these differences? Is there anything useful we in the modern world can learn from these non-violent cultures?
There are perhaps many reasons for the varying expressions of violence in different cultures, from historic patterns to genetic propensities to economic influences. But whatever the predisposing factors are, there seem to also be some characteristic child rearing practices common to most of the known non-violent cultures. To illustrate this, I will draw on my own two years' experience in East African villages and on the work of a number of other anthropologists contained in Ashley Montagu's anthology, Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non- Literate Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Montagu credits Margaret Mead with pioneering work in the examination of aggressiveness in non-literate societies:
Years ago...in her book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, she pointed to the existence of a strong association between childrearing practices and later personality development. The child who received a great deal of attention, whose every need was promptly met, as among the New Guinea Mountain Arapesh, became a gentle, cooperative, unaggressive adult. On the other hand, the child who received perfunctory, intermittent attention, as among the New Guinea Mundugomor, became a selfish, uncooperative, aggressive adult.
Later research among non-literate civilized peoples has substantially confirmed this relationship. . .
How were these needs "promptly met"? What did these children experience that turned them into gentle, cooperative, unaggressive adults?
Infants up through their second year are in close bodily contact with, primarily, their mothers, but also with others, usually women or older children. The Mbuti child, on about his third day of life is passed among close friends and family members, "not just for them to look at him, but for them to hold him close to their bodies. Another educational event has taken place in that young life: at the age of three days the infant boy is learning that there is a plurality of warm bodies, similar in warmth (which is comforting) but dissimilar in smells and rhythmic movements, which he may find disconcerting enough to make him cry, in protest. If that happens his mother immediately takes him back and puts him to her breast." The infant, in all these cultures, is carried and held almost constantly, less frequently being placed near the mother where she is working. Infant presence is not an intrusion into adult life, but rather an expected and welcome part of all adult activity.
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http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC04/McElroy.htmPEACE CULTURE:THE PROBLEM OF MANAGING HUMAN DIFFERENCE
by Elise Boulding
Peace culture, neither a fantasy nor accident, is as central to human nature as war culture.
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The familial household can also be the source of violence. Exercise of power in the patriarchal family model too often leads to wife- and child-abuse. Boys can be gentled by their experience of growing up male when the values of nurturing and sharing exist in the community and women are visible and equal participants in the more public life of the society. If we look at societies that set a high value on nonaggression and noncompetitiveness, and therefore handle conflicts by nonviolent means, we can see how certain distinctive child-rearing patterns produce nurturing adult behavior.
The Twa people in northeastern Zaire (or Congo), now endangered by the civil war that has swept over their country, provide a striking example of how a peaceful society raises its children. The Twa are hunter-gatherers who dwell in the rain forest. The basis for their peacefulness is their relationship to the rain forest, which is mother, father, teacher, and womb. The family hut is also a symbolic womb. Children grow up listening to the trees, learning to climb them at an early age so that they can sit high in their branches. Twa is a listening culture, but also a singing and dancing culture, as adults and children sing to and dance with the trees. Ekima, quietness, is highly valued over akami, disturbance.
Although this preference for quietness and harmony is reinforced at every stage of life, it does not preclude children's rough-and-tumble play. There is also a lot of petty squabbling among adults, which tends to be controlled by ridicule. While children are slapped when they engage in forbidden activities and nuisance behavior, they are also taught interdependence and cooperation. Adults seem to enjoy horseplay and noisy disputes. Semi-humorous "sex wars," in which men and women line up for tugs-of-war, serve as tension-dissipaters; they break up with much laughter. They are also an indication of the companionable equality between women and men. Most groups have a "clown" whose antics also help to keep conflicts from getting out of hand. For all of the squabbling, disagreements rarely get serious.
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http://www.crosscurrents.org/boulding.htmArticle about the Peaceful Societies website
http://cpnn-usa.org/cgi-bin/read/articlepage.cgi?ViewArticle=235http://www.peacefulsocieties.org/