Green Child Magazine Back-to-School 2014 | Page 64

Violence in Our Schools
How Parents Can Help Create a More Peaceful World
|by Jan and Jason Hunt

Jan Hunt, M.Sc. is the director of The Natural Child Project
and author of The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart.
We all hunger for peace. Yet far too often this
seems to be just a dream, hopelessly out of
reach. Instead of the peaceful life we all want,
we have strife in our families, in our communities, and between our nations. We lose hope of
anything better, and begin to think that nothing will ever change. Our dream of peace remains elusive.
This is a hard dream to relinquish, because it
began at birth. Every infant beams when there
is peace in the home, and looks perplexed and
cries when there is not. To an infant, conflict is
a puzzle. As infants, we not only want everyone
to get along, we expect it.
We wake each morning with the hope that
things will change, but every day there is another sad and shocking story. We are all bewildered, and want to understand what went
wrong. It seems to be human nature to focus
on the most recent events, not those further
back in time. So we wonder what could have
been done on the days before a tragedy that
might have prevented it. What last-minute
interventions could have made a difference?
What could have been done differently at the
scene to save lives?
There is nothing wrong with these kinds of
questions - they may help to prevent future
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acts of violence from taking place. But to reduce the potential for violence in general, it
may be more constructive to look at the earliest
links, not the most recent ones. While there are
many factors that can lead to violence, the best
prevention is always the earliest - the one that
keeps the first domino from falling.
Psychiatrist Elliott Barker wrote, “How do we
go about the task of decreasing the number of
psychopaths or the amount of psychopathy in
our society? To me it is the same question as
‘How do we increase the number of people in
our society who have well-developed capacities
for trust, for empathy, and for affection?’”
Here are some possible ways we can
accomplish this:
1. Encourage young men and women to consider carefully their readiness to love and
nurture a child.
2. Offer local maternity classes and support
groups that focus on the parent-child connection, such as La Leche League meetings.
3. Give parents the support they need, so they
can have time to fall in love with their baby
- everything else can wait.
4. Remind parents of the substantial benefits
of breastfeeding with child-led weaning.