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Peace
is necessary for learning. Abraham Maslow, who studied learning and
human development in the 1930's and 1940's, in his work on the
"hierarchy of needs," said that learning just isn't going to happen
until some other things happen.
First level, humans need food, water, air and sleep. Without those,
they just can't concern themselves with anything else.
The second level of human needs, according to Maslow, is safety and
security. If they don't feel safe and trusting, they can't concern
themselves with other things.
Third level is the need for love and belonging—friends,
supportive family, some kind of feeling of being part of a social unit.
So for learning to happen in ANY situation, safety and some peace are
required.
Can there be too much peace? For learning, yes. Learning requires
mental arousal. If an environment is so still and barren that one's
curiosity isn't sparked, then people might be closer to a state of
sleep than of excited curiosity. Life can be too dull and quiet for
learning to spontaneously happen.
Can there be too little peace? Yes, and in many ways. There can be too
much noise, stimulation and chaos. So finding the balance place and the
comfort level is part of creating a peaceful home.
Peace is a prerequisite to natural, curious, intellectual exploration.
What is peace, then, in a home with children? Contentment is peace.
Is a child happy to be where he is? That is a kind of peace. If he
wakes up disappointed, that is not peace, no matter how quiet the house
is or how clean and "feng shuid" his room is.
Peace, like learning, is largely internal.
Mother Teresa could have found a more peaceful place than Calcutta, but
she was helping people find peace in non-peaceful surroundings.
Back to Maslow for just a minute, though—if my focus is
helping my children learn, Maslow's ideas can help. If a hungry child
can't learn, I should feed him. He can learn better. If a child can't
learn if he's thirsty, I need to make sure there's always water or
juice or something for him to drink. If a child needs to feel safe, he
won't learn by someone yelling, "Learn now, or I'll hit you."
Children's needs must be met for natural learning to blossom. Part of
that learning can be learning about how to keep their own needs
fulfilled. Helping children consider whether they're comfortable,
hungry, thirsty, sleepy or restless helps them be whole and healthy
people.
To have peace in your house, be more peaceful.
In English there's a phrase, an idiom, a lump of words:
"peace and quiet." People speak wistfully of "peace and quiet" as
though one requires the other, but I haven't found that to be true in
practice.
Is quiet always peace? I can think of lots of times of holding my
breath to be quiet, out of fear. I've seen families where people passed
through the house quietly, out of habitual fear and avoidance. Some
quiet can be very scary and dangerous. Some families live in fear and
quiet, not peace and quiet. Quiet fear is not peace at all!
Some parents wear their compassion on the outside and say we need peace
in the whole world first. That's a little like saying the ocean should
be drained before we take the water out of the basement. Does every war
have to stop before we can stop hitting our kids? Does every bit of
urban violence need to end before we can stop yelling at our kids? Do
lions have to stop eating gazelles before we stop harassing our kids?
To think in those terms is to justify our own lack of peace. It seems
to me that a child who has known strife at home won't blink at it
outside.
The more local and personal peace there is, the more peace there will
be in the world. That doesn’t mean that if Holly's sleeping
quietly there will be less violence in the Sudan, but it does mean that
there is more peace in the world. And it means that when she's grown,
she will be more unhappy to see or hear of neglect and abuse than she
would be if she herself had been neglected and abused and thought it
was normal.
If we raise the level of peace our children expect, they will know what
peace feels like.
Adults need to know what peace feels like too, though, and some feel it
for the first time when they really start to understand unschooling.
What Progress Looks Like
How did I come to make progress on peace in my own life? After I was
grown and married, friends persuaded me to attend meetings of Adult
Children of Alcoholics, an al-Anon group, which involved itself with
healing the inner child. From them, I learned ideas like
HALT (hungry?angry?lonely?tired?)
"How Important Is it?"
"If you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, you're
pissing all over today," an indelicate but memorable way of saying
"live now" and "pay attention to today."
During the time I was active in those meetings, I had Kirby, and then
Marty.
When Kirby was a baby, I started going to La Leche League meetings. I
wish I had gone before he was born. From LLL, I learned that a mother
and baby should be partners, not adversaries. I read, heard about and
saw attachment parenting, child-led weaning and separation from babies
when the babies indicate a desire to get down and go.
From my teen years, I had learned meditation and breathing exercises
and knew how to calm and center myself quickly. More than that, though,
I knew what it felt like to be calm.
How might others make progress now? Inner child work was common when I
was a new mother, but now cognitive therapy tends to replace that. If
we avoid thoughts that are negative or non-productive or illogical, we
move toward a better, lighter place. People can work on thinking and on
being.
How will you be, as a parent, and why? What's keeping you from being
the way you want to be?
Inventory your own tools. What do you already know that can make you a
more peaceful parent? What tricks and skills can you bring into your
relationships with members of your family?
Below are several things can help you move toward peace, and each will
help the others develop: breathing, understanding, choices, awareness
and principles.
Breathing
There are physiological and emotional advantages of breathing. One way
to learn this is with meditation. The "meditation" most think of in
this country came from Hindu practices. The Buddhist style meditation
is referred to often as "breathing" or "sitting." Christian meditation
is sitting or kneeling or walking. It involves contemplation while the
Eastern versions involve trying to avoid contemplation in favor of
blankness.
Moms with little children cannot easily do these things.
Other ways to work on breath and breathing might be yoga, maybe
running, bicycling, walks or swimming laps.
Moms with little children cannot easily do these things.
What those moms can do is find other things involving breathing and
rhythm. They can sing, walk, rock or bounce babies, go to the park and
push a swing. How and why they do those things will make a difference.
If they're done sweetly and patiently and mindfully, both mother and
child will benefit. Done merrily and generously, they will create
peace.
Peace is not an element "that can neither be created nor destroyed."
Peace is entirely a condition and a mood. It's very, very fragile. It
has to be created and maintained and protected.
Counting to ten only works if you're breathing slowly and deeply and
looking at (or thinking of) the sky or something else airy and big and
peaceful. The purpose of counting to ten is to let the adrenaline pass
and to think of some good options from which you can choose. If you
count to ten holding your breath, holding your frustration, with a
roaring anger in your ears, the adrenaline isn't
dissipating—it's just
being focused into a beam of extraordinarily dangerous power.
While you're breathing, you might want to think, "I love these people,"
or "whatever I say could last forever." Think of what you want to be
and what you want to create. See what you want, and what you don't
want.
As you move toward peace, remember you can't have all of anything in
one move. Each thought or action can move you nearer, though (or
further).
You know the game of finding something in which other players will say,
"You're getting warm," or "You're getting cold"? You need to get
warmer and nearer and closer. You don't need absolute peace; you need
more peace. You don't need to live in perpetual peace; you need to live
with more peace.
You can't be absolutely safe from strife, but you can be safer.
Understanding
Nothing has ever made me feel better about me than the feeling that I
was being a good mom.
If you work on understanding what you want, you will have more peace
within yourself. Understanding takes inquiry, observation, reading and
a lot of thought. These will help to understand yourself as well as you
can too, but that can come gradually. Online unschooling sites and
discussions are excellent opportunities to increase one's understanding
of natural learning and peaceful parenting.
Choices
Unless you considered two or three courses of actions, you didn't
really make a choice at all. Consciously think of two choices before
you act—then make the better choice. Your range of choices
will get better as you do this. While you're helping your child learn
to choose, you can also learn to choose.
Awareness
Look directly at your child. Practice watching your child without
expectations. Try to see what he is really doing, rather than seeing
what he’s NOT doing. Just look.
Smell your child's hair. They say dogs can smell fear, but moms can
smell love, or something, when they smell the top of a young child's
head. Something biochemical happens, and something intellectual can
happen.
BE AWARE of who this child is and of your potential to help or to harm.
What is the opposite of peace here? Lack of awareness. In cases of
violent crime or crazed fit what do people often cite? "I was unaware;
I forgot where I was; I didn't think…" If you can choose to
be more aware over less aware, that will help.
One aspect of awareness is working on your ability to be quietly alert,
like a mother hawk, aware of the location of your child, her mood and
your surroundings.
Principles
So what's the "rule" about peace?
There's not a rule about peace.
There will never be perfect peace. We can't even define "peace."
There can be a closer approximation to ideal peace. People can come
nearer to the way they would like to be, but only incrementally, choice
by choice.
If you want to live peacefully, make the more peaceful choice.
Peace is all about choices.
Choose to breathe consciously sometimes.
Choose understanding over ignoring and ignorance.
Choose to make choices.
Choose awareness over oblivion, when you can.
Make choices based on your principles.
To have peace in your house, be more peaceful.
Sandra
Dodd is the mostly-peaceful mother of primarily-peaceful children, in a
generally peaceful home in Albuquerque. Her dog is at peace with her
cats. Sandra once taught Jr. High English, in a long-ago age, but met
Keith Dodd and they lived happily ever after (so far so good).
An MP3 of a longer, spoken version of the information above, with
stories and more humor, is available for $10 from Live
and Learn Resources.
The conference presentation version was called "Big Noisy Peace."
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