Nonviolent Conflict Solving is necessary if we choose to instill peaceful values into our children. Given the degree of anger and violence in society, children may need to know, as early as possible, how to handle disagreements with each other without letting their anger get out of control, and without using violence. As they develop physically and cognitively, children can be helped to use the conflict-solving methods that worked for them in their early childhood days to problem solve around the more complicated problems that appear in adolescence.
We’re not violent so why should we teach this to our children?
He@lth, athealth.com, suggests the following lists of reasons to teach children why violent conflicts need to be settled peacefully:
• Guns and other weapons are easily available, and young people don’t have a good sense of the consequences of their actions. So, they may think that an easy way to win an argument is to threaten opponents, which can lead to accidental injury or death, or even to the intentional use of a weapon.
• Youth who learn to solve problems fairly and nonviolently are respected by others, make friends more easily, and become role models for others.
• Youth who use violence may die young or spend their lives in prison.
• Youth who don’t know any ways to deal with disagreements will always be the victims of bullies.
• Unless youth learn to reject and avoid violence, they may encourage the violence of others just by being willing to watch it without trying to help the participants find another way to settle their dispute.
• In communities where youth witness a great deal of violence, they may grow up thinking that using violence is the best or only way to end a disagreement, unless they are shown other equally effective methods.
Children’s attitudes about violence are influenced by ALL of the adults in their lives (including the people they see on television or the video/computer games they play), but because families are first role models and the most significant of all interactions, the strategies that children learn at home have more effect than what children learn from others.
Parents may unwittingly have attitudes toward violence that can lead their children to think it is all right to be violent. Do you unwittingly send out any of the following attitudes?
• You must win an argument, no matter what the cost.
• Walking away from a dispute, even if it doesn’t really affect your life, is a sign of weakness.
• Compromising to settle a disagreement is a loss you can’t live with.
• “Real men” are aggressive, and it is important to encourage aggressive behavior in sons.
• “Real women” are submissive and dependent, and shouldn’t protect themselves from abuse, and daughters should learn to defer to the men in their lives.
How to Teach attitudinal Alternatives to Violence.
It is possible to teach your child to be nonviolent by modeling different attitudes and behaviors. However, even if you do not reject violence all the time (times of war for example), you can help your children learn to solve disputes without using violence and without allowing themselves to become victims. This is particularly important because of such easy access to weapons. It is necessary to teach your children that relying on violence to solve problems can have deadly consequences.
Following are some principles and strategies that you can teach as of today. Thinking these strategies aloud, in front of children, helps them to learn the problem solving technique prior to them having to enact them.
• Figure out what methods to control personal anger work, like leaving a tense situation temporarily or finding a calm person to talk to. Use them before losing control.
• Think beforehand what the consequences of different actions will be: anger and violence versus walking away from a dispute or compromise.
• Use humor to cool hostility. This is not changing the subject, but rather, diffusing a situation so that it can be dealt with again when there is less chance of violent eruptions.
• Never fight with anyone using drugs or alcohol, or likely to have a weapon. You cannot reason with these people as they are already far out of control.
• Get as much information about a disagreement as possible, to help solve it and to head off feelings of uncontrollable anger. This means getting the full information from the other person, not just always putting your side forward.
• Try to think of solutions to a dispute that will give both sides something acceptable, and try to understand an opponent’s point of view.
• Show respect for an opponent’s rights and position. Everyone sees things a ittle differently. This doesn’t mean one person is right and the other wrong.
• Don’t use an opponent’s race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation as a reason for a dispute. If you have a bias, it is your bias, and has nothing to do with the other person just trying to live their life.
• Instead of responding with violence, show strength of character by either rejecting the “set-up” for a fight, or, accepting a compromise to a dispute.
• Never coerce a partner or be violent in a relationship; this behavior causes distance, loss of respect and love, and feelings of fear and guilt, in addition to the more obvious consequences of physical harm to the victim and arrest of the abuser.
• Show that people like and respect nonviolent problem-solvers more than bullies (for example, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King) and be a nonviolent problem-solver yourself.
Some further reading for those interested:
Problem Solving Through Writing
Creating A Safe Environment for Conflict
Teen Dating Violence: A Serious Problem