Week 2 of September, Peaceability
In Partnership with Richard and Linda Eyre

Editor’s Note:  This month the Meridian Family Value of the month is Peaceability (click here to read last week’s overview article). Each week during the month we will post an update in Meridian, illustrating a couple of the Eyres’ favorite methods for teaching peaceability to each age group:

Methods for Preschoolers

The “Calm Couch” and the “Repenting Bench”

These methods combine a penalty for temper and hurtful conduct with a way to get attention for improving. Have a hard bench or two straight-backed chairs somewhere in the home where children who fight are assigned to sit. Children who fight (physically or verbally) are sent instantly to the bench. A child can get off only when he can tell you what he (not the other child) did wrong and when he “repents” to the other child with a hug and a request for forgiveness.

Also have a particular couch or softer chair designed as the “calm couch” or “calm chair.” When a child is fussy or feisty or loses his temper, have him sit  in the calm chair until he is calm.

Don’t treat the calm chair or the fighting bench as punishments — rather as ways to avoid punishment. If children don’t wish to sit on the repentance bench to think about what they did wrong and apologize, then they get punished. If they don’t want to use their calm chair to calm down, then they get sent to their room.

Stillness Contests

This is a way to teach small children the feeling, as well as the skill, of being peaceful, quiet, and calm. Have contests to see who can go the longest without speaking, or without moving. Afterward say, “It feels nice to be quiet and still sometimes, doesn’t it?”

Methods for Elementary School Age

The Peace Award

This award is a good way to praise and recognize children for their efforts to stay calm and peaceable. Make up a Peace Award by lettering the word peace or the symbol on a card. Remember that awards get posted on the bedroom door of the family member who wins it for the week. Using the Sunday-award technique discussed previously, say to children, “Who is in the running for the Peace Award?” A child might be in the running  if he has not lost his temper, has not retaliated when someone hurt him, has counted to ten, or could explain why someone might have done a hurtful thing.

Lavishly praise every effort. Be in the running yourself, thinking of examples of your own efforts to be peaceable during the week just passed. Discuss each situation that anyone brings up.

Give the award to the family member who has made the greatest effort to be peaceable that week. Praise the winner profusely!

The “Two to Tangle” Concept

Help children see that the opposite of peace is fighting and that since one person can’t fight by himself, both sides of a fight must be partly to blame.

Use the “repenting bench” with elementary-age children as well as with preschoolers. Explain to children that if they are peaceful and refuse to retaliate (learn the definition of this word together), then there can’t be a fight.

Methods for Adolescents

The ”Analytical-or-Angry” Discussion

Help young teenagers conceptualize the benefits of trying to ”understand” rather than trying to “win.” At dinner or some other natural conversation time make the statement that we have many situations in which there is a choice between two “A” words — arguing or analyzing. In other words, when someone does something to us or says something with which we disagree, we can either fight back and argue or we can try to analyze why he did or said that.

Point out that the second choice is better because we learn something whenever we try to figure out why, and we keep our cool and keep our friends.