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Peaceability Teaching Methods for All Ages
In Connection with Richard and Linda Eyre

As most Meridian readers know, Meridian Magazine, in collaboration with Linda and Richard Eyre, presents a specific and particular value each month, complete with methods for teaching that value to each age group of children. As is the pattern each month, we begin September with an overview article that re-introduces this month's value. We began September with an overview article that re-introduced this month's value (the value of Peaceability). During the month since then, readers have sent in their own ideas and methods for teaching this value, and we now present them to you.

Remember that any time during the month, you can click on the "family value of the month" icon on the left side of the Meridian home page and go directly to the teaching ideas for the month. You can also get additional teaching ideas for teaching and communicating the value of the month by going to http://www.valuesparenting.com/

We appreciate your feedback on each value. Send your comments to Eyres@meridianmagazine.com. Meridian readers can also receive a marvelous (and free to Meridian readers) children's CD on the value of Honesty by following the instructions at the end of this column.

Methods for Teaching the Value of Peaceability (including those sent in by readers)

General Methods that can be Adopted for all Ages:

1. Create a peaceful atmosphere in your home. Try to enhance the setting in which you live and teach this value. Improve the calmness of your home by (a) playing restful music — much classical music creates a feeling of refinement, order, and peace; (b) controlling the tone and decibel level of your own voice — yelling accomplishes little and instantly punctures a peaceable atmosphere; (c) touching others in your family — we talk more softly when we touch; put a hand on a shoulder or arm as you speak to your child.

2. Set an example of and have an advance commitment to calmness. Demonstrate the practice and the benefits of peaceability to your children and take advantage of the quality’s contagiousness. It is natural, as a parent, to say, “I have the right to get upset,” or “They needed that.” but no matter how much right we have, getting upset with children simply doesn’t work very well, and children really don’t need to see us lose our temper.

There is occasionally a place for righteous indignation — when children willfully and flagrantly do something they know is wrong. But too often our anger comes from our own frustration and sets negative and even dangerous precedents. Unfortunately anger, volatility, and impatience are as contagious as calmness. Children frequently exposed to it inevitably become frequent expressors of it.

3. Teach by praise. Try to develop a “contagious calm” in yourself and to build it in children though positive praise.

Besides working to stay calm within ourselves, and trying to respond in a peaceful way, parents need to learn that “praise is peaceful” while “negative is nervous.”

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?”

The Magazine Game

This game helps small children realize that it is all right to feel mad or sad, just as it is all right to feel happy or glad, but it is not all right to hurt other people or their feelings because of how we feel. Flip though magazines with a child, stopping every time a person is pictured, and asking, “How do you think he feels?” (happy, jealous, worried, etc. — this is also a chance to each children new words and the names of new emotions.) Then say, “Is it okay to feel this way?” (Yes.) Then say, “Is it okay to be mean to someone else if you feel mad or sad? (No!)

Explain “Temper”

Give your children the vocabulary they need to talk about anger and give them a way to conceptualize why anger is dangerous and harmful. Show children a pan of cool water, have them touch it and put their fingers in it. They put it on the stove over heat. Explain that when we get mad and lose our tempers, we start getting hot. When the water is boiling say, “This is like getting angry and losing our temper — we get all bubbly and upset and we can hurt people. Would you like to touch that water now?” (No!) “So let’s try not to boil — not to get mad, not to lose our temper.”

Counting to Ten

This helps young children learn a practical method for controlling their tempers. Since preschoolers are excited about learning numbers and learning to count to ten, explain to them that there is another reason (besides adding, subtracting, etc.) for knowing numbers and how to count. It can also help us control our tempers! Explain how counting to ten before we yell or get angry allows us to calm down. Go through some examples — situations where something makes them mad — talk about what would happen if they got mad, and what would happen differently if they counted to ten first.

Set the example by letting your children see (and hear) you counting to ten.

A Simple Musical-Harmony Game

This game can help older preschoolers get the idea of harmony. If you have a piano, show children the difference between a chord that is in tune and in harmony and the sound of two or three random and dissonant keys struck together. Let them hear the sound and say, “harmony” or “no harmony.” Then ask which sounds best. Then ask which sounds most like peace and calmness and which sounds upsetting. Finally talk about the other (but similar) kind of harmony — of how people treat each other.

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.

“Technical Fouls”

This method can help sports-oriented kids see the benefits (and adopt the goal) of calm behavior. Sports-minded kids who know about technical fouls and the sign the referee gives to call one (straight, vertical, right hand hitting straight, horizontal, left hand to make a T) are quick to understand why a “player” shouldn’t lose his temper. In basketball you don’t slam the ball to the court, push someone, yell at someone, or show disrespect or temper. If you do, you are hit with a T.

Set up a system in which every time you slap a child with a “technical,” it costs him something (a small part of his allowance, etc.).

The Color Game

The color game is a good way to teach younger elementary-aged children the good consequences of peace and the bad consequences of anger and retaliation. Cut out two single figures in the human shape, one from red paper and one from some pastel color. Tell the children that the red represents temper and impatience, the pastel is control and peace. Give them a situation and let them tell you what each figure might do in each of the following situations:

Your alarm clock doesn’t go off, so you’re going to be late for school.
You’re playing basketball and you get called for a foul you didn’t think you committed.
Your friend forgets to meet you for lunch.
Your little brother flips you with a rubber band.
Your mom says you can’t have a sleepover because there’s school tomorrow.
The new pen you just bought won’t work.
And so on. Think of your own, based on your own experience.

One year we were so busy in January that the Christmas tree just didn’t get taken down. On a Saturday, early in February, I finally got around to the task. As I was “undecorating,” eight-year-old Saydi walked in. “Oh, don’t take it down, Dad!”

“Saydi, it’s February, it’s got to come down.”

“But there’s such a nice feeling here when the tree is up, Dad, it’s all peaceful and warm feeling. I wish our house would feel like this all year long.”

A week or so later I bought a small artificial Christmas tree (it was on sale, since it was February). Every once in a while, when things seem hectic and strained, I set up the little tree for a day or two.

Memorizing

Teach your child a phrase that will help him understand rather than argue. Have children memorize the couplet, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Help them understand the simple meaning that even when we win an argument, the other person resents us, so it is better to try to understand the other person and find a away to agree. Another good saying to memorize comes from Keats, “Beauty if truth, truth beauty, — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Discuss how beauty is more visible to those who are calm, peaceful, and truthful.

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.

Story and Follow-up Discussion on the Theory of “Win-Win” Situations

This exercise will help adolescents begin to see the world not as constant competition and “win-lose,” but as a place where understanding can help everyone win. Tell this brief incident: