How To Help Your Child
Avoid Violent Conflicts
Why
Nonviolent Conflict Solving Is Necessary
Children need to be taught 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 get older, they should be helped
to apply the conflict-solving methods that worked for them in childhood to the more
complicated problems that appear in adolescence. Here are some reasons why learning to
settle disputes fairly and nonviolently is important:
- 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.
How Parents Can Teach Alternatives to
Violence
Children's attitudes about violence are
influenced by all of the adults in their lives (including the people they see on
television), but what they learn at home is especially important, because their families
are their first role models. Some parents, for example, never become violent, and try to
avoid the violence of others.
Other parents, because of their upbringing or their experiences in life, believe that
there is no way to avoid violent confrontations, and that it is all right to use violence
to express their anger or to solve conflicts.
Parents' Attitudes
Parents may have attitudes toward violence that can lead their children to think it is all
right to be violent. Here is a checklist of some of these 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.
Parents' Teachings
The best thing parents can do is teach their children to be nonviolent by example.
However, even if you do not reject violence all the time, 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.
Here are some principles that parents can teach:
- Figure out what methods to control personal anger work (like leaving a tense situation
temporarily or finding a calm person to talk to), and 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.
- Never fight with anyone using drugs or alcohol, or likely to have a weapon.
- Get as much information about a disagreement as possible, to help solve it and to head
off feelings of uncontrollable anger.
- Try to think of solutions to a dispute that will give both sides something, and try to
understand an opponent's point of view.
- Show respect for an opponent's rights and position.
- Don't make bias against an opponent's race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation a
reason for a dispute.
- Show character by rejecting the bait for a fight, or accepting a compromise to a
dispute, rather than responding with violence.
- Don't 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, and be a
nonviolent problem-solver yourself.
Information in this guide was drawn from the October 1994 (Volume 94, Number 4, Part 2)
issue of Pediatrics, the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It is a
special issue devoted to the role of the pediatrician in violence prevention, based on a
conference sponsored by the Johnson & Johnson Pediatric Institute.
Source: ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education
Author: Wendy Schwartz
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Overview
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Fostering
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