Creating a Peaceful World through Peaceful Parenting

Nurturing Compassion from the Beginning by Jan and Jason Hunt  "If we are to reach real peace in this world and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with children. And if they will grow up in their natural innocence, we won't have the struggle, we won't have to pass fruitless idle resolutions, but we shall go from love to love and peace to peace, until at last all the corners of the world are covered with that peace and love for which, consciously or unconsciously, the whole world is hungering." - Mahatma Gandhi   We all hunger for peace. Yet far too often this seems to be just a dream, hopelessly out of reach. Instead of the peaceful life we all want, we have strife in our families, in our communities, and between our nations. We lose hope of anything better, and begin to think that nothing will ever change. Our dream of peace remains elusive. This is a hard dream to relinquish, because it began at birth. Every infant beams when there is peace in the home, and looks perplexed and cries when there is not. To an infant, conflict is a puzzle. As infants, we not only want everyone to get along, we expect it. We are born expecting peace. Even as adults, we are shocked and saddened by every new story of brutality. We still believe that life can and should be peaceful. But we know that each day, in far too many places, there will be conflict, fighting, killing, and even war. If we are all peace lovers in our infancy, what makes us so divisive in adulthood? What goes wrong? How can it be fixed?
We wake each morning with the hope that things will change, but every day there is another sad and shocking story. We are all bewildered, and want to understand what went wrong. It seems to be human nature to focus on the most recent events, not those further back in time. So we wonder what could have been done on the days before a tragedy that might have prevented it. What last-minute interventions could have made a difference? What could have been done differently at the scene to save lives?	The best prevention is always the earliest.
There is nothing wrong with these kinds of questions - they may help to prevent future acts of violence from taking place. But to reduce the potential for violence in general, it may be more constructive to look at the earliest links, not the most recent ones. While there are many factors that can lead to violence, the best prevention is always the earliest - the one that keeps the first domino from falling.