Methods for teaching "Peacability"

Peaceability

"Calmness. Peacefulness. Serenity. The tendency to try to accommodate rather than argue. The understanding that differences are seldom resolved through conflict and that meanness in others is an indication of their problem or insecurity and thus of their need for your understanding. The ability to understand how others feel rather than simply reaction to them. Control of temper."

Introduction

Children need calmness. It gives them a kind of security. Peace and the control of temper is a powerful and important value that is largely a product of love and of the atmosphere created in a home! Understanding is the key. We seldom lose our temper when we are trying to understand. Children who are taught to try to understand why things happen and why people act the way they do will become calmer and more in control.

We have used the term peaceability to mean understanding, calmness, patience, control, and accommodation -- essentially the opposite of anger, losing one's temper, impatience, and irritation. Just as there are a lot of ways to be dishonest, there are a lot of ways to be unpeaceable. Peaceability does not mean the elimination of ignoring of emotions. Rather, it means to control them and to prevent their causing hurt to other people.

Calmness and peaceability are values because they help others as well as ourselves to feel better and to function better. In addition to being values, they are contagious qualities. As you develop them within yourself, they are "caught" by others around you, particularly by children.

General Guidelines

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 someone.

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 a 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 expressers of it.

Teach by praise. Try to develop a "contagious calm" in yourself and to build it in children through 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."

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