Teaching Our Children Peace: lessons at home
My older child, who is now in the throws of high school, tells me weekly of friend’s traumatic break-ups and school fights. She relays that her freshman class already has a reputation for being the ‘trouble class’ in the school. Her classmates inability to resolve simple conflicts leaves her dumbfounded.
Not one to ever seek out conflict, I’ve smiled as my older daughter has gained more moxie over the years. In chakra terms, we’ve declared that she has “found her yellow chakra”, and hopefully this personal power chakra continues to radiate in her. I’ve never wanted her to confuse peace with avoidance of conflict. “To thine own self be true” is a core lesson. But, honoring your own truth doesn’t mean that you need to destroy someone else’s.
My younger child however is a different story. Instead of a quiet peacemaker she’s a budding mediator. She has no fear of jumping into conflict and her dazzling magnetism makes her a voice that a room listens to. (A rather stunning feature in a 1st grader!) My attention is now on her; hoping that I’m guiding her in a way that will take her gifts and channel them for healing.
I learned through my divorce experiences that the lessons of my personal journey can be used to benefit others: starting with me and my girls. So while I’m not overjoyed in continually experiencing “life lessons”, I can be grateful for the opportunities that they provide. Most recently, the opportunity was to show my daughters that the absence of romantic love doesn’t leave hate.
While my older daughter had the opportunity to watch the process over the last several months, my youngest is rightfully more shielded from such goings on. So for her, the end of a longer-term romantic partnership between me and a friend needed to be discussed. I had flash-backs to the “we’re getting divorced” moments of my past, so my apprehension in starting the conversation with her was causing me to stall. In lovely encouragement, my older daughter prodded: “Well, what does your book say you should do?” [Divorced Situation #27: Talking To Your Child About The Divorce] And I laughed while giving her a not-so-mature rolling of the eyes.
At the end of my talk with my younger daughter, (which was filled with many 1st grade tangents about totally irrelevant things), I finally got out the message that I wanted her to hear: peaceful dissolution. In simple terms: just because he and I won’t be holding hands anymore doesn’t mean that we hate each other. And those words are re-enforced by what she sees as two people seemingly go on naturally with life.
(and yes, yes, for all child psychologists out there, I spent the next few minutes separating the love that may come and go of romantic partnerships with the love that is here forever of child/parent relationships. geez, give me some credit, this isn’t new to me!)
In reflecting on the talk, and in thinking about the high-school dramas, I had a moment of gratitude that maybe, through my guidance, I was able to take my daughters one step closer to a life filled with expectations of peaceful resolutions not destructive ones. I don’t want them avoiding relationships out of fear of a damaging break-up - a fate that so many children of divorce are cited to follow. Certainly their lives, and likely mine as well, will continue to be filled with relationship ups and downs, but with my shared practice I hope they can avoid the necessity to experience anger filled break-ups, seeking peaceful ones naturally. And that is good; for them and for the world beyond our home.
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Mindful mom, thinker, and author, Ellen Kellner, guides parents through The Pro-Child WaySM of nurturing their child’s spirit through her intuition, discernment, and somedays way-too-much experience. Ellen’s book, The Pro-Child Way: Parenting with an Ex details mindful solutions to tricky divorced-parenting situations.
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