A nonviolent method of dealing with terrorism has been adapted as a gentler form of parenting. But does it work?

I was rendered speechless by my four-year-old son recently. At the end of a fraught day he put his arms around my neck and whispered in a consolatory tone: “I still love you Mummy, even though you’re grumpy and you always scream and shout.” Gulp. My maternal guilt-o-meter went off the scale. In my defence, I’m not always grumpy and I don’t mean to scream, but what else can you do when your son throws his shoes at his brother’s head instead of putting them on, as requested, on a frantic Monday morning? There isn’t a baby book with a chapter on that. Believe me, I’ve checked.

That bedtime exchange was enlightening. Things are going to change around here, I promised. Which explains how I came upon Parenting with Nonviolence, an unconventional parenting approach based on principles of Nonviolent Communication (NVC).

NVC is a mediation tool developed in the 1960s by Marshall Rosenberg, a US clinical psychologist and founder of the Centre for Nonviolent Communication. Today, more than 200 trainers teach Rosenberg’s philosophy of mediation in more than 50 countries, including Afghanistan, and there are 15 qualified trainers in the UK.

Long used effectively in warzones around the globe, NVC is now gaining credence with parents looking for ways to handle conflicts that rage closer to home. The emergence of parenting courses based on NVC, and its take-up by British parents, represents something of a backlash by those disenchanted with the more prescriptive approaches of people such as Gina Ford and Supernanny. The advent of footwear as weaponry in our house, and my overreliance on shouting, made me want to know more about a nonviolent parenting philosophy.

Helen Bone runs a group in Bristol that meets every two months to work through the practicalities of parenting with nonviolence. She turned to NVC when her son Sam’s behaviour began to deteriorate, triggered by his asthma.

“He couldn’t verbalise how his asthma made him feel so he shut me out, with lots of kicking and shouting,” she says. “My response — angry, frustrated and upset — was making the problem worse. Through NVC we’ve learnt a different way of communicating and it’s gentler.”

So how does it work? Bone describes a time when she used NVC with her son to prevent a conflict getting worse. “We were at a relative’s house and Sam was playing in the sandpit with a toy lorry, but the rest of the family were going to the park,” she says. “He just lost it because he didn’t want to stop what he was doing. I used to think, ‘I’m the parent, so he’s going to do what I say’, but instead I thought about what his needs were. I realised he just wanted some autonomy. I think that’s important, and what tantrums are about in most cases.”

Bone then turned the spotlight on herself. “What I love about NVC is that it isn’t just about empathising with the child. I need to understand what’s going on for me as well,” she says. “I realised I needed to show my partner’s family that I am a good mother, that I have discipline with my child. I needed him to come to the park because the other grandchildren were going and I thought ‘Wow, this is a really pressured situation, it looks like nothing on the surface but there’s loads going on here’.” She offered to help Sam bury his lorry in the sand if in return he would go to the park. He agreed. “It was yes straight away. We buried the lorry and the whole thing dissipated.”

NVC isn’t simply about not being violent; it’s about dealing peacefully with conflict of any kind — from toddler tantrums to global terrorism — extending to addressing the unspoken feelings and unmet needs that often underlie violence and conflict. NVC regards all behaviour as linked to needs. So a child who refuses to finish his lunch shouldn’t be forced to do so because modifying a child’s behaviour without addressing his needs is considered an oversight, even when the method of “coercion” is nothing more harmful than the promise of dessert.

Instead, NVC encourages parents to engage with their child to seek an outcome in which the parents’ needs and the child’s are met. That might mean accepting that your child has had enough to eat, or together negotiating a few more bites — it doesn’t mean forcing your child to finish his food, or go without pudding as punishment for not complying.

Sarah Ludford, mother to Ella, 20 months, says that NVC has changed her parenting approach and how she copes when she gets it wrong. “I scream and shout sometimes, but NVC helps me to engage more constructively because I’m learning to recognise Ella’s needs and hold them with my own,” she says.

As a result, previously fraught interactions over such things as changing Ella’s nappy or brushing her teeth are mostly a thing of the past. “If I approach her with the toothbrush and hold her down it’s a horrible experience, so we’ve turned it into a game. She runs up to me and puts my toothbrush in my mouth, then I brush her teeth and she runs away again. It might take ten minutes but if I treat her with force, even in minor things, I’m teaching her that violence is an acceptable way to operate in the world. That perpetuates the same old paradigms that create wars and division and racism.”

Daren De Witt is a UK representative of Rosenberg’s Centre for NVC and a qualified trainer. He feels that we treat children’s needs as second-rate, and believes that NVC counters the culture of domination that influences the way we raise them. Respecting children as sentient human beings, he says, lays the foundation for teenagers, who are more likely to relate respectfully to parents.

So what is the appropriate reaction to my son’s “need” to throw his shoes at his brother? De Witt says: “By identifying his underlying need and talking about it rather than just labelling his behaviour wrong or punishing it, you can equip him to recognise his feelings and to articulate his needs more effectively in future.”

NVC is not, though, about refusing to say No to kids. Kitty Hagenbach is a pre and perinatal psychologist and runs Babies Know, a parenting programme that draws on NVC. She feels that failure to hold boundaries for a child can be as much a violation as enforcing them too aggressively. “No is a very important word for children, especially in this age of overly permissive parenting,” she says. “NVC is not about having the children run your life. It is most important that parents remain in charge.”

NVC strikes me as a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” approach to parenting. But it seems to work. And involves far less screaming and far fewer incidents of shoe-related injury.

Written by: Heidi Scrimgeour www.cnvc.org
The Sunday Times ~ 20 April 2010

NOTE FROM KARIN:
I recommend NVC to my clients. If you would like to purchase the Non Violent Communication Book ‘Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids’ please send me an email: karin@nurturehouse.com.au

Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids ~ was $40 only $25 plus $5 postage and handling.