early childhood – Smart Tools For Life

Nothing gets better until we wage peace.

Fighting in the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul and around the world in the last week from a police killing of a black man, George Floyd indicates the extent of the alienation, anger, and outrage so many of us feel right now. People are exploding with pent up rage from systemic racism, classism, and a host of issues brought about by the pervasive top-down society of which we are a part.

Entrenched entitlement, coupled with habits of supremacy at-all-costs, is encountering the fruits of its oppression of black and brown people.

Can We Change?

Change is never easy. But we must change the habits that are so dangerous to ourselves and others and move on to a time of equality and justice. We can make cultural changes best through the education of children. They can make it a habit to wage peace. There are numerous helpful resources for educating anti-racist and peace-waging children in a recent Huffington Post article.

What does it mean to wage peace?

It’s what you do when you take a caring action, when you stand up — are an “upstander” instead of a bystander. Waging peace is what you do when you educate a kid in conflict transformation or how to find peace in the day. It is taking a tortured or abused animal to the shelter. Waging peace is marching with others to stand up for what is right, and maybe taking your kids along when you march.

Wage peace. That’s what this children’s musical play demonstrates.

It brings a compassionate perspective to the challenging topic of “the other”. If the newcomer is an immigrant or just a new kid in town, kids can choose to bully, or be courageous — and be a friend. Or perhaps the newcomer is a person of another skin color, a kid with a disability, a kid who is economically challenged and doesn’t have “things”. The specifics are important but most important is the habit of compassion and empathy that is developed when children are very young.

The book itself is on Amazon so get your copy today! if you sign up for our mailing list, we’ll give you a link to a discount product page. Be sure to purchase books in hard and softcover for a friend or for your child to look at while watching this free video.

We are very excited about the video which is our Covid-19 version of a book release party! Julia Amundson, Director, and a team of theater students (Alex Feia, Alli Christner, Bridget Foy, Guled Badri, Madeline Jacobs, Natalie Amundson, Tony Farrar, Vaerna Mayer) created this play using music written by Julie Penshorn. It was performed uniquely by each “animal” actor. Julia did a wonderful job of gathering free music to augment certain singers and the “Sleepy dog” poem. Thanks all for your hard and timely work, all while being Covid-19-safe!

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

—Elie Wiesel, Acceptance Speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1986

There are three keys to children’s mental health:

Seeing, being, and waging peace. Children’s mental health predicts the future of a society, of planetary conflict, and ultimately of life on the planet, so these are important!

The first ingredient for us all is seeing peace. We need to be able to imagine a better tomorrow and find peace in our daily lives through gratitude and a connection with nature and others.
Then, we need to demonstrate care for ourselves and others, and in so doing, we are being peace. Working out our problems peacefully and respectfully with each other demonstrates being peace and provides a lifelong tradition for our children who will ultimately be our world leaders.
Finally, waging peace helps us all to surmount difficult times, including those that tend to force us to focus inward, on our own misery. By finding something to be “FOR,” someone to help, some cause to support, something to create a better home, community, neighborhood, and/or world, we are waging peace.

Seeing Peace — Activities for Teaching the Concept

Seeing peace begins with simple observations of the world around us and enjoying time together creates a tradition of joy, respect for nature, and appreciation. For example, in one square foot of grass, a child can find at least ten magic, wonderful, creepy, crawling, manifestations of the earth’s remarkable creations!

Covid-19 isolation, a time to see peace in nature. This picture is from “I Can See Peace,” a children’s book guiding children in this skill and lifestyle. Find it here: http://bit.ly/smile4PEACE

Some simple ideas to get started.

Lie on the ground with your kids and study what’s in front of you! How many things can you find in one square foot?
Watch a sunset or sunrise together. Breathe deeply. See peace.
Check the new growth on the trees and bushes around your house or in the park. Watch the magic of spring birth and growth in the garden and on the trees. Marvel together. See peace.
Watch the raindrops on the window, or on a warm day with soft gentle rain, go out and feel it on your skin. Get drenched. See peace!
Sing together as you take a walk. How about, “You Are My Sunshine”? Music brings so much joy. It’s a wonderful way to see peace.

After Stopping to See Peace, and Breathing to Be Peace, It’s Time to Wage it!

Jack Doepke and Julie Penshorn sing “I Can See I Can Be I Can Wage Peace” by Julie Penshorn

Much of success in business depends on our ability to get along with others.

Social and emotional skills (SEL) are learned when kids do their own conflict resolution, perhaps better termed “conflict transformation”. Conflict transformation includes the reality that often conflict resolution is imposed from a more powerful country or individual (such as a teacher or parent) and in being top-down it misses something important and results in imperfect resolutions. Conflict transformation implies that people work to a solution that can actually help them move beyond the current anger and hostility to a much greater relationship as they have come to a deeper understanding and are ready and able to move beyond where they started.

Waging peace goes beyond typical mental health approaches for children.

It gives children something to be “for” rather than spending all their energies focusing on all the challenges they face. It fits under the umbrella of SEL (social and emotional learning) beautifully but goes beyond. Instead of just seeking skills for getting along, it positions kids to build a purposeful future, as they seek peace, through generosity, positive action, and mindfulness as a way of life.

This is a time to take stock of practices and policies, habits, and attitudes and really ask: who and what am I supporting by my actions? How can I be a role model for a child and wage peace today?

My friend Sam, was an ADHD student going through elementary school in the 60s. He had a miserable experience. The structure of a sit-down classroom was impossible for him, and soon he felt isolated and alone. He was sure that no one cared about him, that he belonged alone in the hall, and that school was a place to be hurt, embarrassed, and maligned. And he didn’t learn a thing. By 8^th grade he was so lost and behind that there was no catching up.

Dropping out early impacted Sam’s entire life. He couldn’t hold a job and had terribly low confidence. His defensiveness resulted in explosive, even violent outbursts. Sam’s life was forever impacted by the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) he encountered. After he succumbed to the lure of drugs, he couldn’t hold a job, and ultimately ended up incarcerated for larceny. Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa, provides extensive additional reading on this topic. We highly recommend it!

There are many classrooms and families where Sam would not thrive. If children’s learning styles are not the same as the teacher’s or the parents’ it can be difficult for all. And since Sam has some adverse early childhood experiences such as I describe here (this topic, including what constitutes an adverse childhood experience, will be addressed more thoroughly in subsequent blogs), it becomes even more challenging for him.

Honoring diverse approaches to learning is a critical ability of a parent and/or a teacher

Yes, ACE training is now being provided more often for educators. Instead of harsh discipline, we are learning we must draw in closer to our children and follow their lead. We need to demonstrate love and care for the unique person each child is. By honoring each child’s unique needs and diverse learning styles we can make those critical connections that provide a different outcome from what happened in Sam’s story. If Sam’s teachers had known his family story of neglect, and how vulnerable he was in 3rd grade, after numerous moves from town to town, and the murder of his father, how might Sam’s life and the lives of those he touched, have been changed?

Julie Penshorn, MBC (left) and Rebecca Janke, M.Ed.

Two parents and teachers working to be the best we can be.

This is where Smart Tools for Life comes in. We provide smart tools for classrooms and homes for today’s children!

Hi, my name is Julie Penshorn. I am the author of the Smart Tools for Life children’s books on this site, with content editor and co-author, Rebecca Janke, who blogs at Children’s Peace Education Company (coming soon!). We’ve been working together over the years since 1992 with the nonprofit organization, Growing Communities for Peace.

Developing as a Teacher or Parent Educator

Though I didn’t have any ACEs growing up, I was, and still am an active learner. I evolved into an intense, driven riding teacher, following in the footsteps of my own teachers. It took some time for me to evolve my teaching toward facilitating. Only after I gained some age and perspective did I figure out that the best way for learning to occur for many of my students was to help them feel, learn, and become aware of an experience, on a deep level. I couldn’t “teach” it or “explain” it. The student had to find it. So, it was the horse that did the teaching, and I found my role as a facilitator and a guide. The capability of the horse was important, since heavy, dull, or lame horses gave bad lessons.

Learning to be an effective facilitator drove me to become a children’s book author. I thought maybe here was an opportunity to engage with the Sams of the world in a different way.

Bumper sticker: Life is Short: Ride a Good Horse! or Life is Short, Read a Good Book!

With limited time for children’s stories in classrooms and in homes, adults need good tools. I felt we needed smart tools for children’s lives, specifically stories and music that could educate them that being a loving, caring, participating, peacemaking person, capable of dialogue when in conflict and working out problems, was “normal.” They needed to become “peace literate.”

Children in a classroom are gathered around a globe to show they value all our Earth’s people and value diversity.

I saw that children were inherently filled with compassion for others and the planet, and that when they were in close connection with their families and teachers they learned better. With the help of Rebecca Janke, I discovered that I could create a unique learning experience for children by using the illustrations and words to bring a “feel” to the children, much like the way I learned to ride.

Stories and music provide the learning in a memorable way, and we can empathize with the animals or other characters in the story, and share their experiences vicariously. When children read our stories, or are read to, they can feel the characters’ pain and angst, their satisfaction, and their successes. They can see that the story has a given outcome because of the choices that were made along the way. The teacher or parent only must facilitate, which is easily done by reading the children’s book!

Children as the leaders in co-creating a culture of peace.

All our current and upcoming children’s books provide some suggestions for extending the learning in the back of the book. They meet state standard curriculum needs, but each book will also stand alone. So, just read them. Again. And again. Read them until the children recite passages from memory. Then it’s deep in their hearts. Then they “feel” it and you know their lives will be changed as they become the leaders in co-creating a culture of peace.

We need each child. No one is a “throw-away.” We need each flower, each butterfly, each bee, each tree, each ocean. Caring for the most maligned, the lonely, the hurt, the sick and the poor, the displaced, and the miserable, is the only way to bring peace to the planet. The way we raise our children has huge consequences — not only for the children — but also for our society! The children need us, as adults, to facilitate their journey into adulthood.

Smart Tools for Life makes teaching peacemaking skills easy for you, even if you’ve not been focusing on this in the past. We need these skills for our children’s future! Worried that you’re not a Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, or Mother Theresa? Don’t worry! We make the road by walking. Let’s journey together!

Tag Archives: early childhood

How to See, Be, and Wage Peace With Kids!