Spirit in Action

Purple Peace Wagon - War and Peace Talk Between Parents and Kids - Judith Myers-Walls

Purple Wagon is the site of Perdue Professor Emerita of Child Development & Family Studies, Judith Myers-Walls. In 1989 she began research and applications around parent/child communication about war & peace, a passion that comes out of her background with the Church of the Brethren, one of the traditional peace churches

Broadcast on:: 30 Oct 2011
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Judith Myers-Walls joins us today for Spirit in Action. I met Judy about two weeks ago while visiting Lafayette, Indiana Home of Purdue University, where Judy is Professor Emerita. Her decades of study and application of how kids and parents communicate about war and peace struck me as vital info for my spirit and action listeners across the country. So here she is, Judith Myers-Walls, two weeks ago, when I did not have a cold and did have my normal voice. Judy, it's wonderful to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Thank you. It's good to be here. We're here in Lafayette, Indiana. Have you been working here along with Purdue? Is this the origin of your work? I did my graduate work here at Purdue, and I was a professor for 31 years here, so I've been in the community for quite a while, and this is where I started the work with war and peace and children and parents, but a lot of it is really was planted much earlier in my life with growing up in a pacifist family and in a church that was a traditional peace church, and all of that kind of planted some seeds that came to fruition and grew while I was a professional. I know that the big explosion of public awareness of your work happened around 911. The Twin Towers went down. I think you saw it that morning, and you said, "Okay, it's time to let this flower open fully." Well, actually, the first real awareness of the fact that children were impacted by war and peace, I think came with the first Gulf War, and that's when I started doing a lot of the work, started interviewing children, really started getting some attention, but when the Twin Towers were hit, I was watching it at home, and I thought, "I need to send out some information." I had often sent out news releases to colleagues when events happened in the news that I knew children would respond to, but it might be hard to explain it, things like Columbine High School and so on. So I sent out actually the same news release that I sent out after Columbine and said, "This is temporary. I'll send out something else later today." My colleagues in the outreach, the news department said, "We want to create a website." And I spent all day then working on a website with them, and we got it up before drive time. So it was a lot of work, but it got a lot of attention. There were 6,000 visitors the next day. And what was the message that you so urgently had to get out them, the resources that you had to share with the world? The primary message was that you may think kids aren't paying attention, but they are hearing it because it's all around. And often they are misunderstanding what they've heard. It's important to help them understand things in a realistic way without giving them a lecture. But listen, recognize they're there, and let them know that you are there with them and you'll support them. What I found out in earlier research is that parents assume that the major reaction of children at times like that is fear, and it is an important reaction. But parents tended not to recognize the fact that children were also angry and sad. Parents often didn't respond to that. They, however, were more likely to say the kids are responding with patriotism and increased pride in the US. I've never heard a child say that. So how do you know this? What's the mechanism that you've got for discerning what these kids know? Kids are kind of famous, I think, sometimes for saying, "Well, I don't know," or whatever. In our research, we got a lot of, "I don't know," especially with the youngest kids. But what we did, first I interviewed parents back in 1989 and asked them how they talked to their children about war and peace, to try to get a sense of how they introduced that topic in their children's lives and what kinds of messages they were trying to get across. Then, with the first Gulf War in '91, we started also interviewing children. Now, this involves starting with drawings. So what we did was we were going to take a picture and markers and say, "draw a picture of war and a picture of peace." The goal was really just to get them started and get them thinking about it, but we realized that those pictures themselves were telling us a lot and were a great entree into the topic, so we could say, "Tell us what's happening here and what are these people feeling and what are they doing." And that gave us much more idea of what they're thinking and what we're talking about, and then we would have questionnaires for the parents. More recently, we have interviews with the parents. On both sides, we're saying, "What is war and what is peace? What are you telling your children? What have your parents told you?" We're really trying to get at the concept, not trying to look at trauma, although we pick up some of those issues as we go on, but we're really trying to get at what do they think war is and what do they think peace is? And so, what do they think war is and what do they think peace is? And in here, I hope you'll toss in the origins of Purple Wagon. Okay. Yes, we have talked to children as young as three. Now, many of those children know very little, and some of those interviews have been very short. Probably the youngest child we talked to was one week over three. We asked him, "What is peace?" and his drawing was just kind of blue. I think he said something about water at some point, but he really didn't understand much. When we asked what is war, he said, "Throw it in the trash with other things we don't like." And he had something involving guns. I can't remember if he acted it out or if he said something about guns. Now, his father did civil war reenactments, so that's probably partly why he knew what he knew. But then when we get to a little older, we've had preschoolers say, "Peace is a rabbit, and if it's winter in peace, you'll have to wear a sweater or you'll be cold." So they connect it with something else they know, but we had one little girl who said, "Peace is a wagon, a purple wagon that someone pulls." We really liked that imagery, so we used that as the title for the website. Originally, it was called Children in Terrorism on 9/11. But then in the next few years, as I started expanding and building on it, we renamed it Purple Wagon to be broader than just the terrorism issue. So they think a number of things about war. War tends to be very concrete. They talk about actions. Parents, when they talk about war, use more action words and use more words than when they describe peace. Children are somewhat more likely to know war than peace. If they don't know one, it's more likely to be peace. However, some kids, when we ask about peace first, then we get to war. They say, "Oh, now I know what peace is," and we'll go back and explain it. That has been an interesting outcome for us. One of the things that we discovered when we looked at our answers, this is all qualitative research, not giving them any other information, just asking them what they think, and then we look at their answers. What we found was that when we asked war first, they gave more complete answers for both war and peace. As a pacifist, I wanted to believe that starting with peace first was good to get them on that track and to focus on those issues rather than saying that peace had to be compared to war. A lot of research does say they learn about war first. We think they're learning about both, but if we ask about war first, I think what it does, several things. One is that it is more concrete, it's easier for them to talk about, and then when they talk about peace they can contrast it. It also may feel less happy or less appropriate to expand on war after they've already talked about peace. It may be that in order to understand peace you do need to understand war. It's maybe a little bit like in order to understand light you need to understand dark and so on. It does provide a contrast, and we found that parents could either give a negative definition of peace, which is the most common thing we get from the parents, which is saying peace is when there is no war or when people are not fighting, and they talk more about what they're not doing than what they are doing, but we found that some parents also did what we called a negative description with replacement. And we said it's when you don't do this, you do this instead, and we're thinking that may be the most complete answer. So you're looking at both war and peace, and we find that children will make definitions that include both war and peace, which makes us think they're learning both at the same time. The thing I'm most curious about is if we don't pay attention to this, if we don't help kids verbalize their feelings, if we don't open up to them about war and peace, are there negative consequences? Now, this may not be what your studies are about, but I'm sure you must be aware of the studies that say that something happens. So a person's around stress, they're around emergencies, they're around war. What happens to kids? Why is this important to know how to handle it? Now, one of my concerns is that we need to make sure that parents are prepared to talk to their children because parents are really the first responders when it comes to dealing with these big events. They're the most important responders, and if they don't keep that dialogue open, several things can happen. One is misunderstandings. Those misunderstandings may sometimes lead to unnecessary fears or concerns on the child's part, or they may not realize that the child needs to work some things through. For some examples of misunderstandings, I had a colleague who was driving across the river here in Lafayette about a week after 9/11, and her five-year-old son saw some boaters on the river and asked if the boaters died. His mother was thinking, "What is he talking about?" They had to talk about this for a few minutes before she realized that he didn't know the word hijacker, but he knew the word kayaker, and he thought there were kayakers involved in 9/11. So that's an unnecessary confusion that may make him afraid of kayakers or whatever. There were several things like that that we heard from children. We heard children being concerned that the war would come here. Now, that is something that I think gives me mixed feelings because we do want to reassure children that the war is far away, but one thing I found is that most children don't say, "Because of that, I don't need to worry about it." And with the first Gulf War, we spend a lot of time reassuring children, "It's very far away you don't need to worry." But they were not only worried. They were also angry and sad because children were losing their parents and parents were losing their children and buildings were being knocked down. And they care about other people that they don't know. And that was very clear in most of the interviews we had with children. I was concerned when I heard from one child during the first Gulf War who said, "I don't care if there's a war as long as it doesn't affect me and my family." And I'm afraid that that might have come out of our desire to reassure all the children, "Don't worry, it's far away." So those misunderstandings and that sense of being heard is important. Another thing that happens, and this is part of the process of talking to kids or not, children in the immediate time after an event like this, when both the parents and the kids are upset, there are a lot of things going on, they don't know what's happening and they're concerned, children first want to get back to normal. They want their routine, they still want to have their teddy bear, they still want to sleep in their own bed, they want to know if we're still having macaroni and cheese for supper or whatever. Parents look at that, especially if they're saying, "I don't know how to talk to my kid about this," they may look at that and say, "Oh, good. My child didn't notice, so I don't need to talk about it." Well, kids then, after they've normalized things, get ready to talk about it later. They've got a different rhythm in dealing with those issues. When they're ready to talk, and they start to try to talk to the parents, and the parents aren't talking back about it and act like they don't know, then the kids start saying, "Okay, this is taboo, I'm not supposed to talk about this," and you get something I've called the cycle of silence. Neither side talking to the other, so you don't know what misunderstandings your children have. The children don't know if you can talk back, if you can answer any of their questions, or if it's okay to ask those questions. That then means that there are lots of opportunities that are missed for parents to pass on their values and their strategies and their support. I think one of the things that I found when looking at families from peace churches and other activist groups, if parents talk to their kids, they're giving them words and they're giving them strategies, we found a real difference between those kids who came from a family that did talk about these issues and brought them up. It doesn't make them more afraid, it makes them more confident because you're teaching them alternatives. Kids who have, who come from peace churches or come from activist families, when you ask, "Is there something else they could do besides war?" have more ideas. They talk about, "Yes, they can cooperate, they can share, they can talk to each other, they can use their words." They have ideas of what else can happen, so it doesn't feel so inevitable or so overwhelming. They know the actions of peace, not just that it's a state or a condition or something that might happen to you. And that's another reason why parents need to talk, give children some words to express their feelings and give them some strategies to use to make sure that these terrible things don't happen again. Judy, both you and I come from peace churches. I'm Quaker and you're part of Church of the Brother. I think for us, we tend to make a lot of assumptions. I think maybe we've been exposed to a lot more knowledge about war and peace type issues than perhaps the mainstream. I still don't know if we have the quantitative evidence out there to say that if kids are raised without this knowledge, if the issue is not talked about, that's something really bad happens. Do they turn into mass murderers? Do they tend to be uninvolved, non-democratic? Do they tend to withdraw into shells? What are the really negative things about not dealing with the consequences down the road besides simple ignorance that are so important? I don't know if we can really say that because you'd have to do an experiment that would involve putting children in other people's families perhaps. So it's hard to say there are some children who seem to have the natural ability to be nurturers and to look at other options, whether they hear it from their parents or not. That's something we can't ignore, that there is a natural tendency. And I think I've found that in children that almost every child we've talked to has said that war is bad and peace is good. When they get to be the teenage years, then some of them start qualifying it because they learn to think in a different way. It's a different level of abstract thinking, but also I think they start picking up more messages from adults. We need to not unlearn everything they know as children, which is that you're not supposed to hit people and you're supposed to be kind, which is what we teach them, but then we give them next messages when we talk about war and aggression and using military responses to conflicts. But I think some of those children who don't get those strategies will not necessarily turn into mass murders, but they may be more afraid. As I said, I think we picked up some evidence that getting more strategies, getting more education, learning more about what to do besides hitting and responding with heavy duty force when someone is looking like they're threatening to you. Then you have children who have those tools and they're better able to respond. The others may be feeling like I don't know what to do in these situations, and so we've got to be strong. And children's cartoons support that. There is some research that has shown that there's kind of a strategy of war cartoons with children's programming. Everything starts out peaceful. Everything's going fine. And then all of a sudden the bad guy attacks, all out of greed or out of meanness, and they need to bring in the good guy because the only thing that this bad guy will understand is force. So you bring in the good guy, and there's a struggle, and it looks like one or the other might win, and then in the end the good guy wins, but the bad guy escapes. That means that the world is, well, that means that the cartoon can bring that character back, but that means the world must be full of escaped bad guys. And it's very interesting to look back at the first Gulf War and see how closely it fit that whole model of everything that's going along fine until all of a sudden the bad guy attacks, and we had to respond with force because that's the only thing he would understand, but then in the last minute he escaped. So we need to look at what children are not only hearing from us, but what they're getting for entertainment and what other messages they're getting from other places so that they feel hopeful so that they don't feel like force is the only way to respond to something you're unhappy with. I saw a dramatic presentation, Walter Wink did. He showed us a cartoon. It was a Popeye cartoon, and it showed us that pattern happening, and we've got Wiley Coyote, or we've got Popeye or a thousand other good guys, bad guys in cartoons that are teaching kids this message. I guess you and I accept that that's not a valid representation of what the world really is like. We need to make sure that we're showing that there are other examples of ways to do this, and that success needs to be defined a little bit differently. It's not just suppressing the bad guy. It's bringing everyone up together and giving everyone an opportunity to flourish. That means we need to share. That means we need to compromise. That means we need to bring all of our assets together and build something new. Things are not only torn down. They're also built up. How can we help children to build things up? If you just tuned in, we're speaking with Judith Myers-Walls. She's a professor emerita at Purdue University. A specialty in child development and family studies, and her special gift to the subject is to look at war and peace, and children's reactions, adults, how this works within our families. When we talk about or don't talk about these issues. Certainly came to the front dramatically during 911. Having built on already the Gulf War and Kosovo, all of these other places, we've had plenty of wars to watch in the last couple of decades that you could learn from. One of the things that I find interesting is that somehow I have this opinion that kids in other countries are less traumatized by war than we normally think of our kids being. We normally think of our kids being traumatized. In Vietnam, kids grew up in the midst of war in Germany and so on. In the U.S. we haven't had that experience. Is there a qualitative difference between how American children react to violence and stress and threats all around them, and how kids in other countries react? We were able to look at some of that after the Kosovo crisis or during the Kosovo crisis. We had data from kids here in the U.S. and data from Belgrade that were collected at the same time that really showed some of the differences. I think we found before 911 anyway, kids here would talk about war as hypothetical, kind of in a distant way. So they would talk about peace as when everyone is sharing and they're kind and they're getting along and they would often compare war and peace to some of their personal friendships and arguments with friends and so on. Kids in Belgrade talked about war as when you couldn't go to school, your parents couldn't go to work. They talked much more about the disruption of everyday life. The kids in this country didn't understand. They talked about listening to the sirens. We had one child in Belgrade say, "In war, birds sing sadly." Which was a fascinating comment. I had a psychologist say that there is a difference in your senses and the way you hear and taste and see things when you're traumatized. And that may have been partly what they heard, but children see and hear things that we don't notice. So they talked about the sirens. They often imitated the sirens when they were interviewed. They talked about having to spend their birthdays in a bomb shelter. They did know the everyday impacts of war. They talked about the cinema being hit by bombs. They responded very differently in what children can do. There tended to be several different groups in Belgrade. Some children felt disempowered and said, "No, there's nothing we can do about war and peace because we're just kids and we can't sign a treaty." Other kids said, "What we can do to make peace is to be quiet and obey our parents." That is somewhat a function of the language because the word that was used to translate for peace in Serbian is also a command that parents give their kids peace, settle down, that sort of thing. But then there were other kids who responded in kind of a retaliatory way saying, "If you see an American, attach the locator to them and then the bomb will fall on them." That's really sad that that kind of thing happens. But then there were other kids who said, "What we can do is we can make signs and hold them up so the TV cameras see them and we can stand on the bridges so that they won't bomb because they'll see that there are people here." So they were taking much more of an empowered stance. We see some of those same reactions here, but much less. Now, after 9/11, we started hearing parents and children sounding a little bit more like those kids in Belgrade, sounding a little bit more like using their first person saying it's when we, when I, and not just when they and when people and someone else in another part of the world. For children who are actually in the war zones, they are noticing that it's not just something that happens, it's not just something from the history books. It is happening here and it is impacting how we live our daily lives. We are worried about our parents, we're worried about the parents who are in the military, we're worried about our cinema, we're worried about our school, and we hear the animals doing things differently. That's the big difference that I've noticed and I think that sense of personal impact can lead to this sense of needing to retaliate and hatred, or it can lead to taking it all very seriously and saying we need to build peace because we've seen what the alternative is. One of the things that you said, Judy, is the importance of both listening to the kid, comforting, making sure that they're kept in the loop in a comforting way. I think about the movie "Life is Beautiful" and, you know, it's taking place in Italy and the father and his son end up in this prison camp and the father turns it into a game to keep his young son from doing that. And they can win a tank, right? I don't want to give away the end of the story, but it's both so touching and beautiful, the love of this father for his son and the incredible efforts and the weight that the father takes upon himself. And the son believes it's all a big game. He's successfully kept in that point of view until the very end when his father dies, but he rides in, it makes me want to cry just to think of that story. Did that father do right or did he do wrong? He was protecting his son from the knowledge. He was actually giving him a falsehood to help make it more manageable. I tend to see that as a great gift that that father gave. And I'm sure a lot of parents, when they're not talking to war and threat and terrorism to their kids, they're thinking they're shielding them. In the movie, I think that father was giving us great a gift as he could give, but what I hear you saying is that maybe that's not the gift we want to give to our kids. We need to give them a different gift. And I wonder if in today's environment with media around us and as pervasive as it is, we hear almost before something has happened. We hear it immediately. We see photos, pictures, movies. I think it may be difficult to do that. And I think what you have to decide is there are two sides. There's protection and there is preparation. People have looked at those two elements. And in general, activists, people who are trying to help give their child tools to make a difference tend to fall more on the preparation end. That they want to give their child the tools to deal with whatever the event is. And then on the other side are people who are trying to protect their children. I think probably the extremes of either of those approaches can be difficult for children. If you expect the children to be able to cope with it and put all the weight on their shoulders, that may be overwhelming to children. But if you try to protect them from everything, then what you may be doing is that cycle of silence. And you may be implying that it's not okay to talk about this. And you're saying something I see is happening is not happening. So I don't know how to respond to that. We need to make sure that what we're doing is checking their understanding. I don't think you should sit down with your child and say, "Okay, a war started today. Let me tell you all about it." Many children will not understand it. Most of them don't want to sit down and have a lecture. You can't have one talk with sex either. It's not going to be one talk, but it might be best to say something happened today. And a lot of people are talking about it and maybe give some of the basics and say, "Have you heard anything about that? What do you think? Do you want to talk about it?" If they say no, then you can say, "Well, if you want to, let me know. I'm here." And maybe at some point, if you think that they're ignoring it or that something seems to be going on, you see their play changing, it may be appropriate to sit down and say, "Let's talk about this a little bit. I think you're a little confused or I'm worried about it and I want to share what I'm concerned about or what my ideas are." If you don't talk about it and you don't talk about your reactions, you again are missing a real opportunity for the child to learn something. If you give the impression that only children are upset, that you're not upset, that may be a bad message to give the kids, that only children are upset. I know there are people who say never show emotion, never show you're afraid in front of your child. You don't want to totally fall apart in front of your child. You don't want to act like you want the child to take care of you. You don't want to make the child feel like you've lost control, but I think it's very important or very appropriate for you to say, "I'm worried or I'm sad or I'm frustrated because I wish they wouldn't do things this way or I really wish we could be friends." It's okay to say those things. If you're sad, if you are angry, then tell your child how you deal with it so that you can teach some strategies that the child can use. I'm planning to write a letter. Do you want to help me write that letter or I like to take a walk and I think we should turn off the TV because I think all we're doing is thinking about that right now. We need to remember there's a world out there. Let's go take a walk. That gives the child some strategies to use when things are overwhelming or when you're sad or angry. If you are confused, then you and the child can sit down and look some things up or try to find some answers. This will depend a lot on the age of the child clearly and you need to know what your child understands, but the best way to know that is by sitting down and talking with the child and saying, "What do you think is happening?" Maybe sit down with puppets or with blocks or with books, with drawings and have the child draw a picture of what he or she thinks is going on or if the child spontaneously draws a picture that looks like something. You may want to sit down and say, "Tell me about your picture and what are the people doing and how are they feeling and what do you think they're going to do next?" Now let's draw another picture. Let's draw a happy picture this time. Something that allows the child to work through some of those feelings and check some misunderstandings or understandings. You're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet for this Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org. On the site you'll find our archives the last six years. You'll find links to our guests, like our guest today, Judith Myers-Walls. And you'll find her website, for instance. If you just go searching on Google for Purple Wagon, you'll find her pretty quick. But she'll give you great resources on that website, which is of course connected with Purdue, where she's a professor emerita in child development and family studies. But also on our site you'll have a place to leave comments and we really appreciate the two-way dialogue. So please drop us a comment. Again, the website is northernspiritradio.org. We're speaking with Judith Myers-Walls. Judith, you were just speaking about the kinds of things you do with the kids to help them get them expressed. How you get the communication going better. So if they do sit down and say do a drawing or in some way put it down on paper, how do you interpret that? How do you get the meaning out of that? Because don't you have to be a psychologist to do that? Well, there is kind of an interpretive level. We don't do that. What we're doing is looking at what they are drawing. And there are studies that show that even toddlers know what they're trying to draw. It may not look like it, but at a very early age they know what they're trying to draw. So you might be able to ask that kids tell me about your picture, which is a great opening. That is very broad and that will give you a sense of what's going on. We had a child who was drawing a picture after the first Gulf War. We asked what was happening. There was a great big rocket and a small person and red. They always need red to draw war. They need blood color, they say. But in this picture, it looks like he felt very small and vulnerable to these rockets. In another picture, I think the same child drew a picture of an airplane and a big boulder. Now, when we asked him about that, that was a plane flying into Iraq. Iraq or Iraq. There's a good example of why we need to talk to our kids. Let them draw pictures so that we can start seeing their misunderstandings. Again, when you talk about what they're hearing and what's going on, we had a child during the Gulf War. We asked him why they were fighting. And he had been to a number of demonstrations against the war. And he said, because some people wanted to use other people's blood for oil, the chant was no blood for oil. Obviously, he didn't understand exactly what that meant. So using creative methods like drawings, using play, listening to what they say, asking some questions without making it sound like it's a test. And you're going to tell them whether they're right or wrong. Just ask them what they think. And that may help you clear up some misunderstandings that kids may have. Kids after 9/11 tended to build a lot of towers and knock them over. That's fine. That helps them think about what's going on. But I would suggest you don't just let that happen. Sit with the child and then build them back up again so that it's not just a destruction. It's also a rebuilding, which helps with a sense of hope, helps them think about what could happen next. We can build something new after something has been destroyed. Judy, is there a qualitative difference between children raised in peace families, that is to say, like peace churches, Quakers, brethren, Mennonites, et cetera, other activist kids? Is there a difference between those kids and the kids of other families who are perhaps maybe not getting the same information? And does this affect their development in really significant ways? We found that kids from a peace background were more likely to say they've talked to their parents about those issues. They were less likely to not know the answers to the questions we were asking them. They knew more, they had more words to explain it. They were more likely to talk about alternatives to war to solve problems. They had more creative suggestions for what can be done peacefully and tended to be more action oriented with peace and not just to talk about it as a feeling or a condition when you just have a void because war isn't there. It gave them, I think, much more empowerment to understand and do something about war. Parents were more likely to say they've talked to their kids about it and used more action words. We found some interesting differences between girls and boys. However, the group as a whole, we found that fathers who were talking about a daughter and how they would talk about war and peace tended to use more emotion words for peace than action words. I think it's because they expected their daughters to need that. Mothers who were saying they were going to talk to their son about it used a lot more action words for peace, probably because they expected their sons to be more actors and not just feeling and dealing with emotion. So you might want to make sure that you're balancing those when you're talking to both your sons and your daughters. What do you think of the idea of war toys positive or negative? I want to share up front one of the stories of a woman who was part of Milwaukee Quaker meeting. She had forbidden her kids to have war toys and so they kind of pimped her, I guess, a little bit. They would get like a hose or something like that and they would go with her watching. And so they're doing this for her benefit too. They're saying, "Squirt, squirt, you're wet because she wouldn't let them play your dad kind of things. Is this good or bad? Do children need war toys, war play to be able to cope with the fears related to war?" Children need active play. They need play that gives them a sense of power and control. They need excitement in their play. I've written a couple or co-written a couple of books, the Young Peacemakers Project book and Peace Works. And in there we give children that idea of thinking first, "What is it that kids like about war play?" And I think it is that strategizing, it's the activity level, it's the sense of power, it's working with groups that are trying to overcome something. And then we say, "How can you take those same characteristics and play in different ways that people don't have to get hurt in?" So we talk about being firefighters, we talk about being space explorers, we talk about other things that will give them that idea of taking away a gun from a child and saying sit down and read a book doesn't replace the same needs for that kind of play. When a child makes a gun out of whatever, and they will, they'll make guns out of legos, out of sticks, out of bananas, whatever, I think it's better for them to be doing that with another toy or another item. Because then what you can say is, "What else could it be?" and let the child make the transformation. If they are commercial war toys, they tend to be bad toys because they can be played with in only one way in most cases, and they can be dangerous because they're about aggression. So children tend to play with them very aggressively. My suggestion is not to have any formal war toys. They've gotten people in trouble with police thinking that they're real guns. I mean, they're all kinds of stories we've all heard. They're not good toys, but good toys can be played with lots of different ways. So if children make something into a gun, which Mr. Rogers said is tied into their need to influence something beyond the end of their arm, well, what else can you use that would influence something beyond the end of your arm? A flashlight, a remote control, a pretend magic wand, a squirt gun? Hopefully it won't be a gun. Hopefully it'll be a spray bottle, something that will allow them to influence something beyond the end of your arm. I know with my son, when he would be pretending to shoot, I said, "What else can you do? Can you be a firefighter?" They can still make the noise, and as those kids discovered, it influences something beyond the end of your arm. Squirt, squirt, you're wet, and they wouldn't probably say squirt, squirt, they'd probably go, "Shh," which is a sound that you can make that influences someone else. So it's important to be able to feel powerful in that way and to feel like you can influence something. Hopefully it's not always the remote control, which gives the same sense of power but can really upset everybody else in the family if you're changing the channels when they don't want you to. But something that allows them to have that influence is a very positive thing for children who often feel disempowered or feel very small, and that allows them to get that feeling without feeling like you need to hurt somebody else in order to get it. The need to talk about war and peace certainly preceded 9/11 and certainly First Gulf War has been going on as long as we've been around. One time when I've been aware of the need to address childhood fears, the understandings about it, was when we were so worried, particularly in the early 80s, about the advent of nuclear war. And you can go back 30 years before that and the kids who grew up in the 50s with duck and cover and hide under your desk to protect you from nuclear war. There's been so many generations that grew up with that. Are the techniques you're talking about, the procedures, the way of dealing with and talking with kids about this kind of things, does it apply to all fields of stress or should it be differently if you're talking about the threat of nuclear war? It's interesting that there was a lot of research in the 80s about nuclear war and children's fears of nuclear war. One of the interesting findings from that research was that children who felt that it was likely that there would be nuclear war, if they also felt like they had some strategies to do something about it, didn't feel the despair. It's those who kind of thought it might happen but didn't have any tools and had never talked to anyone about it, who were more fearful. So I think, again, giving kids tools is very important. Now, I've applied a lot of this also to natural disasters and to Katrina and to earthquakes and so on, that the same kinds of things occur. If children and parents are traumatized at the same time, first of all, parents need to get themselves under control and need to find support and need to feel like they're having their needs met. Someone needs to be there with the child to provide support. What they found in a number of studies in different places, especially war zones, is that peacemakers can come out of those settings if the child feels that there is a good, strong attachment figure there for them. That they feel that they've got support and securities from somewhere and that that person is modeling peaceful ways of solving problems and that the child then is enabled to enact some of those methods. That is how you can take a child who is in a terrible situation and still get a peacemaker coming out of it. I think that really gives us some real hope. Have a strong attachment figure. If the parents are not available or are too traumatized, there can be someone else there who can fill that role to be a support to the child and to model and allow the child to practice peacemaking methods and you'll have a different outcome. Now it's interesting that nuclear war has kind of gone off of the screen. We obviously don't have that threat anymore. We don't have that threat in our minds anymore. It's still there, but it's not going to be impacting children in the same way that it did in the 80s and many children were very distracted by that. Hopefully we are building this sense that we do have things that we can do. We still need to be building those, that empowerment in our children so that they can deal with whatever the threat is that we're facing at that moment. If I can toss in a recommendation for a good movie, I hope it's out on DVD. I hope it wasn't lost in the transition from VHS DVD. Amazing Grace and Chuck is quite an amazing story and it's such an empowerment message to kids. It carries the threat. I mean, you're not ignoring the danger, but it gives you something to do about it in such a heartwarming story. So in addition to life is beautiful. We've got Amazing Grace and Chuck and maybe you have another movie that people should be looking at to get an idea of different ways of responding to the threat of war and peace and how we deal with kids about it. There are a number of books available from new society publishers. I would encourage people to look up some of their books. There was a novel for young adults teens called an outbreak of peace which was during the nuclear threat and it talks about kids dealing with these issues and becoming advocates for peace and feeling empowered to do that. So I think there are some good places out there to find those kinds of stories that then you can share with the kids that I think helps to reduce their fears and also gives them something more concrete to talk about. Talking about a story is easier than just talking about their feelings. I'm pretty sure if you go to Judy's website, you'll find that. Follow the link from nordenspiritradio.org to the Purple Wagon website and there you'll find excellent resources. Frequently asked questions, you'll find stuff for parents and for other experts and researchers, you'll find all of it on this website. Purple Wagon is the code word and you'll find it under Purdue website. So Judy, is the responsibility for doing this? Is it always squarely the parents? Should they have a plan ahead of time? Is that what we need to do in order to get this communication going? I think we need to realize that it's going to unfold and it's going to change as the child grows and has different understanding levels. So you may have talked to kids after 9/11 or after the Afghanistan War, something particular happened or after the death of Osama bin Laden, but they may need to think about it again as they grow in their thinking changes. So keep the communication going both directions, but also listen to what the kids say. They have some really fascinating insights at times. One of the questions we ask the children when we talk about or in peace, we ask how peace starts. Now one of the answers we'll get from several of the kids, especially some of the younger kids who are learning to write, is peace starts with a P. So I guess it's a little obvious and they're so proud of knowing that. Then we ask how does peace end and we had one child say, well it shouldn't have to end if you start it right. So it's one of those challenges we look at and say, okay, how can I handle the wisdom that's coming from a child to me? Listen to them and they will have those ideas to share with you and inspire us all to be a little bit more consistent with what we've taught them. I have a colleague who wrote a chapter for a book I edited on Families as Educators for Global Citizenship. He had a section called In Praise of Naivate. When the kids listen to what we say and take us literally and say, didn't you teach me that recycling is what we're supposed to do? Why are you throwing those things out? Or didn't you tell me that all people are equal and we should love everyone? Why are you walking on the other side of the street when those people come by? They pick up when we're being inconsistent with what we've taught them. Take advantage of their naivate and their childhood wisdom as opposed to grown up wisdom and let it challenge us to be idealistic and to take ourselves seriously and really try to live by the ideals we're trying to teach our children. Well speaking of those ideals, Judy, I'd like to hear a little bit about how where you got to be in this process. Working at least at one point with Cooperative Extension Studies, this is a government function, if you will. And I guess the assumption is that you're not supposed to bring your personal agenda into it. But having been raised in a peace church like Church of the Brother and certainly that weighed with you, how did you get from where you started to being so faithful, I guess, in raising up this concern for talking to kids about peace and war? Well, I did start my work with this government agency under USDA that is nonpartisan and it's supposed to be very balanced, not recommending only one approach, but obviously we do have a value to teach good positive child development strategies and to support basic values for health and human development. So I started keeping that separate and not talking about my background, and then I started getting requests for nonviolent parenting programs and for things that would bring in that background, so I decided to start working with it, started collecting data in that area. I was one of the only people doing that. I and my colleagues, their colleagues in several states now, I think are the only ones who are doing war and peace and children's understanding with a parent perspective. A lot of this has been done since the Second World War, but it was looking only at the children and usually in school settings. So we were providing a unique resource for people to use. Then I also started looking at the parenting strategies that I was teaching. My sister is actually also a professor in this area, and the two of us were looking at the values that are included in parenting programs and came up with several categories of types of parenting approaches, behavior modification and more of a counseling therapeutic approach and a democratic approach, and we named another approach, socially conscious parenting, which is the Parenting for Peace and Justice approach that comes out of St. Louis and the Institute for Peace and Justice, and some other people who had used that kind of approach. And I put all this into a questionnaire, all these different strategies are for students and for professionals who are teaching parenting and saying this is the situation, what would you recommend, and giving an option for each of those approaches. And every time I have used that questionnaire, I would say every time, the majority of people who respond to that questionnaire have more answers in socially conscious parenting than in any of the other categories. It is a comfortable approach for many people. Socially conscious parenting goes beyond just saying I need to get my kid to pick up his room because it's dirty. It's also saying we need to look at the larger context, and we need to also look at the fact that this child may be upset about a friend who's on drugs, not that he's on drugs, and that the reason to pick up your room is because it influences other people in the family, and we also need to look at our purchases and make sure that they are allowing for other people to have their needs met and that we're not buying a lot of things that are made in sweatshops and so on. It's giving a much larger context. Now, when those professionals fill out the questionnaire and most of their answers are in that category, then they sometimes look at some of the books and they say, "Oh, wait a minute, I'm not sure I'm ready for that." So, I don't think they're all truly socially conscious parenting professionals, but they like the ideas behind it. So, we need to not be so apologetic about it and say, "This is a fringe movement and it's not for everybody." In the Church of the Brethren, I've always known that we're in the minority, and I was taught it was okay to be different, and that was good. At the same time, we need to not just pull back and say, "So other people aren't going to like what we're doing." There is an ear out there for what we have to say in teaching, peace, and justice, and in including it in our parenting and family lives. There are ways to do that that people will be responsive to. And do you have to be careful that you somehow avoid the religious, spiritual underpinnings of it, or is that okay to include it? I mean, why should we care about the people of Iraq because they're outside the borders of the USA and God bless America? You know what I'm saying? There's a certain mainstream thought that draws the circle of family with borders that I think both you and I are used to reaching beyond. Actually, that's one of the characteristics I heard a professor from the University for Peace in Costa Rica talk about. The characteristics of peace activists is that they draw their borders for family and for community very large and make them a whole world. But back to your other question about faith and religion. It's an interesting line to walk. I have not talked much about my personal faith and religion, but I try to include when you should talk about yours. So, for example, when I talk about war and peace and how parents should talk to their children, especially when we talk about reassurance, I've also included this for disaster response, that you talk about the fact that you will do everything you can to keep the child safe. Don't worry, I won't let anything bad happen to you. I think that's a real fallacy that a lot of other professionals have recommended. You can't control what's going to happen to your child, and promising that you won't let anything bad happen means that you are going to disappoint your child at some point because there will be bad things that happen. But you can say, no matter what, I will do everything I can to protect you, and my love will always be with you. And it's very appropriate then to follow with what you believe about your faith. God's love will always be with you. Jesus will be with you. Allah will be with you. Whatever it is. I want to be inclusive about the faith, but recognize that faith and spirituality should be part of parenting and shouldn't be only in one particular faith group that you'd say exactly. These things need to be said. Talk about how you can take your faith and put it in what you do with your children to help support their faith growth and to help them again feel hopeful. I feel hopeful just hearing what you've been doing, the studies you've been doing, the way you've been communicating with the world. I'm heartened each time someone reaches out and puts their lives on the line for that, and you've certainly been doing that, Judy. Thank you so much for Purple Wagon. Thank you so much for joining me for Spirit and Action. Thank you very much. It's been a great conversation with you. Our Spirit and Action guest has been Judith Myers-Wall's Professor-America of Purdue University in the area of child development and family studies. With an emphasis in study of communication between parents and kids about war and peace. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit and Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.