What You Live is What They Learn
An Edited Excerpt from the Introduction to Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids: 7 Keys to Turn Family Conflict into
Co-operation
by Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson
As a parent, of course you want to have influence with your children; you want to pass on values and guide them in ways that will contribute to their happiness and success in life. The question is: How can you have the most influence with your children—by lecturing and taking them to task or by sharing your values and living those values yourself? Read Full Story >

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Support your child’s emotional growth and stay connected to your values even in the most trying situations. Learn to reduce family conflicts and sibling rivalry; move beyond power struggles to cooperation and trust; protect and nurture the autonomy of children; motivate using “power-with” rather than “power-over” strategies; and create a quality of connection with your children that embodies unconditional love.
Includes: Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids, by Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson, Parenting From Your Heart, by Inbal Kashtan, and Raising Children Compassionately by Marshall Rosenberg. No substitions, please, for previous orders of Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids.

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TRAINING — Are You Teaching NVC, or Do You Want to?
This January, Inbal Kashtan and Miki Kashtan will lead BayNVC's 6th annual year-long NVC Leadership Program. The program includes 4 residential retreats plus long distance components. Understand, live, and teach NVC while building a compassionate, passionate and authentic community with others who are deeply committed to personal and societal transformation. Program graduates are sharing NVC around the world. Find more information and an application at www.baynvc.org — Applications are due in October.

WORKSHOP — Creating a Compassionate Classroom One Day at a Time
Jan 12-14, 2007 and also April 13-15, 2007 • Ventura, California
A Kindle-Hart Workshop presented by Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson. This is a 3-day Seminar for Teachers based on The Compassionate Classroom: Relationship Based Teaching and Learning. Develop a step-by-step plan; inspire cooperation and intrinsic learning; teach kids how to resolve their own conflicts.
For more information or to register email Sura at call 805-698-3332 • or email Victoria or phone 805-653-0261

WORKSHOP —7 Keys to
Turn Family Conflict into
Co-operation
Jan 6-7, 2007 • Ventura, California
A Kindle-Hart Workshop presented by Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson. This is a 2-day seminar for parents based on our new book, Respectful Parent, Respectful Kids: 7 Keys to Turn Family Conflict into
Co-operation. Learn to revitalize your parenting skills, improve communication, inspire co-operation and respect, and have more fun with your kids. For more information or to register email Sura at call 805-698-3332 • or email Victoria or phone 805-653-0261

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Key Facts About the NVC Process • The 4-Part NVC Process • Feelings and Needs We All Have • Benefits of NVC

Play Inspiring Video of Marshall Rosenberg Now!
Hear Marshall speak about the impact of the Nonviolent Communication process in transforming world conflicts, creating extraordinary relationships, healing emotional pain, and contributing to lasting peace in this 10-minute video.

What You Live is What They Learn,
continued . . .

It is commonly believed that a parent’s job is to teach and enforce cultural values. Customary methods for doing this include lecturing, advising, making demands, and correcting behavior. This parent-as teacher orientation is, unfortunately, a set-up that creates frustrated parents, irritated children, and conflict all around. At the same time that you are doing your best to teach your kids cultural values, they are doing their best to develop a sense of self-direction and self-respect. All too often they learn to turn a deaf ear to you and your advice. They avoid saying anything that might result in another lecture, admonishment, or ultimatum that reminds them how they are failing to live up to your expectations.

Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids offers a refreshing alternative to managerial parenting. The good news is: you don’t have to figure out how to change your kids’ behavior, and you don’t have to manage anything, in order to end conflicts. The parenting we advocate is in many ways much simpler and more instinctive than this. It is also more effective in meeting the needs of kids and parents, in the short term and, especially, in the long term. It builds on the good feelings you and your children experience at your most connected moments, and it addresses the only behavior you can actually change—your own. The beauty of it is, when you change your behavior, your kids’ behavior will change too. 

Everyone knows that actions speak louder than words. In fact, studies show that only 5 percent of lifelong learning comes from instruction: 95 percent of what we remember comes from family and social interactions. At some level you likely know that your children learn more from what you do than from what you say. You may hear your own voice in the way one sibling talks with another. You may hear your children using the same line of reasoning with you that you use with them. 

Think for a moment about what you learned from your parents. Did you learn the most from, or even listen to half of, what they told you? Or did you learn the most from what you saw them do and how they lived their lives? Many parents tell us that they learned from painful experiences with their parents what they didn’t want to do with their own kids. Whether their modeling was positive or negative, your parents’ actions are a primary motivating force for the way you are parenting and the life you are living now.

Children need parents who live honestly and with commitment to their values. Parents have a chance to be exemplars and model what they want their children to learn and live. This is an invitation and opportunity, and for many it is a powerful incentive to get clear about what has purpose and meaning for them and to do their best to live in harmony with it. 

To live authentically, with clarity about what is important and true for you, is the goal—not perfection. Giving up the ideal of being a perfect parent can be a huge relief. Then, when you blow it and do things that don’t match your values—as you will—you won’t spiral down into self-condemnation but will be able to enjoy the opportunity to be honest with your children and let them learn what honesty looks and sounds around. And because you aren’t expecting perfection from yourself, you will be less likely to expect it from your children.

Build Your Capacity to Create a Loving Home
Your home is where your children learn the most elemental lessons of human life—how to take care of their own needs and how to contribute to taking care of the needs of others. Home is a foundation for your children’s future relationships as spouses, life partners, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, good friends, community members, co-workers, and stewards of the planet. And home is a sanctuary to protect your children so they can learn lessons of caring and contribution at their own developmental pace and with your support, guidance, and respect. 

A loving home is free of fear, which is the source of all conflict. It is a place where children trust that their needs matter and that everyone’s needs—theirs included—will be considered and cared for. They can then relax into the life that calls them forth with such urgency—and find their place in the net of giving and receiving that forms a family, a community, a nation, and a world. 

Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids is primarily about parent-child relationships. The processes and suggestions for improving respect and co-operation apply to all ages of children and are also very effective in communicating with adult family members. Each of the three parts of this book will contribute to a parent’s growing capacity to create a respectful, loving home.

Part I. The Foundation for Respect & Co-operation
The three chapters of Part I focus on the underlying dynamic that links the two things that parents say they want most: respect and
co-operation.

Part II. The 7 Keys to Co-operation
The 7 Keys that make up Part II gradually develop parents’ capacity to establish a home as a No-Fault Zone—a place where valuing every family member’s needs equally and doing one’s best to meet them replaces fault-finding, punishment, and reward.

• Key 1 — Parent with Purpose, helps you align with your deepest reasons for parenting and your deepest desires for your children.
• Key 2 — See the Needs Behind Every Action, takes the mystery out of why children act the way they do and introduces a needs focused approach to parenting.
• Key 3 — Create Safety, Trust and Belonging, draws upon scientific research to confirm the crucial role that physical and emotional safety plays in children’s development, and then shows you how to provide it.
• Key 4 — Inspire Giving, invites you to identify your child’s gifts, receive them gratefully, and encourage a mutual flow of giving and receiving.
• Key 5 — Use a Language of Respect walks you, step by step, through the process language of Nonviolent Communication, showing how you can translate all criticism and blame into respectful expression of needs.
• Key 6 — Learn Together As You Go encourages you to explore, investigate, and co-create with your children, with the confidence that there are many ways to do things and many strategies to meet needs.
• Key 7 — Make Your Home a No-Fault Zone reveals the true source of conflict and the path you can take to transform conflict situations into heartfelt connections.

Part III. Family Activities & Stories from the No-Fault Zone
Part III provides a wide range of games, activities, and cut-outs for additional skill development as well as for fun and further exploration. For inspiration and real-life stories from parents who are using the processes introduced in this book, go to the end of Part III for Stories from the No-Fault Zone.

Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson are co-authors of Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids and The Compassionate Classroom and bring a combined 45 years of elementary teaching and parent education experience to their work. As co-founders of Kindle-Hart Communication, they’ve been developing and facilitating parent and teacher education workshops together for over 20 years.

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by Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson
Do more than simply correct bad behavior—finally unlock your parenting potential. This complete handbook offers parents 7 Keys to discover the mutual respect and nurturing relationships you’ve been looking for.

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Transforming Children's Anger, continued . . .

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) invites us to explore a different paradigm when we face challenges with and between our children: a paradigm of connection and compassion for all, of mutual care and the possibility of contributing to everyone’s needs. Perhaps most importantly for our troubled times, this paradigm supports children with models and skills for making peace in our world.

How does this paradigm shift work in real life families who practice NVC? Here is a story from one mother of three boys, who participated in BayNVC's family camp in 2004:

My 13-year-old son, David, was really angry one day and about to hurt one of his twin younger brothers as they sat near each other on the couch. So, I did what I now do whenever physical violence is about to happen between them and got in the middle of the two. David was breathing heavily and had his fists clenched as he sat in a chair next to me. His brother was on the other side of me on the couch. I went with habit and started to tell David about anger management and how he needed to go for a walk or go to his room until he cooled off. He continued to breathe heavily and clench his fists.

Then his brother said something like, “David did you just want to be included?” I realized then that what David needed was empathy and started guessing, too. My first guess simply echoed what his brother already guessed: “Are you needing to be included?” I saw David’s fist relax just slightly. I guessed again: “Are you needing to feel that you belong?”  His fist relaxed even more and his breathing began to slow down some. Then I guessed that his need for belonging had been unmet for a really long time with his twin brothers. David’s fist relaxed more along with his body. Then I guessed that maybe if his need for belonging were met his need for love would be met, and tears began to roll down his cheeks.

I will be forever grateful for the tools of NVC for allowing me to get to this place of awareness and healing with my son.

I celebrate this mother’s honesty about her struggle to remember to turn to connection. Like most of us, she has habits that point in another direction. Yet she is willing to be awakened by her son’s initiative and remembers to return to the focus on the heart. This reinforces my trust in the possibility of transformation for all of us. We can always be reminded and can always choose to return to connection.

I also celebrate this mother’s modeling for her sons. It’s her dedication to trying, again and again, to focus on holding everyone’s needs with compassion and care that made it possible for her son to do the same when she could not.

My heart abounds with hope when I hear stories like this — and I hear them from many parents. In August, I started a program called the Parent Peer Leadership Program, for participants from the U.S. and Canada who are learning to integrate NVC into their lives and to share NVC with others as peer leaders. These parents will be starting empathy and practice groups in their communities this winter. I celebrate how this work will now reach many more people and continue to support families to live with compassion, connection, and peace.

Inbal Kashtan is author of Parenting From Your Heart, and serves as the director of the CNVC Peaceful Families, Peaceful World project. A mother of an 8-year-old son, Inbal facilitates workshops and retreats, co-leads an NVC leadership program and creates NVC curricula.

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by Inbal Kashtan
This practical booklet addresses the challenges of parenting with real-world solutions for creating family relationships that meet everyone's needs.

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