The Roots of Conscience: Attachment, Pleasure, Then Empathy

[Excerpted from Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers, by Marcy Axness, PhD]

Connection and Conscience: The Foundations of Peace

Whenever a heinous, violent act is committed, there is talk of a lack of conscience in the perpetrator. The question of what builds a conscience has long engrossed philosophers, psychologists, and even Disney imagineers (who decided Pinocchio’s conscience looks a little like a cockroach, carries a watch fob and goes by the name of Jiminy Cricket). James Prescott’s massive, cross-cultural study of the root causes of violence, together with the body of bonding and attachment research, point clearly to the fact that Read the rest of this entry »

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At the Heart of Humanity: Cultivating Empathy Through Attachment

The subject of empathy — and whether it’s an endangered trait — has been on many people’s lips and pens in the wake of unspeakable events in the past several weeks, on US soil and US-occupied soil. As Steve Taylor wrote in Psychology Today,

To a large extent, all human brutality – all oppression, cruelty and most crime – is the result of a lack of empathy. It’s a lack of empathy which makes someone capable of attacking, Read the rest of this entry »

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Can You Hear Me Now, Mama…?!! Cell Phones & Pregnancy

In the conception chapter of Parenting for Peace, I devote a section to the 21st century issue of EMFs (electromagnetic fields) — cell phone radiation, wireless and electronic gadgetry, the whole shebang — and a discussion of how it might perturb the minute processes around conception and early embryonic development. Well, yesterday came news of a new Yale study finding ADHD-like symptoms and other brain abnormalities in mice whose pregnant mothers were exposed to cell phone radiation. Read the rest of this entry »

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Womb Peace to World Peace: Protecting Children From Toxic Stress

“Building a strong foundation for healthy development in the early years of life is a prerequisite for individual well-being, economic productivity, and harmonious societies around the world.”

So reads the opening line of one of the most important articles published this year that you will most likely never read or even hear about. The article, entitled “An Integrated Scientific Framework for Child Survival and Early Childhood Development,” was published in a recent issue of Pediatrics, the prestigious journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Not exactly bedside table reading. Or what’s tops on your Kindle. Read the rest of this entry »

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Does iPhone’s Siri Thwart Social Intelligence?

A thought occurred to me years ago on one of my maiden strolls through Costco (besides yum, those mini pizzas are good): If I were an evil genius wanting to erode the nutritional wellbeing of a civilization (not to mention the individuality of its citizens), this would be a good first step. Induce mass consumer hypnosis via the big-box store. (Will return to this point in a bit.)

In the half-decade between my son’s junior and my daughter’s freshman years in high school, I witnessed his late-night telephone confabs (on a landline, gasp, when conference calls were a cool innovation) give way to her disembodied “connectivity” with Facebook friends. Read the rest of this entry »

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Of Love & Milk: Facing Our Breastfeeding Ambivalence

Optimal brain development in progressMost parents know mother’s milk is the best nourishment for their babies, but they may not know how really miraculous the biochemistry of breast milk is. Nature has prepared it as a most exquisite elixir, to perfect and complete our journey from one fertilized cell to a young human being. Given the evidence about the comprehensive benefits of nursing our babies, why is there so much ambivalence about breastfeeding? Why do mothers wrestle with the choice of will I or won’t I breastfeed?

This inner tug-of-war about breastfeeding is not a modern burden: Read the rest of this entry »

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Epigenetics, DNA, and True Intelligence

In the seven years since I started writing Parenting for Peace the term epigenetics has graduated from being a practically unheard-of, esoteric branch of biology to an increasingly mainstream concept. (That worked out nicely, since my book’s entire premise turns on the epigenetic notion of just how much influence we have in who we and our children shape up to be.) In a recent post on Eco Child’s Play, author Jennifer Lance does parents a solid by gathering wide-ranging information and insight into why they need to understand and care about epigenetics.

Unlike what we learned in basic biology class, we are not immutably defined nor are our children unalterably determined by DNA. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve adopted!!

Once the title was set for my book, of course I set out to lay claim to the matching domain name. To my dismay, parentingforpeace.com belonged to someone else. I’d simply have to use a different name. The frontrunner was parentingforpeacebook.com. Didn’t really like it, not much. Too cumbersome. When one of your principles is simplicity, it doesn’t do to complicate up your URL with extraneous words.

In the 11th hour, I made a bold move: Read the rest of this entry »

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Beauty as a Verb

In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind. •Blaise Pascal•

It sometimes seems to me that we’ve lost a sense of the importance of beauty in daily life. There is a coarseness and crassness to so much of the personal and cultural discourse we’re exposed to, that we’ve grown callouses over our “beauty receptors”—out of sheer survival! And, we’re all so busy, so techno-distracted, so efficient. Just don’t have the time to pick a few flowers for vase on the table… to smooth out the clutter by the front door… to hang just the right pictures on the wall. This relates to P4P Principle #3, Rhythm. Read the rest of this entry »

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What Is “Peace”?

Occasionally when I’m telling people about my new book, they hesitate over the notion of raising a “peacemaker.” (Don’t worry—this happens only very occasionally!) They flinch at the idea that I might be campaigning to raise a generation of wimps… peaceniks… idly sunny beings whose inertia might only allow for a round or two of “Kumbaya”—in perfect harmony, of course. No. What I mean by a peacemaker is a socially healthy human being: an intelligent person whose brain is wired with the capacity for inner balance, empathy, and enlightened social action. Read the rest of this entry »

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