Playing Fair and Being Kind

Most of you know that I facilitate Alternatives to Violence Workshops in Maine State Prison. I have been doing so for about twelve years. The workshops are experiential in nature. The men I work with come in with questions and answers. I prefer to deal with the answers. While surfing the internet I run across stories that deal with childhood experiences. These are usually relatable and generate a ton of responses and reflection. Here is one I stumbled upon yesterday while researching another topic. I took this from an article by Amy McReady. Here is the link:
https://www.positiveparentingsolutions.com/parenting/spanking-from-childs-perspective

“Here is a short story by Astrid Lindgren. She lived a long, long time. She wrote “Pippi Longstocking”. She told this story.”

Above all, I believe that there should never be any violence. In 1978, I received a peace prize in West Germany for my books, and I gave an acceptance speech that I called just that: “Never Violence.” And in that speech I told a story from my own experience.

When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with.

The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.”

When I read the last sentence I was so moved as to sob audibly. I stared at that last line blindly, visualizing the times when I was a small boy, I wanted to tell one of my parents to stop punishing me. I’d had enough and I was exhausted from hiding my behavior from them. I’d been berated so many times I was never able to learn how to do anything right. It seemed I was in a lose/lose situation all the time. I had reached a point where to be hit would have been a relief. The snark and looks of disgust had pushed me to a place where I’d rather have been hit just to let me know it was real and give me a chance to really sob. To give me a reason.

Here is her story as it continues.

All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.(By Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking. Originally shared by Vivian Brault, founder of Directions, Inc.)

Here is a response from a friend who listened to me read this last night at a writers group. I sent him the link.