Parenting For Peace

Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers, by Marcy Axness, PhD, recently won the 2013 National Parenting Publications Awards, one of the country’s most authoritative consumer awards, recognizing the best in children's and parenting resources. The book was chosen out of a field of hundreds of entries. For more than 20 years, the National Parenting Publications Awards (NAPPA) has been the go-to resource for the best products for families. “A product that bears the NAPPA seal has been stringently reviewed and deemed a superior, reliable and innovative product,” says Julie Kertes, NAPPA General Manager. “We chose this book because Parenting for Peace empowers parents to create peaceful environments from pre-pregnancy through birth through later years to help raise a generation that is built for peace. Exercises in every chapter help parents get back to basics in order to move toward peaceful interdependence.”

If we really want to change the world, let’s raise a generation hardwired for peace and innovation from the very beginning. A child whose brain develops its capacity for self-regulation, self-reflection, trust, and empathy is a joy to parent. As an adult, this individual will have the heart to embrace and exemplify peace, the mind to innovate solutions to social and ecological challenges, as well as the will to enact them.

Such a person is never a genetically predetermined given, but the result of dynamic interactions between genetics and environment, beginning before he or she is even born. Foundations for this level of health begin forming during the prenatal period, and some aspects of optimal development are influenced as early as conception.

In the midst of our global human, economic and environmental crises, we have overlooked a profound means of cultivating a sustainable, peaceful future: the choices and attitudes with which we bring our children to life and shepherd them into adulthood. With compassion, good humor and engaging examples, Parenting for Peace points out fundamental missteps we've made through the ages, and explains why they’re counter-productive. It gives straightforward guidelines using a unique 7-step/7-principle matrix for parents to foster their children’s development in a vibrantly growth-oriented fashion, rather than a protection-oriented fashion. This is an essential guide for raising a generation of peacemakers.

Praise for Parenting for Peace

I was overjoyed as I read Parenting for Peace, not only as a new paren, but as someone who has fought the establishment to prove that there is an audience out there starving for this type of information. I know parents, soon-to-be parents, grandparents and many others will read this book with enthusiasm.

—Betsy Chasse, co-creator of What The Bleep Do We Know 

(4th highest grossing documentary in U.S. history)

While library shelves bulge with books on parenting and childhood, our situation has only deteriorated. Somehow, as with our ecological perils (with which the crisis in childhood is intimately linked), the subject registers on too small an audience. That serious lapse could be turned around through Marcy Axness’s work. Marcy has written the most comprehensive, all-encompassing, scientifically valid parenting book yet given us. It is captivating, engrossing, and remarkably clear, free of jargon, easy to read, and loaded with common-sense insights that remain with one long after the reading. I know of no one so well equipped educationally, intellectually, emotionally, and intuitively to speak to our times on behalf of this, our gravest and most ignored problem, the abandoned and unbonded infant, child, and adolescent. No one could read Axness’s work and remain indifferent. It surely deserves the most rigorous sponsorship and publicity.

—Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of The Biology of Transcendence

I so appreciate the wonderful work Marcy Axness is doing in helping us all to evolve.

—Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief

What is more important than raising a generation of peacemakers? In Parenting for Peace, Dr. Axness brings a clear voice to the number one task for families and societies: to raise citizens committed to cultures of peace through the gift of knowing peace right from the start. And we can do so by raising ourselves in consciousness.

—Raffi Cavoukian, children’s entertainer and founder of Child Honoring