If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?
Interpretation
Family violence instills harmful lessons in children about power and conflict resolution.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin's quote emphasizes the detrimental effects of family violence on children's perceptions of power dynamics and conflict resolution. If children learn that using might is a valid way to assert dominance at home, it raises concerns about their future behavior and attitudes towards conflicts in the broader world, suggesting a cycle of violence that extends beyond the family unit into society at large.
In practice
During a community meeting on domestic violence prevention.
When a family is free of abuse and oppression, it can be the place where we share our deepest secrets and stand the most exposed, a place where we learn to feel distinct without being better, - and sacrifice for others without losing ourselves.
When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.
As a child, the family that I had and the love I had from my two parents allowed me to go ahead and be more aggressive, to search and to take risks knowing that, if I failed, I could always come home to a family of love and support.
I don't feel like I'm a perfect mom, and then there are times at work where I feel like maybe I wasn't perfect here because of constraints on my time. But having the sum of both of those things going on in my life makes me a better mom at the end of the day, and I think gives me really important perspectives in the workplace as well.
There are certain characteristics that define a good chimp mother. She is patient, she is protective but she is not over-protective - that is really important. She is tolerant, but she can impose discipline. She is affectionate. She plays. And the most important of all: she is supportive.
It can't hurt to go to the people you love, whose blood type courses through your veins and whose DNA, from a certain angle, contains many of the same markings as yours. You don't have to take their advice, but let them share their version of solutions to life's difficulties. Good or bad - it could be interesting.
The difference between keeping things clean and keeping kids clean was that things just sat still and waited for the dirt to collect. We kids were carriers. We ran a pickup and delivery service.
Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying
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