LESSON SEVEN

Practice Nonviolent Parenting

Whenever I think about my time with Bapuji at the ashram, I remember his warmth and wisdom and gentle smile. He taught with love and patience.

A couple who lived near the ashram came to Bapuji one day with their six-year-old son, Anil. The little boy’s doctor had said he needed to drastically cut down on his sweets because the sugar was making him ill. Anil liked his candy and would sneak treats, making himself sicker. After a few weeks of struggling, the mother brought Anil to Bapuji with a request to speak to the child about not eating sweets. Bapuji said, “Come back in two weeks.”

The mother was a little frustrated and not sure why they had to wait, but when they came back, Bapuji pulled Anil close and whispered to him. They gave each other a high five—and the mother was astonished in the following days to see Anil avoiding sweets and eating as he should. He became healthier, and the mom was convinced that Bapuji had performed a miracle. She came back and asked what he had done.

“It was no miracle,” he said with a smile. “I needed to give up eating sweets myself before I would ask him to do the same. When you came back, I said that I had given up eating sweets for two weeks, and now would he try?”

Bapuji’s idea of education was different from most people’s. He thought children didn’t learn as much from textbooks as from the character and example of the people teaching them. He would scoff at the old advice “Do what I say, not what I do”; he firmly believed that teachers needed to do exactly what they asked of their students. He urged parents and teachers to “live what we want our children to learn.”

I had a tutor for subjects like math and science, but Bapuji knew the most profound lessons would come from watching him. He was a kind and patient teacher, and he wanted everybody to think of him as the father or grandfather they could learn from. He first took on that role back in 1910 when he lived on the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, one of his early experiments in having many people live and work together. He described it as a family where he had the role of father and the responsibility for teaching the children. In those days he didn’t think he could find any teachers or tutors to come for the nonwhite children, so he himself began educating the boys and girls living there.

Bapuji’s model of leading by example is a powerful one that parents today could use. Many parents talk about limiting screen time for their children, but then they themselves take phone calls or stare at their smartphones when they are supposed to be spending time with their families. The children learn that the phone or electronic device is more important than anything else—and certainly more important than they. I shake my head when I see parents devouring sweet pastries and frosted cereals while insisting that their toddlers eat fruits and vegetables. They are forgetting that children learn from how we adults live.

Before I went to Bapuji’s ashram, I didn’t have much use for school because my teachers set a terrible example. Given the racial prejudice in South Africa, there weren’t many schools that would accept nonwhite children. When I was about six years old, my parents found a Catholic convent school we could attend, but it was eighteen miles away, in the city of Durban. I went there with my sister Sita, who was six years older than I. Every morning, we woke up at 5 a.m. and quickly got ready for our long, arduous trip. First we walked a mile through sugarcane plantations to the bus stop, then took a bus to the railroad station four miles away, and finally got a train into town. After that we had a two-mile walk from the station to the school. At the end of the day we had to do the whole thing in reverse.

The principal of the convent school, Sister Regis, was coldhearted and authoritarian. Lessons started at 8:20, and if you weren’t inside the compound by then, you had to go to her office, where she whacked you with her polished cane. My sister and I were marched into that office and whacked more times than I want to remember. Sister Regis knew that Sita and I had to rely on the bus and train to get to school, and we couldn’t do anything if either was late; we were well-behaved children who didn’t oversleep, and her beating us served no purpose. But she did it anyway.

All of that violent whacking did nothing to improve my attitude—and it certainly couldn’t help me be on time more often. All it did was turn me into an angry child who loathed going to school. Psychologists now tell us that children who are hit are more likely to be violent later in life, and my own experience tells me that’s very true. When I left Sister Regis’s office with my skin stinging from her cane, I felt powerless and angry, and all I wanted to do was hit someone. An adult beating a child only sets up a useless cycle of violence.

Years later, conducting a workshop for teachers in Memphis I was shocked when one teacher after another insisted that the best way to discipline children was to paddle or spank them. One teacher explained that after she hit the children in her classroom enough, they learned to fear her, so all she had to do was glare at them to get them to behave. She might have been proud of her approach, but, as with Sister Regis, the long-lasting results could only be damaging. Not only was this teacher educating her children in violence, but she had to continually escalate her own violence to keep control. Her method of teaching breeds disrespect. Her students had been dehumanized.

I was stunned that this kind of violent teaching would be accepted in American schools, but I am even more shocked to discover that today nineteen states still allow physical punishment. Estimates find that some 200,000 children are beaten in our schools every year by adults in authority. We need to stop calling this “discipline” and admit that it is violence against our children. We are allowing those in power (the teachers and principals) to get out their frustrations by attacking powerless children. Parents and teachers resort to hitting only when they are too weak in themselves to handle better and more sophisticated forms of teaching.

However, some parents who now shun physical violence resort to equally damaging techniques. I cringed when I heard a story recently of a teenager made to stand outside wearing a sign saying “I’m a bully. Honk if you hate bullies.” It seems to me that the parent who demanded that punishment was the real bully. What is bullying if not using your power to humiliate someone you perceive to be weaker than yourself? The repercussions of shaming children this way—using emotional violence against them—can be severe. I was shocked when I heard about a father who hacked off his thirteen-year-old daughter’s long hair to punish her for sending racy photos to a boy at school. He videotaped her trembling afterward as he taunted, “Was it worth it?” The video ended up on YouTube. Shortly afterward the young girl jumped off a bridge and killed herself.

While many factors often contribute to a teenager’s suicide, surely the grieving father now asks the same question about his own violence: Was it worth it?

Bapuji believed in teaching children using only nonviolent means, which is much subtler than just avoiding physical confrontation. To raise your children in a spirit of nonviolence means filling your home with love and respect and a common purpose. When parents and teenagers disagree on rules, parents sometimes resort to demanding, “This is my house, and you’ll obey my rules as long as you live here.” That sends a message of conflict and hostility, with parents and children taking sides against each other. In a nonviolent approach, parents and children look for common ground and reasons to help and support each other. The parents accept that the children’s failings are probably a result of the parents’ own failings.

I experienced the power of nonviolent parenting when I was about sixteen and my dad asked me to drive him into town in the family car and do some chores while he attended a conference. Living in a rural community in South Africa, I didn’t get to go into town very often, and I was excited for the chance to explore. I had heard a lot about American movies, and though I didn’t think my parents would approve, I hoped to get all the chores done and sneak in a movie too.

When I dropped off my father at his conference in the morning, he asked me to pick him up at the same place at 5 p.m. Mom needed me to get groceries and do a few other errands, and my father’s list for the day included getting the car serviced and the oil changed. “You have the whole day, so it shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.

I got the errands finished in record time and then dropped the car at the garage in time to make a 2 p.m. movie. I hunkered down in my seat, delighted by my good planning, and became riveted by the John Wayne movie on the screen, which was as good as I’d hoped. When it finished at about 3:30, I realized it was a double feature, so another movie was about to start. I quickly calculated that I could watch the first half hour or so and still be on time for my father. But (as might have been expected) I became so engrossed in the movie that I stayed in my seat until it ended at 5:30. Oh no! I raced to the garage and got the car, but I didn’t pull up at the conference center until after 6 p.m.

My dad was relieved to see me; he had obviously been worried. “Why are you so late?” he asked as he got into the car.

I was too embarrassed to tell him how much fun I’d had watching violent Westerns. You might think that after my experiences at the ashram and with Nehru, I would have known not to lie. But protecting our own image of ourselves sometimes outweighs any common sense. “The car wasn’t ready,” I answered, thinking up a quick excuse. But even as I said the words, I could see the disappointment on my father’s face.

“That’s not what the garage told me when I called them,” he said. He seemed to think for a moment before deciding what to do, and then he gently shook his head. “I’m sorry you lied to me today. I have failed as a parent to give you the confidence and courage to tell the truth. As penance for my shortcomings, I am going to walk home.”

He opened the car door, got out, and started down the road on foot. I jumped out of the car and ran after him to apologize. But he kept walking. I tried to talk him out of his plan and promised that I would never lie to him again, but he just shook his head. “Somewhere I made a mistake. I will take this walk to think how I could have better taught you to know the importance of telling the truth.”

Mortified, I ran back to the car. I couldn’t keep walking with my father because I had to get the car back home. But there was no way I would drive off and leave him to walk by himself on the dark country roads. So I drove behind him, crawling along at walking speed for the next six hours, my headlights lighting the way. The walk might have been hard for him, but it was torture for me. My father was suffering for my dishonesty. Instead of punishing me, he took the burden on himself.

My mother was expecting us home for dinner, and I knew she would be terribly worried. In those days there were no cell phones, and even if we could find a public phone, it was difficult to place a call outside the city. I imagined my mother standing on the terrace with my sisters, peering into the dark to see if she could spot our car. It was close to midnight when she finally saw the headlights creeping ever so slowly toward the house. She assumed that we were delayed by some mechanical problem with the car. It was only when we went inside that she learned what had happened.

Had my father simply punished me, I am sure I would have felt humiliated instead of guilty, and the humiliation would have led to disobedience and revenge—or a desire to hurt someone else. By using the nonviolent method he had learned from Bapuji, my father made me his partner in both the problem and the need to correct it. The impact of that is powerful and long-lasting and will achieve more positive results than coercive or violent approaches. Bapuji’s method helps parents achieve their goal of raising confident, emotionally intelligent, engaged children.

Children flourish when they are respected and see that the adults in their lives aren’t asking them to do something they would never undertake themselves. The goal is to make our children good and strong people who are not victims of other kids’ bad behavior. The news is full of images of kids attacking each other while friends stand by recording the action with their phones. Bapuji would not ask “What’s happening to our children?” because the answer would be clear to him: we can’t blame children for being callous or uncaring if we haven’t shown them what positive values look like.

Parents buy their children fashionable clothes and the latest toys, but the children still want more. So the parents complain that they aren’t grateful. Many children in America live in their own bubble of privilege and never see any other way of life. How can they appreciate all they have when they have no way to compare? Gratitude comes when you can see your place in the bigger world. We all do better when we have a sense of connection with each other.

When my two children were young, they wanted to have birthday parties, as all kids do. My wife and I love our children very much and wanted to celebrate their big days, but after the experiences we’d had working to get Indian orphans adopted by loving families, we wanted our children to understand what it meant to have a family and people who care about you. We decided we would have their birthday parties in a local orphanage so that all the children could celebrate and have fun together.

“Why would we have a party with strangers?” my daughter asked me. “Why can’t we invite our regular friends?”

“Sharing with people who already have a lot doesn’t make much sense,” I explained. “We want to give to those who have less.”

She and her brother were not convinced this was a good plan until we visited one of the orphanages. This one wasn’t much different from the ones that had inspired us to take action; it was bleak and dark and paint was peeling everywhere. The children had no toys. Some of the little ones were just sitting on the ground, rocking back and forth to comfort themselves. They had nothing to hold or touch or play with. My children were shocked. After that they started taking toys to the orphanage. One time we brought tricycles; the orphans had never seen anything like them before and didn’t even know to sit on them or push the pedals.

Once my children talked to the orphans and spent time with them, they had a new view of their own birthday parties. Sharing with those who had so much less than they did seemed to make sense. These strangers were no longer so strange.

Given the right example, children grasp the power of nonviolence immediately. After learning that the teachers in Memphis believed in physical punishment, I thought I could begin to change attitudes by running a conflict resolution course. It was clear to me that the children needed a nonviolent model for solving problems, which they weren’t getting from the adults in their lives. The first course I conducted was in a middle school. The children were excited at the chance to learn how to become peer mediators. I explained that their job was to bring two people who were disagreeing to a neutral place where they could sit across from each other with the mediator in the middle. The mediator had to lead the conversation with certain rules—making sure that each person spoke without anger and listened carefully before replying.

The children practiced with each other, and while they felt awkward at first, they soon saw how effective this simple technique could be. They learned that disagreements can be settled respectfully and without violence. They got a sense of control over their own lives, knowing they could handle conflict without resorting to fights and shouts and anger. I heard afterward that one of the young boys went home that evening and heard his parents screaming at each other. At first he cowered in his room, as he usually did in that situation, but then he got up his courage and marched out.

“I am now a certified peer mediator and I can help solve this conflict,” he announced boldly. “I want you two to sit across from each other and I will mediate.”

The parents were so shocked by the boy’s quiet wisdom that they immediately calmed down and apologized to him. There were hugs all around.

Many of us write a will to distribute our material legacy—the money or house or diamond ring we want to pass along to the next generation. But what about the ethical legacy we leave? Our parenting style—and whether we give or withhold our love—resounds for generations. Bapuji’s first exposure to nonviolent parenting and the power of love came from his own parents. When he did something wrong (and he wasn’t perfect, as we’ve already seen), his parents responded with love and understanding. I described earlier how Bapuji wrote a letter to his parents admitting to a lie, and his father cried and embraced him. Bapuji later wrote that his father “helped me wash my sins away in tears.” If his father had slapped him or shamed him or confined him to his room, would my grandfather have become a different person? An angry or vengeful Gandhi could not have influenced the world as he did. Perhaps it’s not too much to say that the fate of millions might rest on the love or anger we show our own children.

It seems clear to me that if love, respect, and compassion can make a difference in one home, they can have an effect in many homes. And if in many homes, why not throughout the country and the world? The first seed of nonviolent living was planted in my grandfather during childhood, and he nurtured it throughout his life. Some people now revere him as a saint, but he didn’t see himself that way at all. He tried hard to project himself as an ordinary person with ordinary failings who transformed himself in the same way that everybody can: by hard work and caring. When I was with him at the ashram, he made me promise that I would strive every day to be better than I was the day before. Once you have that goal in mind, it sticks with you. I think about it every morning when I wake up.

When Bapuji went through the normal challenges of being a teenager, he strayed from good values. Yes, that happens to even the most noble among us! But instead of going deeper and deeper into the hole of deception, he was changed by the love of his family. Many parents now are good at saying “I love you” to their children, but Bapuji’s parents expressed their unconditional love without using those words. To them, their children came first in all of life’s equations and were never a burden or a sacrifice. He benefited by feeling their love in everyday interactions. Instead of complaining that you can no longer go to parties or enjoy the pleasures of a single life, give your children one of the greatest gifts you have to offer: let them know that now they are your truest pleasure.

I worry that in our daily life, we too often set a model where “happy and kind” is less important than “rich and successful.” Even though, as new parents, almost all of us say that what we most want for our children is for them to be happy, we start putting pressure on them—and on ourselves—as they get older. Progressing in our careers or making lots of money becomes more important than time spent at home nurturing love and trust and understanding. Expensive gifts replace love and attention. I don’t pretend that balancing work and family is easy for anyone, and I admire the men and women who do everything they can to have full lives. But we have to be careful that we aren’t worrying about the wrong values and putting emphasis on ephemeral experiences rather than long-lasting benefits and worth.

When we moved to America and lived on a university campus, my wife and I often invited students to bring their lunch and join us to talk about nonviolence and love and Bapuji’s philosophy. My wife is a very kind and motherly sort, and she would hug the students and ask them how they were doing and if there was anything they needed or wanted to discuss. I remember one student who returned her embrace and began to cry in her arms. “My own parents never ask me questions like that,” she said. “I wish they cared about me in the way you do.”

Her parents probably loved her, but they might have been too self-absorbed and distracted by their own needs to find out what moved and inspired her.

When my daughter was raising her own children in New York State, she followed the tradition that my wife and I had set in India of serving family dinner every night at 7 p.m. Whatever else they were doing, the children knew to be home to gather at the table. It worked just fine when her children were young, but when they reached high school, some of their friends wondered why they had to run home each evening. My daughter suggested they invite their friends to join them and experience the family tradition.

One friend who came over sat at the table wide-eyed as the family shared stories and talked about what had happened during the day. She finally admitted that it was the first time she’d had a family dinner. Both of her parents worked, and everybody was expected to cook and eat on their own. “We just raid the refrigerator when we get home and nobody really cares what we do,” she said with tears in her eyes. Experiencing the love in my daughter’s family, she wanted it for herself.

Children want to prove their independence, so they act as if being around parents is a burden rather than a pleasure. But at heart they are deeply in need of love and understanding. When parents are too busy to provide love, they are doing a violent disservice to their children’s sense of wholeness and hope.

My grandfather’s extraordinary mental discipline left many people in awe. He had his first experience with the power of mental resolve when he was barely five years old. His mother followed the Hindu tradition of taking vows—which usually meant giving up something for a period of time—and when my grandfather was just a toddler, she vowed not to eat until she saw the sun. Under normal conditions that wouldn’t be a big deal, but she took the vow during the monsoon season. Bapuji recalled later that the sun was shrouded by dark clouds for several consecutive days, and while his mother continued to cook cheerfully for the family and join them at meals, she wouldn’t eat a morsel of food. Bapuji got agitated seeing her endure such a sacrifice for so long. It was perhaps his first experience of empathy.

One afternoon he sat by the window praying that the clouds would part and let the sun peep through. Suddenly a ray of sun appeared, and he called excitedly for his mother to come. But by the time she left what she was doing and got to the window, the sun had disappeared again behind the rain clouds. She simply smiled and said, “It seems God does not want me to eat today.”

A vow such as Bapuji’s mother took might seem strange now, in our self-indulgent society. But it had a profound impact on my grandfather. Later in his life he undertook lengthy fasts for political causes that got the attention of people around the world. These fasts were possible only because he had practiced his mental resolve early. When I was at the ashram, he observed every Monday as a day of silence, and he often undertook short fasts to gain discipline and control over his mind and desires. All of these choices emerged from the model of his mother when he was just a toddler. He used the emotional power she showed him to influence others in later years.

We don’t always realize how deeply our attitudes affect our children. They sense our love as well as our distraction and take in the lessons we teach by our daily actions. If you are a parent, what example are you setting that will reappear in your children’s lives and experiences later? Or if you have a parent (and yes, we all do!) what lessons did your parents pass on to you that you want to shake free of now? Sometimes we unwittingly repeat the violence and shaming that we experienced as children, extending a damaging legacy that should end. We can make a conscious effort to bring nonviolent parenting into our lives and give that gift to our children—and the world beyond.

Bapuji and his wife had four sons, including my father, Manilal, who was the second oldest. My father and his younger brothers, Davadas and Ramdas, tried hard to emulate Bapuji and follow his instincts for goodness and giving. But the oldest son, Harilal, was defiant from an early age and never outgrew his problems. As an adult he was an alcoholic who was accused of theft and embezzlement. My grandfather blamed himself for his son’s failures and wanted to help him. But doing penance for a child’s actions (as my father did when I lied about the car) works only if the child is willing to hear and reform. Harilal had no such intention. Bapuji tried to welcome Harilal home, but the prodigal son had no interest in returning to the family fold. He spent some years destitute and homeless, and he was scornful of anything my grandfather did. He seemed to devote his life to seeing how he could undermine the Gandhi name.

At one point Harilal went to a mosque in Delhi and made a great show of converting from Hinduism to Islam. My grandfather was accepting of all religions, so having a son become a Muslim wouldn’t have pained him at all. But it turned out that Harilal didn’t care about any religion and had just done it for the money. In the religious tensions of the time, some people thought they could embarrass Bapuji through his son: Harilal had essentially sold himself to the highest bidder. “I must confess that this has hurt me,” Bapuji wrote in a letter. He believed religion should come from a pure heart and was distraught that his son would debase the search for goodness and truth out of childish rebelliousness.

Harilal had been raised with the same kindness and love and moral guidance that my grandparents gave to my father and his brothers. So no matter how many times I review this story, I can’t see how Bapuji was to blame for Harilal’s failures. When parents have done everything they can and problems persist, they have to forgive themselves. Nature sometimes creates a negative temperament no matter how ardently and honorably we nurture our children.

Having a practical skill may be important, but so is having a profound understanding of the world. When Bapuji taught children like me at the ashram, his goal was to impart wisdom, not just facts. He believed the best education helped you deal with relationships and emotions and taught you to build a cooperative society rather than a competitive society. In the many years since he passed along his wisdom to me, some psychologists and educators have come around to his way of thinking and now talk about the need for “emotional intelligence.”

Bapuji once told me a story from Indian scripture about a king who sent his only son into the world to get an education. The boy came back sure that he knew everything and was wiser than others. But the king wasn’t so sure. “Have you learned how to know that which is unknown and how to fathom the unfathomable?” the king asked.

“No, that’s not possible,” replied the son.

The king asked him to go to the kitchen and get a fig, and when he brought it back, the king had him cut it in half. They both looked at the many tiny fig seeds. “Cut one of the seeds in half and tell me what you find,” said the king.

The boy tried to cut it, but it was so small that it slipped away. “There’s nothing here,” he said.

The king nodded. “From what you consider nothing, a huge tree emerges. That ‘nothing’ is the seed of life. When you learn what such nothingness is, your education will be complete.”

Bapuji had endless patience and would take all the time necessary to teach me and the world the lessons we needed to learn. He remained calm in the face of upheavals and distractions. He wanted to understand the bigger mysteries of the world, and he knew that even the tiniest fig seed planted in the right soil could lead to something great.

We must not waste the chance to understand the world and to look for greater truths beyond what we can see and understand.