Listening to the Children

by Elise Boulding

Could there be such a thing as an age-segregated peace culture? Of course not! So I rejoiced when at the first in our three-part culture of peace weekend conference series, a series especially designed to be participatory and experiential, participants took us seriously and said, "Why do we have to leave our children home when we come to talk about peace and justice? Why can't we bring them to the next conference?" That such a question could even be raised says volumes about the openness and creativity of the Boston Research Center. Executive Director Ginny Straus exchanged glances with her staff, gulped, and then said, "Yes, why not? Let's do it--have a concurrent peace camp for kids!"

The next two weekends will not be forgotten by any participant, young or old. The presence of the 5 to 12-year-old peace campers gave a new depth and flavor to the sessions, both through the delightful background sounds from their separate activities upstairs in the BRC building, and through the times when we were all together: dialoguing, singing, enjoying each other. Because we adults so rarely really listen to the thinking of the young, we vastly underestimate what goes on in their minds and hearts. When we were all paired off near the close of the third conference, one adult to one child, with instructions to reverse roles and solve some typical child-parent problem situations, we adults found that our young partners had some pretty sophisticated understandings of how adults think. They could take our roles better than we could take theirs.

I was lucky to be invited to do one of my favorite activities with the peace campers, traveling into an imagined peaceful, nonviolent, and fair world ten years in the future, to see how things might be in that world. The campers made it very clear in words and in the pictures they drew that this would be a green world with no hunger, homelessness, or pollution--a world in which the sun shines for everyone. Sharing was a striking theme. The children were not talking in generalizations. They gave very specific examples. No mistaking what they meant.