Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers [Paperback]

Marcy Axness (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 30, 2012

If we really want to change the world, let's raise a generation "built for peace"... from the very beginning. Parenting for Peace is a user-friendly scientific roadmap for how to do exactly that... while bringing more joy into family life!

Parenting for Peace details a unique seven-step, seven-principle matrix for hardwiring our babies and children with the brain circuitry for such essential peacemaker capacities as self-regulation, empathy, intelligence, trust and imagination. The win-win is that a child wired in this vibrantly healthy way is a joy to parent, and as an adult has the heart to embrace and exemplify peace, the mind to innovate solutions to social and ecological challenges, and the will to enact them. To be successful in a changing world.

Parenting for Peace offers readers a user-friendly shortcut around today's information overload, because it gives them the most important research from dozens of leading experts woven together with its own empowering perspectives on bringing more joy into family life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Children are our future, and the values of now are the values they will bring with them when they rule the world. Axness advises readers on thinking for the future. *Parenting for Peace* is a strong pick for parenting collections, very much recommended reading. 
-- Midwest Book Review

Marcy Axness's efforts to educate our world are vital to our evolution! I'm so glad she's telling the growth-or-protection story because simple fundamentals are where the truth is.
-- Bruce H. Lipton, author, Biology of Belief and Spontaneous Evolution

Dr. Axness has distilled compelling evidence from the fields of attachment parenting, preconception, and consciousness research into a readable, inspiring and hopeful book about what we really want to do as parents: raise peaceful people. Parenting For Peace gives us a roadmap.
-- Peggy O'Mara, editor-in-chief, Mothering

Marcy Axness lays down the simple but profound principles and practices required to raise generations comfortable in their hearts and happy with themselves. A tranquil revolution of the soul and of the home that would benefit all humanity.
-- Gabor Maté, author, Scattered and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

I know of no one so well equipped educationally, intellectually, emotionally and intuitively to speak to our times.
-- Joseph Chilton Pearce, author, The Biology of Transcendence and Magical Child

Marcy Axness' book has a beautiful message supported by sophisticated understanding of the underlying science. I have borrowed her remarkable translations of findings from our NIH-funded projects in my own lectures.
-- Curt Sandman, fetal brain development researcher

My first impression of Parenting for Peace was like King Joseph’s comment to Mozart, "too many notes," to which the young man replies, "which ones shall I omit?"
The core principles that Marcy Axness elaborates—Presence, Awareness, Rhythm, Example, Nurturance, Trust and Simplicity—are superb. Like a tuning fork, each resonates as a particular ‘state’ in the adult and it is this state that the child attunes herself to.
Axness has collected tons of insights, from many fields, all designed to crack open and release the false hopes and false fears most of us have about ourselves. If there is a ‘cosmic egg,’ it is our self-world view, our social-cultural identity and the labyrinth of habits of body and mind that reincarnate these shell-like qualities, moment by moment, year after year, generation after generation. There are moments when Presence, Awareness, Example, Nurturance, Trust and Simplicity express something more, infinitely greater and outrageously more sensitive and intelligent than the ‘eggs’ we pretend to be.
The key is sparing our children the need for that heavy, self-centered, defensive-reflexive, knee-jerk armor in the first place, which can unfold by not needing it in their primary relationships--that is, with adults, their parents. Adult development ALWAYS precedes child development and this new treasure nudges all of us along the way.
Too many notes? Not one.
--Michael Mendizza, co-author of Magical Parent, Magical Child

Marcy Axness is making a huge contribution to the improvement of parenting with this book!
--Stephane Goldsand, director/producer of Leap Before You Look

Parenting for Peace is one of the best books I have read in years and it's a PARENTING book for Pete’s sake! I never read parenting books any more, but this one is so much more than just a parenting boo; it is an actual in-your-hands recipe for world peace starting from within the home.
--Bryan Post, Founder and CEO of the Post Institute for Family-Centered Therapy

From the Author

I developed the steps and principles of Parenting for Peace over years of studying, parenting, counseling, listening, and observing. I have woven together skeins of intersecting knowledge from such far-ranging fields as psychology and theology... neuroscience and quantum science... anthropology and endocrinology. (And too many other -ologies to mention.) And of course, early human development, the field in which I earned a doctoral degree.

This book is not to proselytize but to inform and invite: see what ideas might beckon you... to consider... to savor... to try on for size. Put them together with your own knowledge, your own important story, to enrich your soul as a parent and as a person. It is my intention that with the solid foundation of these principles, your own intuitive and inner knowing will deepen as you journey through the steps.

Yes, it's a book of considerable length -- meant not so much to be read cover to cover in one go, but ideally to serve as a companion over fifteen to twenty years!

I'm deeply honored that so many colleagues have showered Parenting for Peace with such praise -- so much that it won't all fit in the "Reviews" section above. Here is more:

"Passionate and intelligent yet also profoundly simple, Parenting for Peace provides parents with the tools and support they need to create peace and participation in their families, their communities and the world. Highly recommended."
Sarah J. Buckley, MD, author of Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: A Doctor's Guide to Natural Childbirth

"I applaud Marcy for calling attention to the importance of protecting the sanctity of the embryonic universe. World peace will only ensue from womb peace."
Thomas R. Verny, MD, author of The Secret Life of the Unborn Child

"Parenting for Peace sends a clear, practical message to humanity about how to reap the true promise of our biology: evolve our own consciousness to ensure the future evolution of our species. Read, learn and enjoy."
Joe Dispenza, author of Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind and Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

I was overjoyed as I read Parenting for Peace, not only as a parent, 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?

"Do yourself, your children, and our human family the service of reading and applying Marcy Axness's wisdom. As a pediatrician, I've watched her put her vision into action over two decades. I heartily endorse the sound, simple yet revolutionary guidance she offers. Parenting for Peace won't disappoint you."
Jay N. Gordon, MD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, UCLA Medical School

"A beautifully written call to action with gentle and clear guidance in how to get here. Marcy Axness is a soul guide in a world in need of her vision."
Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting

"I found Marcy Axness's book as exciting as it is reassuring. Indeed, how powerful we really are as parents to help our children's true spirit to shine, and thus to contribute towards profound and healing social transformation. I gladly welcome her unique voice as she decodes for us this most fascinating, rich art-and-science of parenting. This book is an adventure through leading-edge human development science, a personal induction into parental wisdom and leadership at its heartful best, and a call to arms (the arms that hold and guide!) for joining in building a far, far better world."
Robin Grille, psychologist, author of Parenting for a Peaceful World

"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 editor, Child Honouring: How to Turn This World Around

"Parenting for Peace is the ultimate thinking person's guide to nurturing a compassionate child from conception through adolescence."
Scott Blum, author, Waiting for Autumn and Winter Moon Rises

"Dr. Axness's conclusions are rich, her advice is clean, and her generosity of thought for the parent-in-progress pulls them along with her. This is a beautifully written and expressed work. Every page is a gem."
Winifred Fleet, author of "Epigenetics and the evolution of Neanderthals into moderns"

"A significant aggregate of knowledge and wisdom woven into a very understandable story. It is well organized and clear, and could be considered "A Manifesto for Humanity," rather than a parenting book."
Patrick Houser, author, Fathers-To-Be Handbook

Product Details

• Paperback: 443 pages
• Publisher: Sentient Publications (January 30, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591811767
• ISBN-13: 978-1591811763
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 1 x 6.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #107,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

** FLASH--Free Parenting for Peace webinar April 24 2013: "5 Tools for Transforming from Stressed Out to Sane & Centered" | 10am Pacific | Regiser at: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8219580942260318464 **

Her own life and discoveries as an adopted person and a mother led Marcy Axness to pursue a deeper understanding of how we become who we become, how early it begins, and how we can do it in a healthier, more joyful way. She is a popular international speaker on attachment, culture, and child and parent development. Featured in several documentary films, Marcy is an expert in adoption, prenatal development, and Waldorf education. She counsels parents and pre-parents in her private Quantum Parenting practice, applying, honing, and documenting the successful results of Parenting for Peace principles in real life. With her former husband of 25 years, Marcy has raised a son and a daughter, both of whom are engaging, thoughtful, flourishing young adults in their twenties.

In her pre-motherhood life, Marcy won multiple awards and an Emmy nomination as a documentary writer and producer, covering emerging topics in health for CBS News, and has produced programming for Lifetime, Showtime, and The Disney Channel. She has a solid constituency built up over nearly 20 years of teaching, writing, counseling, and networking within multiple intersecting communities focused on progressive human insights, development, and evolution. Marcy's combination of life experience, cultural acumen, and scholarly credibility uniquely equip her to chart this compelling, entertaining, and engaging human roadmap through attachment theory, developmental neurobiology, epigenetics, cell biology, prenatal psychology, child development, and consciousness research to illuminate a pathway of healing and wholeness for coming generations.

Marcy invites you to join her at www.ParentingForPeace.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Book Review by William R. Emerson, Ph.D. February 3, 2012

By William Emerson, Ph.D.

Format:Paperback

Parenting For Peace

Shifts The Pattern of World Violence
Empowers Parents To Parent For Peace
Enables Our Youth to Be Peaceful and Prosper
Advocates Peacemaking During Childbirth & Postpartum
Educates Parents About Life-Long Imprints From Birth and Before
Encourages Parents To Begin Parenting Early, Before They Conceive

Parenting for Peace is a timely and necessary book for the world's troubled times, but at the same time, it's nothing less than an adventure into exciting new findings that compell us to explore and reinvent ourselves, and raise peaceful and peacemaking children in the process. But how does the process work? Quite simple really. Parents practice peacemaking skills as described in her book, and children spontaneously become peacemakers in their own unique way. But Axness also warns that the peacemaking journey is not always easy, and she is gracious and tenacious in describing her own challenges as she parented her two children toward peacemaking. She contends that for some, the process becomes a "heroes journey" with challenging changes in lifestyle, deep encounters with the psyche, and difficult recurrences of childhood memory, but ultimately accompanied by resolve and joy at the end, perhaps akin to ecstasy. Peacemaking parents need to be essentially aware of and present for their children, love them for the fact they exist as much or more than for what they do, and celebrate the various qualities that emerge. Peacemaking parents need to have a deep trust in nature's plan, and in many ways, their job is more to step aside in amazement at the unfolding, than to consciously inform and shape their children.

Parenting for Peace guides and teaches parents in peacemaking skills for all the major life stages from pre-conception through adolescence. At every step of the way, when there is substantive evidence, Axness describes what is happening in the underworld of the body and brain, and how the central nervous system and neurophysiology are wired at every stage of deveopment to promote inhibition or growth, violence or peacefulness.
For each stage she provides practical exercises in parenting, self-experiences in human consciousness, mental exercises to stretch perceptions, affirmations to alter negative belief systems, thought provoking anecdotes to inspire change, and enlightening vignettes to bring about an understanding of what peacemaking is all about. In the end, one longs for the kind of parent that Axness envisons, and we are forever renewed, inspired and changed by the experience. She says, "...heartened by the promise of simple principles backed by leading-edge research, parents can feel confident in their ability to raise children who are 'hardwired for peace'."

The book is a thorough solution to world violence because peacemaking relations between parents and children create the inner conditions where violence can not exist in the first place, nor ever take hold. But peace and peacefulness are much more than the absence of violence. Peacemaking children are nonviolent to be sure, but they possess essential qualities of empathy, compassion, self regulation, self knowledge, self esteem, playfulness, creativity, and the like. They are personally and socially aware and responsible, in tune with their own unique nature,

Have I said how much I loved this book, and how much it has changed my life? Just reading through a stage called The Enchanted Years, which I was not privy to, provided a model for parenting that changed my inner child and rewired some of the desolation I encountered during those years. Other stages of the book had similar effects. I can't recommend this book enough. It was a pleasure to read, and it provides essential information for being and becoming more peaceful and enlightened parents and human beings. Thank you Marcy!

With gratitude,

William R. Emerson, Ph.D.
President of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH)*

*APPPAH is the world's premier organization to educate, endorse,support, and train individuals, families, professionals, and organizations to honor evidence-based procedures and provide optimally healthy births for babies, mothers, fathers, and families.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars When You Are Their World: Cultivating Peace In Your Children February 29, 2012

By Jari Chevalier

Format:Paperback

Hankering for a whole new world? Well, Dr. Marcy Axness' Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers is your ticket: it highlights all that's amiss in how we currently raise children in America and models an emerging holistic worldview in which human beings can blossom into confident, benevolent people.

Dr. Axness reminds us that "we are the soil in which our children grow." Are we spiritually developed and psychologically mature enough to provide the conditions that truly nourish our babies and children?

Discussing every aspect of parenting from how biological life unfolds to how teenagers can be respectfully supported in their pressures, challenges and growth, Axness' brilliant synthesis makes it clear that parenting must be front and center in any successful movement for widespread social wellness. By "taking responsibility for how we invite in, welcome and incarnate our next generation" we engage in social action, and put ourselves in charge of change.

This witty, poetic, fact-loaded and wise book reveals and exposes all the ways people are currently damaging youth, specifically in contemporary Western-style society. It also suggests just how swiftly and comprehensively mothers and fathers who are parenting for peace can revolutionize our world through a conscious, concerted approach.

You'll also understand the details of why we must revise the way we carry, birth, and engage with children at every stage of their development and, to do so, how we must swim against strong social currents that have deliberately undermined the holistic health of children to make for good workers and consumers, to ensure social stability for a corporate state.

Dr. Axness' deep, comprehensive and effective questioning of contemporary medical, educational, and ideological social mores and establishments calls upon parents to turn the tide.

Axness acknowledges that parenting for peace is the most important and challenging job of your life, "this ideal of parenting for a generation of peacemakers is so demanding, so sophisticated, and demands such a level of maturity, we are culturally only now barely up to the task."

And yet, in many ways, this daunting and demanding task calls upon us to merely to be more loving, aware, easeful and natural. Axness teaches us how to gauge ourselves in the midst of our greatest challenges. At the end of each chapter, there are age-specific tips for embodying and practicing the central principles of her teaching: presence, awareness, rhythm, example, nurturance, trust, and simplicity (P.A.R.E.N.T.S.).

By the end of the book, you will know that every opportunity to bring physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual security and wellbeing to a child is a powerful action in service to the living world.

Listen to my Sept. 2008 interview with Dr. Axness here: [...]
And hear her contribution to our special program Where's the Imagination? here: [..]

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A journey worth taking February 5, 2012

By cwing

Format:Paperback

Marcy Axness offers a dynamic and gifted guide to parenting (and living!) in the 21st Century. In her long awaited book, Parenting for Peace, Marcy successfully brings multiple streams of cutting edge knowledge and research into digestible form for the lay person and professional alike. Perhaps most important of all, she offers hope for a better way forward for humanity as a whole. Parenting for Peace is not just for parents. It's a book that belongs on everyone's shelf.