My ongoing professional challenge has been deciding how to teach nonviolent communication to children effectively. Coping with feelings and expressing feelings constructively while honoring the feelings of others has been a lifelong aim for me. This skill seems integral to achieving peace in the world. Through Quakers I have been exposed to Marshal Rosenburg's work on nonviolent communication. Rosenburg's 'I statement' is aimed at helping us resolve conflicts. I will explore my journey developing a new way to to apply Rosenburg's concepts with young people through children’s literature in this article.
A systematic observation of how professionals in the field of nonviolent communication reveals a repeated theme. They seem to surmise that, if we can teach children what words to say in the face of conflict, they will be equipped with tools to deal with adversity. I noticed many educators wove Rosenberg’s concept of ‘I statements’ into their curriculum. While using these curricula, I struggled with ways to show or demonstrate it on the experiential level for children who needed it most. We can show a child how to communicate in a way that they will focus on the speaker’s thought, feelings, and experiences. But I wrestled with how to acknowledge the feelings of children and the situations from which their feelings arise as we instruct them in nonviolent communication. Beginning with the word “I”, expressing a perspective without blaming or attacking someone else, voicing feelings without putting others on the defensive were all strategies that worked. Providing experiential scenarios in which these feelings arise takes time. Realistic scenarios to explore were needed. Seeing conflicts play out visually, allows kids to talk through things with puppets, role plays, or discussions arises in an imaginary world apart from their world. A toolchest of strategies can best be constructed through experience without the ramifications of real-world consequences.
The ‘I Care Cats’ program for lower grades with the I-Care Cat and his I-Care Rules and developed by the Peace Education Foundation (https://peaceeducation.org/.) were fun to use in my classroom. They helped introduce children to what conflict is, how it affects them, and how to use ‘I statements’. As great as the ‘Teaching Tolerance’ program was, I saw sometimes children struggled with understanding some of the nuances of different feelings because what happened to them felt different than what the script espoused. They needed more time to discern from real experience of a conflict. My school had a moment of silence for reflection at the beginning of each day along with a ‘town meeting’ for people to voice their feelings. This helped students reflect instead of speaking when an idea comes to mind and encouraged students to practice focus and self-control. Mindfulness practice is beautiful but exploring the nuts and bolts of experience in different circumstances needed attention. I questioned how curricula about feelings considered the way feelings changed outcomes. Could a few simple sentences be a one size resolves all conflict win? I did not want to let the kids down, so I looked further than the curriculum I was presented with. I could not explain all the different feelings and how to cope with them or predict the outcome of the use of an I statement in such a prescribed manner. I knew I needed to pay attention to the gnawing sense that something more needed to be considered. There was something missing. I did not prepare enough lessons with realistic circumstances children could relate to and act out. Being the Quaker seeker that I am, I had to find out how to best do this. I looked at the first part of that statement ‘I Feel...’ and thought exploring feelings might be the key.
I read books by experts on feelings voraciously. Susan David’s ‘Emotional Agility’, Emotions Revealed, by Paul Eckman, Achieving Emotional Literacy’ by Claude Steiner, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Coleman and more. I queried (Google) on children’s experience of different emotions. I found various mental health professionals presenting generic case histories of children who faced disappointment, fear, anger, joy, overjoy, and more but few ‘experts’ writing books about the childhood experience about feelings. They also explained little kernels of coping for parents and adults. The experience of the child seemed to be what was missing. I wanted the identification of that experience to be part of my contribution to peace education. My efforts with the I Care Cats and Teaching Tolerance program were not as successful as they could have been, because the acknowledgement of the variety of contexts and circumstances while coping could never be addressed in short simple lessons.
Peaceful kids that really care about each other are important, but kids with the valuable skill of discernment takes time and consideration to learn. While I had been trained in non-violent communication and I had moments of silence before school started, I did not feel I was giving the children the tool to discern for themselves when conflicts arose. I taught the precepts of the ‘I Care Cats’ from the Peaceworks Peace Education Foundation. Yes, kids would go through the motions and use the ‘I feel ---- When you ---, and I need you to –’ formula when they sat at my ‘Peace Resolution Table’. I still felt I was missing something. I believe the slow acceptance of honoring the feeling and the context in which it occurs needed to be included.
Could I teach this tool of discernment? Do teachers, or students have time to stop a lesson and really discern what it is that causes a powerful feeling to interfere with the classroom?
Before I understood the need for discernment, I wanted a system and results that really worked. I tried to explain the ‘I statement’ to students. Each time I could only come up with one example of a conflict. I did not take the time to go into the world view of a child to consider what kind of conflicts they have and how they truly think of others when they have conflicts. My scenario was [kid ‘A’ grabs kid ‘B’s’ toy, and kid ‘A’ wants it back]. I noticed other teachers using the same scenario. Maybe that was the example we learned in the training. The sound bite of nonviolent communication definition of conflict for kids was born and it did get the point across of what conflict is. Many children understood the gist of it and their communication in classrooms improved. But conflicts in classrooms erupted that had nothing to do with grabbing a toy, and the feelings inside were different. The way to process them was different too.
What do you do if your friend has a huge booger on their nose and wants to play with you? If you tell them, ‘I feel disgusted when you don’t blow your nose,’ will their feelings be hurt? Should you tell them? Should you just not play with them? What do you do when it is your first day of school and you find out the lunch lady does not make sandwiches the way your mom does? Do you cry? Do you cope? How? What do you do when your friend eats the last cookie? Should you grab it back? What should you do when you see a scary spider? Should you scream? I decided to write books that would explore these questions so children could take time to discern outside of their own personal conflicts, so they would be prepared when conflicts arose.
The years I worked with children gave me experience with a lot of childhood emotions, but I wanted to know the best ways to help them cope. Most of the books on feelings were written about adults and their feelings. So, I interviewed teachers. One Kindergarten teacher told me ‘The children in my class are low social economic children, they only know two emotions; ‘happy and sad.’ I thought to myself that even if those are the only two emotions these children could talk about, I would be willing to wager that there are more emotions going on inside them than just those two.
Curious about this concept of limited feelings, I took my paints to the park. Depot Park in my home city of Gainesville, Florida’ that had an author day, and took my paints and ‘Emotatude Series of books’ to invite kids to paint their feelings as some of my books do. I received all kinds of feelings painted on paper plates in this park filled with ‘children from a low social economic background’. I got paintings of surprise, happiness, sadness, love, creativity, anger and rage. The rage painted by a child living with her grandma for serious reasons was so powerful that day that I put it in my book about anger.
Their paintings evolved into a label of an emotion that welled up inside of these children. There were far more than two emotions represented. Parents got deeply engaged by their children’s art. Theorists in the books I was reading about the science of emotion at that time proposed that emotional literacy starts to develop at the same time children are learning to read. With all of these paintings representing the inner life of these children, I felt these children deserved to explore and to express them. These tempura paint paintings on paper plates laying side by side to dry in the park that day were proof to me that children are far more emotionally sophisticated than we make them out to be. These paintings were now steppingstones on my path forward. The children proved they were ready for and maybe even hungry for stories about feelings. I felt drawn to write books that provided feeling words in realistic, and developmentally appropriate contexts they occur in for kids one feeling at a time. I could have the characters in my children’s books find healthy ways to cope with these feelings. This approach made the complex path to non-violent communication for children that builds resiliency, and coping skills seem less complex.
I used sight words and created dialogue that was simple for new readers to try. I wanted to cater to the four-year-old to six-year-old crowd. Learning emotional literacy while learning to read just makes sense to me. So, I designed the ‘I Feel…When…’ book series and it was published with Everfield Press. I FEEL...WHEN... books are part of the Reading with Feeling Program sold at Barnes and Nobels and other booksellers. It provides an easy transition from reading pictures to reading printed language. The books in the series explore the importance of dealing with feelings through nonviolent communication to cope with experiences in our everyday lives. The series of 28 'I Feel When' Books revolve around Love, Disgust, Fear, Anger, Interest, Shyness, Frustration, Loneliness, Confusion, Guilt, Hope, Pride, Amusement, Inspiration, Failure, Anxiety, Boredom, Jealousy, Blues, Sadness, Overwhelm, Resentment, Excitement and more.
Each story about a feeling is followed by reflective questions for discussion to involve the reader with a parent or teacher. After all it is much easier to talk to your child about anger when it involves a yellow furry monster named Ben who feels angry when his friend Cal eats the last cookie than it is to talk to your child, or parents to talk about their own anger. Discussing Ben’s feelings and inappropriate behavior of stamping on the cookie Cal had in his hand is easier than discussing a tantrum a child just had.
When I take these books to schools and read them, or perform their stories with puppets, I get wonderful responses. I thought I was making a difference in the world one emotion at a time. But now a cold chill runs across the State of Florida with our book banning, and narrow-minded approach to education. Unfortunately, the State of Florida has the Individual Freedom Act, commonly known as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act and abbreviated to the Stop WOKE Act. This is a Florida state law which regulates the content of instruction and training in schools and workplaces. It outlaws SEL (social emotional learning) to weed out so-called woke education concepts. I worry that, among other educationally destructive forces, in this atmosphere there could be a pivot away from literature dealing with feelings in Florida public schools.
About the Author-
Karen White Porter is a member of Gainesville Friends Meeting in Gainesville Florida. She lives in Newberry Florida with her husband Jim, daughter Cole, and pet dog Mojo and pet cat Eva. To support the publication of the I Feel…When… book series she requests family, and (F)friends ask their local library to add her ‘I Feel … When…’ book series to their collection through your online material request form or ask your librarian to purchase this book for your local library collection.
