How wonderful it is that Marcy Axness, PhD has delved into the profoundly emotional and intricately scientific sides of conception and parenting, presenting it all in a valid, clear and often light-hearted manner. Her intuitive and scientific research unfolds seamlessly in the crucially important message that it really is possible to “hardwire” our children for peace. Bringing a child into the world and helping him or her to truly thrive is so much more than a dream, and Axness has the formula to support readers in that goal.

Axness plants the seeds for an awakened generation. The inspired result would be a shift in consciousness toward respecting each life stage and bringing awareness toward what is essential to physical, emotional and spiritual growth, both individually as well as collectively.

This book is such a pleasure to read. It excites and motivates, affirms and inspires. You will be empowered, and sustain your empowerment. You may even find the answers you never knew you were looking for!

—Ashley Ess, Bamboo Magazine

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. Parenting for Peace guides parents at all stages from pre-conception through adolescence. At every step of the way, and with 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 development to promote protection or growth, violence or peacefulness.

Axness writes, “...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 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, self-regulation, self-esteem, curiosity, imagination—they are personally and socially aware and responsible, in tune with their own unique natures. They are equipped for innovative success in a changing world.

Axness acknowledges that despite the inherent simplicity of her approach, the journey is not always easy, and she is gracious and tenacious in describing her own challenges with motherhood. As it was for her, the process for some parents becomes a “hero’s journey” with challenging lifestyle shifts, meaningful encounters with the psyche, and sometimes difficult recurrences of childhood memory, but ultimately accompanied by resolve and joy at the end—perhaps akin to bliss. Axness invites parents to cultivate a deep trust in nature’s plan, and suggests ways in which they can support and facilitate (rather than thwart) the unfolding of their children’s unique magnificence.

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 and strives to be the kind of parent that Axness envisons, and we are forever renewed, inspired and changed by the experience.

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 didn’t personally experience, 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!

—William Emerson, The Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health Newsletter

You Are Their World: Cultivating Global Peace With Your Children

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 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 this paradigm-busting book, you will know that every opportunity to bring physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual security and well-being to a child is a powerful action in service to the living world.

—Jari Chevalier, PodBean.com

It seems that most parenting books are written by big name brands. Doctors who gravitate towards and write about an issue that becomes polarizing, like whether or not vaccines are safe and if not can they lead or contribute to the rise in autism?

Or other books written by "celeb moms" who think that fame equals sales. And vying for top sellers, publishers are hard pressed to find titles and new authors who will make the A-list for Apple and Amazon's downloads.

Well, I am counting on Parenting for Peace to do what The Joy of Cooking did for the world: create community amongst parents who will savor the joy of raising peacemakers.

I have known Marcy Axness for many years. We started parenting together in the same decade. The '80s were a challenge for many mothers because Gloria Steinem left a time-bomb-on-the-stairway-leading-up-to-the glass ceiling. And many of us cracked under the pressure of having to do it all.

Raising children while caring for elderly parents, all in support of a two-paycheck income, led many of us astray when it came to not only quality of life issues but the quality of time itself.

Time spent raising our kids to become decent, well-meaning, law abiding citizens.

But what many missed as parents in the '80s is what some never had time to teach. Peace.

I was lucky. I was raised in a household that celebrated humanity and the need for world peace. My mother, Lenore Breslauer was a co-founder of Another Mother For Peace so I learned as a teenager how to become an advocate for something so inherent in every human being: the right to respect all human life and the motto which my mother's organization embraced and fostered, "War is not healthy for children and other living things."

There are many books written about world peace and religious philosophies that are dedicated to achieving it but very few examine where peace begins. At the root: teaching parents how to raise the next generation of peacemakers.

As Axness observes, "One concern I have is the nature and quality of the time parents and children do share -- most specifically, what is that adult portraying as an example for the child -- who is essentially downloading the parent's social-emotional programs."

In my opinion, I have observed , in this age of technoacrobatics, today's children sit for hours unsupervised. They develop relationships with others like themselves who rely more on external stimuli for their growth and development and less time with their parents. This absenteeism can cause a deficit in terms of how that child eventually relates to the world and humankind.

But what if, as Axness posits in her book, "In the midst of our global human, economic and environmental crises, we have been overlooking a most powerful means to cultivate a sustainable, peaceful future; the choices and attitudes with which we bring our children to life and shepherd them into adulthood?"

The "mainspring" of Parenting for Peace is that:

at every moment our children -- as are we -- are either in 'growth mode' or 'protection mode'... vis a vis their neurochemistry, hormonal profile, etc. It is only in the context of 'growth mode' (ie, not feeling under undue stress -- what the American Academy of Pediatrics recently labeled 'toxic stress') that their brain development can express the levels of potential unfoldment that Nature has imbued us with for all these years / eons... with the full spectrum of capacities required of the peacemaker (eg, empathy, self-regulation, imagination, and intelligence). We have for many generations continually thwarted Nature's plan by throwing our children into protection mode -- via so many of our institutionalized practices, such as postpartum separation of mother and baby; shaming, abusive forms discipline; early academics; etc. So compassion (or maybe "Nurturance"-the 5th of the 7 principles) is certainly part of this, but the 7 principles work together to foster optimal growth mode and thus the most robust development of our children's social brain.

In her brilliant book, a thesis which she practices and has preached for many years, Marcy Axness beckons, "Let's raise a generation hardwired for peace and innovation from the very beginning."

And she believes, and supports with extensive research, that this process begins in the womb environment. The book's seven-step/seven-principle matrix lays out a road map for parents to follow and adapt, designed to foster a relational atmosphere in which the child's developing brain can unfold its full potential, in which Nature has included such peacemaker capacities as self-regulation, self-reflection, trust and empathy. Instead of the addictions many manifest today which includes competitive materialism and aggression (or simple jaded ennui, which is a kind of soul violence) towards parents and peers, adolescents raised in a home with these principles find an inner richness that shores them up in a world gone a bit mad with technoacrobatics.

But the means through which many children compare their identity to one another is a false sense of self which has been harbored and cultivated in a society that has lost its compass for what matters most. Human connection. (World peace doesn't spring fully formed. It begins with womb peace. Then infant peace. Then Mommy-and-Daddy peace, then teacher peace and so on...)

Axness has raised two "peacemaker" children who are now celebrating their early adulthood having been fostered and immunized with this consciousness. Their early childhood environment was a cultural cooperative unlike anything I had ever experienced. And today it is even more rare to see a parent invest in something as important as this.

And as she points out, this revolutionary approach isn't very complicated:

How best can we nurture our children's capacities for peace, creativity, ingenuity? It's quite simple, actually, but not always easy: we do it by supporting their life-building will energies, which in turn foster optimal brain development. As with a rose, we ensure the unfolding of a beautiful mind and body when, during these first seven years, we enrich the child's soil -- her home, her days, her parents -- with the four elements most important to the young child: nourishing diet; physical and emotional warmth; consistent rhythms; and an atmosphere of reverence, awe and beauty.

In the book's dedication, her two inspirations, her own children, Ian and Eve, are proof that parenting for peace produces results. Axness speaks from the depth of her own personal experience having raised them from the womb to the ecologically sensitive world environment.

"I am unspeakably proud of what thoughtful, engaged, loving people you are, and the unwavering integrity you bring to the art of living your lives."

The book begins with a quote from Kahil Gibran, "You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far."

And as every parent desires nothing but goodness and wellness for their children they can best achieve that by aspiring to the profound principles and practices of parenting for peace.

If having power over another human being is a provocation for war, then parents need a new manifesto, a cultural reboot to help them raise the next generation to believe that their truer power lies in their hearts, entrusted in their minds, having been raised with a kind of love that can, in fact, change the world.

The book asks the question, "Do You Know How Powerful You Really Are?", and helps parents prepare their children for even bigger answers. "Is there anything I can do to change the world?"

Yes! Learn, read, and teach others Parenting for Peace.

—Nancy Chuda, Huffington Post