By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter 
Many primary school children report being pushed, grabbed, slapped, kicked by
their own parents and teachers Dr. Maureen Saams-Vaughan, consultant paediatrician, Medical Association of Jamaica's (MAJ's) Mike D'Silva symposium.
ON THE topic of child rearing, Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese poet from the last century, told parents : "you may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with
yesterday".
Many parents could benefit from the poet's foresight because based on local research on violence and aggression among Jamaica's children, Dr. Maureen Saams-Vaughan, consultant paediatrician, indicates that many children are becoming their angry, violent parents.
Many children, in some cases more than 80 per cent of those children surveyed, report that they are watching adults at home slap each other around as they settle their differences; they see adults threatening each other or actually using a gun or a knife to injure each other; the children themselves are pushed, grabbed, slapped by their own parents; beaten with objects and kicked. When they go to school they experience further violent physical abuse at the hands of their teachers there too, the children report being pushed, grabbed, slapped and beaten with objects.
In their wider communities, the children report witnessing stabbings and shootings; some of these children were raped, robbed and shot at.
"We sometimes forget the other aspects of violence that we teach our children...four out of every 10 children report the loss of a family member to murder... and remember these are 11-year-old children," said Dr. Saams-Vaughan.
Very often, the murdered family member was the father and the consultant paediatrician stressed that the statistics point to an average of about one child in every primary school class (1:40) having lost their father by murder.
These reports of personal experiences of violence, Dr. Saams-Vaughan said, were contained in a study of the day-to-day experiences of 11-year-old children to violence. The study was conducted by the University of the West Indies' Department of Child Health.
"We are teaching them, by our response to our own difficulty, that when adults get angry it is okay to beat each other up ... we are teaching them, through all their life experiences, that the way to settle conflict is through aggression and violence," she said. "But, we have also taught them fear, and taught them such fear that sometimes it is debilitating, and we have also taken away from them, the people who are supposed to love and nurture them... this violence continues into adulthood."
She explained that the children were learning these violent responses very early in babyhood through the emotional hardwiring of the brain.
There are "pathways" in the brain that can be "wired", in the first six months of the child's life, for aggression and violence or love and caring. Dr. Saams-Vaughan explained that babies who experience feelings of love, who are nurtured, hugged, loved and made to feel welcome in this world respond later in childhood and adulthood as loving, caring and beautiful people. However, those who experience only hate, violence and aggression, would not have had the opportunity to develop their nurturing pathways. These children know only the response of violence when there is conflict.
