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“When I was about twenty years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time.

“But one day when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking — the first in his life.  And she told him he would have to go outside and find a switch for her to hit him with.  The boy was gone a long time.  And when he came back in, he was crying.

“He said to her, ‘Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock you can throw at me.’  All of a sudden this mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view:  that if my mother wants to hurt me, it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone.

“The mother took the boy onto her lap and they both cried.  Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever:  never violence.  Because violence begins in the nursery — one can raise children into violence.”

— From a peace prize acceptance speech given by Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978

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