Non-violent Parenting !!!!

Dr. Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and founder of
the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Non-violence, in his June 9 lecture at the
University of Puerto Rico , shared the following story as an example of
"non-violence in parenting":

"I was 16 years old and living with my
parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of
Durban , South Africa , in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the
country and had no neighbors, so my two
sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends
or go to the movies.
One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an
all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town,
my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in
town, my father asked me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting
the car serviced. When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, ' I will
meet you here at 5:00p.m., and we will go home
together.After hurriedly completing my chores, I went
straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double-feature that I forgot the time. It was 5:30 before I remembered.
By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my
father was waiting for me, it was almost 6:00.
He anxiously asked me, ' Why were you late? ' I was so ashamed of telling him
I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, ' The car wasn ' t ready,
so I had to wait, ' not realizing that he had already called the garage. When
he caught me in the lie, he said: ' There ' s something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn't give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure outwhere I went wrong with you, I ' m going to walk home 18 miles and think about it.
So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the
dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads. I couldn ' t leave him, so for
five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go
through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered.I decided then and there that I was never going
tolie again.I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had
punished me the way we punish our children, whether I would have learnt a
lesson at all. I don ' t think so. I would have suffered t he punishment and gone
on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful
that it is still there in my mind as if it happened yesterday. That is the power
of non-violence.