By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter 
Don't beat your children. Parents' response to anger affects their children's outlook on violence - Dr. Elizabeth Ward, Director, Disease Prevention and Control.
OFTEN OPERATING at the subliminal level when parents administer discipline to their children, is the biblical injunction encouraging them not to spare the rod and spoil the child. However, this now runs counter to new thinking and best practice on childrearing.
In fact, epidemiologist Dr. Elizabeth Ward, indicates that one of the best ways to raise children to resist violence is not to beat them.
"We all have to ask ourselves a personal question, 'Are we raising our children to resist violence?', because how we deal with our children and how we respond to our own anger and their anger, really affects how violent they become," she said at the recently-held Paediatric Association of Jamaica biennial international conference.
She also said that parents can protect their children from violence in other ways:
- give them love and attention
- make sure your children are supervised
- show appropriate behaviour by the way you act be consistent about rules
and discipline
- try to keep your children from seeing violence in the home, community and
in the media.
Dr. Ward, who is the Director of Disease Prevention and Control, has been studying violence and its impact on the Jamaican society for some time. She said that the country's children, even those under 10 years old, are experiencing tremendous violence in their lives. Most of the violence is occurring in the familiar environment of the home and most of the perpetrators are familiar people - the children's relatives.
The school is also another setting where children are experiencing a lot of violence, especially the young boys. Dr. Ward said that up to 60 per cent of the violence-related injuries in schools are inflicted on the 10 - 19 age-group males.
What is actually being used to hurt the children? Mainly blunt objects and a lot of bodily force.
"And as the children get older, especially in 10 - 19 year-old males, you see sharp objects, - knives, pencils and you do actually start seeing gunshots," she said.
The under 10 females, she said, are suffering heavily from the effect of sexual assault, again in the homes and again many of the perpetrators are familiar people in their lives.
Using the geographic information system, the epidemiologist is seeing an overlap in the areas of high homicide rates, the addresses of most of the children exposed to violence and the addresses of those attending the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) for violence-related injuries.
"This is something we really need to focus on and target our interventions and look at the relationships between different types of violence occurring in different age groups within the society," she stressed.
