When her 5 year old daughter complained that another girl had been hitting her on the way home from school, the mother told her to hit the other girl back. The daughter replied, “No, Mom, I can't. She's bigger than me and I'm afraid of her.” The mother had grown up in an urban housing project where as a child she had experienced a great deal of violence as a witness, a victim, and a perpetrator. Drawing from her childhood experience, she decided to teach her daughter a lesson in dealing with violence. So she walked her outside, locked the door, and told her through the screen door, “You won't get back into this house until you come back with the other girl's two front teeth.”

More than an hour later, her daughter came back, knocking on the door softly and crying. She didn't know if her mother would let her back into the house because she had only one-half of a tooth from the other girl to present to her mother. She had broken it off with a rock. The mother agreed to let her daughter back into the house. […]