June 18, 2025
This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Mallory Wyckoff, Search’s Associate Director of Philanthropy Communications. She writes as a parent to all peacebuilders amidst another week of violence.
Last fall, I sat across from one of Search’s partners in Mombasa, Kenya, listening with rapt attention as she told us about her work with street youth. A group of these unhoused boys had become extremely violent, committing heinous crimes and striking fear within the community. This woman, however, was not deterred. She gathered the group and, one by one, gave each boy a hug, telling him she loved and believed in him. She saw them through the eyes of a peacebuilder; she cared for them with the heart of a mother. That day, the boys surrendered all of their weapons to the local authorities and committed to halting the violence.
In the nine years since I became a mother, I can’t recall a single moment where the flames singeing the earth have relented. Political unrest and surging polarization. Numerous wars. A pandemic that lingers on. A climate crisis that threatens our very existence. This is the world in which my husband and I are raising our children—a world that is, in so many ways, not as it’s intended to be.
A friend once casually asked what my favorite part of being a mother was. There I was, breastmilk stains on my shirt, having neither showered nor sat down to eat a meal that day. I was in the throws of the early years, two young girls at my feet or on my hip. The exhaustion and overwhelm were real and visceral, but the answer to her question surfaced with unhindered clarity. Were she to ask me the question again today, nine years in, my answer would be the same.
My favorite part about being a mother is creating a demonstration plot for the world I long to see, beginning with our family.
Each day, within the four walls of our home, we try to live into a different world—not an out-of-touch escapism, divorced from reality, but rather a conscious reflection of the reality we long to see. If we want something to be true in the world, we seek to embody it in our family. In big and many, many small ways, we’re trying to say “yes” to a different world than the one we know now—one that is humane, generous, kind. Every choice we make as parents can either add a brick to solidify the world as it is, or it can creatively begin reconstructing a new one right in the shell of the old. And this is why I’m convinced that parenting is one of the most powerful forms of peacebuilding.
I know well the mundanity of snack-making and summer camp planning. I know that much of parenting feels like wild uncertainty at best. But I also know that simple acts, simple moments can speak a better word than all the ones that echo from our smartphones and TV screens. When we change a diaper or wash skinned knees, we affirm that vulnerability is to be tended to with care. When we are mindful of the power differential between parents and children, we can steward our power in ways that nurture rather than exploit. When we allow children—allow ourselves—to feel the full range of emotions, we develop regulated nervous systems that can generate calm in an anxious world. When we reject violent means of raising or communicating with our children, we model far more powerful and generative forms of human interaction. When we grant our children the freedom to be who they are instead of what we imagined, we honor human agency and dignity. When we own our mistakes and invest in repair, we demonstrate the possibilities of forgiveness and reconciliation. Every choice we face as parents holds an opportunity to move with the grain of a more beautiful world.
Perhaps the most powerful part of this work is not how we parent our children, but rather how we are being re-parented as we do so. Our children reflect back all the places within us needing to be tended to, listened to, loved. To be a parent is to be open to all the ways this role invites us to become more whole human beings. To be a peacebuilder is to know that peace begins within us.
We do this work—within our families, within ourselves—amidst a backdrop of conflict, polarization, war. I am not mother to street youth in Kenya. I am not mother to a man who surrendered to extremist notions and gunned down an elected official in Minnesota. But I am mother to Olive and to Ivy. These are the frontlines on which I seek to build peace.
