The Best Gift: Honouring Children - The Tyee

[Editor’s note: This is drawn from Raffi’s introduction to Child Honouring: How to Turn This World Around. Edited by Raffi Cavoukian and Sharna Olfman; Foreword by the Dalai Lama.] One morning in late 1996, the phrase “Child Honouring” woke me up from a sound sleep. In that pivotal moment, I realized that all my years of singing and talking with young children, learning all I could about child development -- and then of watching, with growing alarm, the disintegration of communities and the deterioration of our planet -- had been a preparation of sorts, a way of showing me the link between th…