Ten black mothers sat on the stage in an auditorium and looked into a diverse crowd of women in the audience. They were about to share something personal and hurtful with this room full of mostly strangers.

They were going to talk about something they didn't normally share with their white friends or colleagues.

It was about to get real in that room.

In the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager fatally shot by a white Ferguson, Missouri police officer, conversations about race in the St. Louis area have been loaded.

Christi Griffin, the president of The Ethics Project, wanted this to be different. She wanted to invite mothers of other races to hear directly from black mothers the reality of raising a black son in America. She wanted them to hear the words they each had said to their own sons, in different variations over the years, but all with the same message: Stay alive. Come home alive.

She wanted mothers who had never felt the fear, every single time their son walked outside or drove a car, that he could possibly be killed to hear what that felt like.

Griffin's son, now grown, had never gotten in trouble nor given her any trouble growing up. But when her son was 14 years old, the family moved into an all-white neighborhood. She took him to the police department to introduce him to the staff. She wanted the officers to know that he belonged there, that he lived there.

When he turned 16, it was time for another talk. Every single time he got into his car to drive, she made him take his license out of his wallet and his insurance card out of the glove compartment.

"I did not want him reaching for anything in the car."

He graduated from college with a degree in physics.

Marlowe Thomas-Tulloch said that when she noticed her grandson was getting bigger and taller, she laid bare a truth to him: Son, if the police stop you, I need for you to be humble. But I need more than that. I need for you to be prepared to be humiliated.

If they tell you take your hands out of your pockets, take your hands out. Be ready to turn your pockets out. If they tell you to sit down, be prepared to lie down.

You only walk in the street with one boy at a time, she told him.

"What?" her grandson said. In his 17-year-old mind, he hadn't done anything wrong and nothing was going to happen to him.

"If it's three or more, you're a mob," she said. "That's how they will see you."

She started to cry.

"Listen to me," she begged. "Hear me."

Finally, she felt him feel her fear.

If they ask you who you are, name your family.

Yes, sir and no, sir. If they are in your face, even if they are wrong, humble yourself and submit yourself to the moment.

"I'm serious," she said. "Because I love you."

She told him she would rather pick him up from the police station than identify his body at a morgue.

When her grandson left to go home, she called her daughter to tell her about the conversation. Her daughter asked her what she had said, because her son came home upset, with tears in his eyes.

"I hope I said enough to save his life," Thomas-Tulloch said. "I'd rather go down giving him everything I got."

The mothers talked about the times their sons had been stopped in their own neighborhoods because "they fit the description." They shared the times their sons had come home full of rage and hurt for being stopped and questioned for no reason. And they told the other mothers how often they told their sons to simply swallow the injustice of the moment. Because they wanted them alive, above all.

Amy Hunter, director of racial justice at the YWCA in metro St. Louis, said it's taken her 10 years to be able to share this story about her son without crying. She didn't want her white friends to see her cry when she told it. She didn't want to look weak.

Her four children are now older, but when one of her sons was 12, he decided to walk home from the Delmar Loop in University City where he had met some friends.

He saw a police officer circling him, and he knew. He was wearing Sperrys, a tucked-in polo shirt, a belt. He was 12, and he knew, but he was scared.

He lived five houses away, and he hadn't done anything wrong.

"I knew you were home," he said to his mom when he finally made it home after being frisked. "I knew I was about to get stopped, and I thought about running home to you."

His mother froze.

"I forgot to tell him," she said. "I forgot to tell him: Don't run. Don't run or they'll shoot you."

Her 12-year-old cried when he told her what had happened and asked if he was stopped because he was black.

"Probably, yeah," she said.

"I just want to know, how long will this last?" he asked her.

That's when she started to cry.

"For the rest of your life," she said.

It doesn't matter about your college degree, the car you drive, the street you live on, she told the moms in the audience. It's not going to shield your child like a Superman cape. She admitted that it was difficult to share these painful moments.

Just one of the mothers on the stage asked a single question of the audience. Assata Henderson, who has raised three children, all college graduates, said she called her sons to ask them what they remembered about "the talk" she had given them about how to survive as a black man.

"Mama, you talked all the time," they said to her.

It made her wonder, she said. She said she wasn't pointing any fingers, but it made her wonder about the conversations the other mothers were having with their sons, who grow up to be police officers, judges and CEOs.

"You're the mothers," she said to the crowd. "What are the conversations you are having with the police officers who harass our children?"

My crucible was a papier-mache pueblo village.

A fifth-grade teacher assigned my daughter the project as part of a social studies unit. Typically, she worked on projects like this with a fair amount of parental guidance and oversight.

I passed the math word problems over to my spouse, but crafty and creative research assignments? That's my jam.

But this year, I had decided to take a hands-off approach to homework. I would still check to make sure my children were getting it done, but it was going to be all their own unassisted work and not my responsibility.

So, as hard as it was to stand by and watch the papier-mache explosion in my kitchen, I sat on my hands.

The research backs up my resolve.

The most thorough scientific investigation of how parental involvement affects students' academic achievement was published earlier this year by sociology professors Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris. Their research found that parental assistance isn't always a help in the long run. It can actually be a hindrance.

They reviewed nearly three decades' worth of longitudinal surveys of American parents and assessed more than 60 different measures of parental participation, from helping with homework to volunteering at schools, and controlled for parents' race, class and level of education. They looked at the relationship between that involvement and the students' academic progress, by measures such as reading and math test scores.

Most of the parental involvement didn't translate to better scores or better long-term outcomes. Robinson and Harris's data, published in "The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement With Children's Education," found that once students enter middle school, parental help with homework can actually bring test scores down.

The things that did seem to help? Reading to young children and talking to teenagers about college. Sending the message that school is important and providing support and encouragement when a child's academic performance falters.

There is wisdom in letting children try on their own, even when they are getting it wrong. But this is also not to say children should be left to sink or swim on their own.

Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, recently wrote an op-ed in which he described not helping as his 5-year-old son struggled for a minute to sound out the word "gratefully" while reading a book together.

Parents have a natural impulse to want to step in at the first sign of difficulty.

But, as Khan described in his essay, he is teaching his son that his brain grows when he struggles to learn something hard. We gravitate toward things that come easily and naturally to us. Learning happens in the struggle. That effort is also how we develop persistence.

Many parents fear their child will suffer if all of her peers are getting additional help while she tries to keep up alone.

A mom, who admitted to spending considerable time watching YouTube videos learning how to help her teenage son with a major high school project, explained her motivation: You don't want your child to fall behind because he's the only one not getting extra help. She poured hours of her own time into helping with the typing, formatting and grunt work involved with his assignment. The school had fostered a culture so competitive that it took parental involvement to excel.

That kind of environment is doing a disservice in the long run to the students, and some brave parents ought to speak up about it.

At the elementary and middle school levels, it becomes fairly evident to teachers when parents have taken too large a role in a student's project or homework. After all, they see the classroom performance and work of the same child day-to-day.

In our low-stakes fifth grade homework, the pueblo turned out just fine. In fact, my daughter took great pride in having done it by herself. It may have even provided a boost of confidence for her to know that she could figure it out on her own.

When the next assignment involved making a puppet of Abraham Lincoln, she asked for some fabric and a sewing kit.

I handed her the supplies and didn't even offer to thread the needle.

The puppet's hat didn't quite fit. And the beard may have been a bit uneven. But she managed to capture the spirit of Honest Abe perfectly.

Women who work up the courage to call an abuse hotline often ask a jarring question:

"How do I get him to stop hitting me?"

Katie Ray-Jones, CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, knows the answer: "You're not going to be able to do that."

It's not that abusers are incapable of changing their behavior; they can.

But the victim of intimidation, threats, bullying, put-downs and abuse will not be the one who changes an abuser.

The recent release of a graphic video of Ray Rice, former Baltimore Ravens running back, punching his then-fiancee in the face and dragging her unconscious body out of an elevator, sparked a public outcry. Plenty of discussion on social media focused on the complicated reasons why victims choose to stay with their abusers.

There can be a sense of forgone conclusion about the abusers. If they are capable of the sort of brutal violence witnessed in the Rice video, what are the chances an abuser can learn to manage such out-of-control behavior?

"If we talked more about what to do for the Ray Rices of the world, who are the perpetrators of violence, we might get even further in the discussion," said Ruth Glenn, interim executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

The answer has high stakes: 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men aged 18 and older in the United States have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to a 2011 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. Teens and young adults face the greatest risk of violence in relationships.

Ray-Jones ran groups for perpetrators for a few years and saw a hundred men go through the treatment program. It was court-ordered treatment, twice a week for 52 weeks. There were some successes: A man said he realized he would yell at his wife and tell her if she could just keep the house clean or the kids quiet, he wouldn't get so irritated. He realized his culpability in that moment and started changing his own behavior.

She recalls another abuser, who said all the "right things" during the yearlong treatment, then said on graduation day: "I don't understand why I had to do this program. I only punched her in the mouth."

He had knocked three of his partner's teeth out, and she had needed stitches.

Edward Gondolf is one of the world's leading authorities on predicting abuse and reassault among batterers, and the former director of research at the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute. A long-term, longitudinal study by Gondolf looked at reassault rates for men who attended treatment programs. Although almost half reassaulted their partner within the four-year span, the reassault rate went down over time.

In fact, it went down substantially over time. More than 80 percent of the men had been violence-free for at least a year by the 30-month mark.

In other words, most abusers reassaulted early on. Eventually, the vast majority were violence-free for at least a year in the extended follow-up.

"Intervention does seem to matter," Gondolf said. He cautioned, however, that there was a portion of men who were violent early on and unrelenting in their abuse. "These are the horror stories that bring into question whether men can change," he said.

There is a core group of abusers who are unresponsive to change, impervious to treatment.

There's been research that tried to help identify which abusers are more likely to reoffend, but there's a basic way women can get a sense of the answer themselves: Ask yourself if you feel safe. Do you think he will hit you again? Listen to your gut. Are you living with verbal abuse, threats and intimidation?

The same can be taught to young people learning to navigate the early years of dating and relationships. If your child is dating, talk about what a healthy relationship looks like. Share the signs of possible red flags. How much is this other person trying to control you? Is he or she overly jealous, always asking a lot of questions about your whereabouts? How much time and attention does he or she want and demand from you? Do you feel listened to and respected?

Oftentimes, abuse goes unreported. What is the likelihood that abusers who never seek therapy, or are not forced to undergo treatment, will change? I asked Gondolf.

"That's an important question," he said. "And one we've somewhat neglected."

Listen to your gut.