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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
So you decided to make rules about the violent play. How did you come up with the first set of rules specifically dealing with violent play?
The children dictate stories to me in the morning, which we then act out later in the day. Sometimes they would dictate stories that, to me, seemed to be inappropriate. I wondered if enacting these stories would make some children feel uncomfortable. So I brought it up in class, and the children made these rules, which I was glad about, because they were close to the rules I had hoped they would make. They decided that the play could not be too bloody, parts of bodies could not be cut off in "pretend" and nothing inside the body could come out. Knowing that some children were made uncomfortable by these things made it easy to set the limits for the kids when they were telling stories.
The fact that these things were happening at all, and that the activities of one child might make another child uncomfortable, implies that there are very different levels of violent play from child to child. Do you have any theories about what causes one child to be more violent than another?
When I talked with the kids about it, one boy said, "The reason I'm not violent is that my parents just say 'no, no, no, no.'" And yet for another child who isn't particularly interested in violence, the parents may not have such strict rules at all. It didn't seem consistent to me. It seems harder for children when their parents' rules are inconsistent. They would be critical if their parents said, "You can see this movie, but you must cover your eyes at this part because it's too scary or violent." They really wanted their parents to be consistent with the rules.
But I didn't see that kids who were allowed to see more violence played more violently. There were kids who weren't allowed to see much violence who were so fascinated by it that they would catch every word that other kids were saying, and act as though they had seen the movies themselves, because violence was so attractive to them.
One boy in your classroom, Seth, seemed to embellish the explicitly violent fantasies, and claimed to have seen all of these violent movies. And yet, in talking with him, you eventually discovered that the plot lines he claimed to have seen in violent movies weren't real. Do you think that for him, and children like him, violence will always be a crucial part of their play, whether or not they are exposed to it in the media?
He was looking for excitement and he would have found it in whatever form it existed in his culture. I'm sure that if there weren't children seeing these movies in his presence, he would have looked for whatever the exciting thing was in the environment. Some children just seem to be searching for that excitement -- but what they find when searching depends upon what they were exposed to.
Eventually, you came to feel strongly enough about this connection between the kids' violence and the media that you sent a letter home to parents, along with a full bibliography of studies done on violence in the media, and suggested that the parents limit their children's exposure to violent TV and R-rated movies. Why did you find it necessary to do this?
Parents can find it overwhelming to limit their children's exposure to violence in the media. Knowing that everyone was limiting it together made it more manageable. They knew that other children in the class wouldn't be watching those movies and putting pressure on one another to watch more. They knew that if their child went over to somebody else's home, they probably wouldn't be seeing something that they had banned in their home. They knew that if their child went to a birthday party, they wouldn't go out to a violent movie.
What were some of the positive things that came out of allowing children to engage in violent fantasy play?
The most important thing was that they began to listen to each other when they encountered problems in the game. They had to hear the similarities between their feelings about the play, and the differences, and then they had to come to some compromise about their differences of opinion.
They played, for instance, a game they called the "shooting game," where they pointed with their fingers and said "Bang," and the person who was pretending to be shot was supposed to fall down. They were getting into a lot of arguments and calling each other cheaters. The game would end with everybody angry, and they would come into the classroom upset after recess.
It turned out that the biggest problem was that when a child pretended to shoot another child, the child who was supposedly shot would refuse to fall down, saying, "You didn't really get me." That's when the arguments began. So they made a rule that if you pointed a finger at someone and said "Bang," the other child had to fall down, but could count to 10 and get up again. The child who was "shot" at wasn't out of the game for too long, so he felt satisfied, and the person who did the pretend shooting felt satisfied because it had the desired effect.
After that, they could play in a way that was actually peaceful in spite of the violent content, which to me is a really important distinction. There is play that has violence in the fantasy content -- like cowboys and Indians did, or Peter Pan when he gets the pirates, or the pretend suicide. That's all imaginary violence. And then there is real violence when children are actually angry at each other and hurtful, either physically or emotionally. As the children negotiated the rules, they became more peaceful with each other in reality.
