War Play Doesn't Make Violent Kids
I am a pacifist. I do not support acts of war between nations, I eat a vegetarian diet and I try (and fail) to never raise my voice with my children. I believe there is a peaceful solution to every problem.
Yet twice a month, I sit down with a group of friends to play Dungeons and Dragons. I pretend to be a cold-blooded killer. Last week I cut a dragon's head off with my flaming sword. I am not even joking. It felt great.
After the game, I put away my character sheet and dice and went home, where I was not at all tempted to cut off my husband's head with a flaming sword. Even though he was acting like a grumpy dragon.
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My teenager engages in a lot more war play than I do. While I play Scrabble on my iPhone, he's playing first-person shooter games on his laptop. These vividly drawn games look almost real, and in them he can destroy everything from robots to zombies to innocent bystanders.
No doubt in the wake of the Millard South High School shooting, some pundits will again be blaming video games for teens erupting into violence. But I'm pretty certain it takes more than a violent game to push a kid over the edge.
My son is a happy, healthy kid. When he puts his games away, he does things like clean the house without being asked and play Candy Land with his little sisters. Playing war, even in video format, doesn't seem to have hurt him any.
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Yet I still reflexively disapprove when my little girls pick up sticks and turn them into swords.
I'm not alone in this. There's a "no pretend killing" policy in place at the little one's preschool. The kids are not allowed to kill ghosts with magic wands, much less each other with pretend swords. What are their teachers afraid of?
There's a kind of knee-jerk distaste that comes from seeing little kids engage in any kind of violent play. Why are they doing that? Are they disturbed? War is bad, kids! Stop waving that stick around!
In our culture, children are the ultimate emblem of innocence and sweetness, especially girls. Seeing them play at war just feels bad to adults, with our sense of the weight real violence carries. That doesn't mean all war play is bad, though. As Kelly Coyle DiNorcia at the Humane Connection points out, some kinds of violent fantasy play might be important for kids.
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For some kids, they're enacting violence they've seen, and fantasizing about a better outcome. Others are just blowing up small conflicts from their daily lives into epic tales of war and love. Everyone who's ever written a fantasy story knows that trick. My kids wave their "swords" around with as much seriousness as they bring to asking me to marry them, or flying to the moon.
Children pretend to have weapons because they like pretending to have power. Of course we want to teach them peaceful problem-solving techniques, but I also want to leave room for the kids' imaginations. And they imagine being armed and dangerous when "ghosts" fly out of their closets at night. More power to them. Literally.
Is war play really just a form of creative expression? Read more on Babble's Strollerderby.
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