Q. My wonderful, energetic, 4-year-old boy has picked up some wonderfully expressive behaviors from his Transformers, Power Rangers, Iron Man and watching friends at school. His latest play involves pretend shooting and “booming” with his hands, with sound effects, dying people, pretend-cutting people and the lot. His preschool teacher tells me that it’s becoming more and more the play at his public preschool, which has zero tolerance for gunplay. It’s so very, very taxing and upsetting, and I don’t know what the “right” thing to do is.
Good for you for asking this question: it’s an important one, both for your son, and for the boys of our society!
Here’s my take on what I will call “combat play.” I date myself when I say that in my childhood, the “Taming of the West,” which we now know involved the genocide of Native Americans, was the main theme of TV and movie drama. The Lone Ranger, Cisco the Kid, Roy Rogers, and Davy Crockett had adventures, and sometimes fought the “bad guys.” We kids had cap pistols, holsters, bows and “arrows,” hideouts, and did lots of running around as we played out the roles we had seen. When we got old enough, we were allowed to have BB guns! The dramas we saw involved some shooting and capturing bad guys, but they also involved friendship. The Lone Ranger had Tonto and his horse Silver; Roy Rogers had a large cast of sidekicks. These partners provided humor and loyalty. They helped the hero solve problems in every episode. We didn’t have to worry about our frontier heroes: they weren’t riding alone.
“Parents Strongly Cautioned”
Many of the dramas being played out today that, literally, capture the minds of children are fierce, fraught with isolation and scary images, heavily sexualized, and shockingly violent. Real humans are almost unrecognizable in these fantasies. “Children’s” picture books of Batman, Spiderman, and The Hulk are full of grotesquely exaggerated bodies and frightening, outsized foes whose teeth are long and sharp, whose saliva froths all over the page, and whose eyes burn with murderous intensity. The women companions are bursting out of their skin-tight suits, have tiny waists and melon-sized busts, and bring no mercy or tenderness to a child’s imagination. The movies about these characters are dark with evildoers. Even jaded grownups come away feeling that they’ve seen a new depth of hellish existence on the screen.
These images are harmful for children. Many parents don’t realize that these intense, threatening tableaus are interpreted as real experiences in children’s minds. They create a frightening backdrop to everyday life. They cause bad dreams. They cause children to feel less secure in the world. They haunt children’s imaginations. And children don’t “grow out” of the fears they acquire when they’re exposed to this kind of mental pollution.
Videos and movies, in particular, install messages that are very difficult to erase. The attacks of the shark and the deep-sea fish in Finding Nemo, for example, create a sudden, frightening experience that injects fear into a child’s mind very nearly as deeply as if he were the tiny fish being threatened. The emotional center of a child’s mind can’t tell the difference between the movie or video and reality. In fact, your child won’t be able to reliably remember that he’s seeing a movie until he’s in his teens.
Keep your child away from superhero videos, movies, and books
You want your child to have a sense of safety and love in his life. You want him to retain his natural kindness, his ability to be tender, his sense of injustice when people are hurt or mistreated. You want him to be able to trust other people’s good will. You want him to embrace the world as a place full of possibilities. So don’t expose him to fictional harshness, which his mind processes as real harshness. Don’t fill his mind with images of one person, fighting alone against threats from every corner. Our world has been scarred enough by this mental model. Don’t install fears that are difficult and time-consuming to dislodge.
I highly recommend previewing every video aimed at your child, and letting other parents know that you don’t allow your child to watch videos on play dates. The images of peril, the isolation of the “hero,” the onslaught of fantastic foes, each one more terrible that the last, don’t offer the kind of experience that empowers our children.
Instead, choose videos, books, and comics that have the tone that Sesame Street sets: a friendly community, mutual help, humor, and bad guys who are no worse than silly Grover in his garbage can! If we are to work together as a human community, we need children raised with warm community experiences of play and cooperation.
Children freeze when they’re scared, and cry later to heal
Children’s minds don’t grasp evil. They don’t grasp unkindness. They don’t grasp harshness. They can’t even shake off a slightly edgy comment from you on a stressful day. “Put on your boots now!” can cause a young child to collapse in tears. And that’s a good thing! Children who cry when threatened are offloading the emotional tension that has assaulted their delicate systems. A good cry at that moment, or later, over a drop of spilled milk or a broken cookie, (or, if a child has just seen a “children’s movie,” the crying he does in a bad dream) is the healthiest thing your child can do. He needs you to listen. To care. To provide the safety that was shaken at the moment he was frightened. Put your arms around him and let him cry, long and hard. It’s the fastest, most efficient way to help his mind free itself of that fear.
But most children can’t respond at the moment they see a frightening image. They get wide-eyed, and their mind freezes. They do what animals have been doing for millennia—they go quiet and wait for the danger to pass. So they don’t say anything about the scary part of the video, or the horrible eyes of the comic book character on the page. They wait for the scene to change, for the page to turn. But those images stick.
Combat play is often heavily scripted
So later, children engage in combat play, in an attempt to portray and work through their fears. But each child in play is carrying his own frightening image and has his own scenario. So combat play often amounts to several children playing a similar game, with each child, in reality, playing almost alone. Each child is tense. Each child insists that other kids have to play the game the way he sees it. So eventually, there are hurt feelings. And the play can become hurtful, because children’s minds are saturated with the harmful images they want to recover from. They don’t have enough awareness left over to keep track of each other. I wouldn’t call this play, in the true cooperative sense of the word.
When combat play dissolves into upset, if an adult will simply embrace the crying child and listen to how he feels, rather than trying to legislate turns or forbid the game, the fears that drive the play, at least for that child, can be relieved.
Forbidding combat play in large groups may be necessary
Forbidding combat play, one strategy adopted by some parents, schools and preschools, does prevent children from hurting each other as they try to portray their fears in play. It can be the wisest thing to do in a group situation, where there are few adults and safety must be maintained. But children’s appetite for this kind of play remains strong. The fears are still lodged in their minds, and play is their instinctive bid to shake those fears.
When you’re geared up to help, enter into the play and elicit laughter
If your child is full of superhero energy, make a safe place for his imagination to run free! He needs to be able to show you his enthusiasms, and he needs a kind, energetic, thoughtful adult to steer the play toward laughter, and to set limits on the rough edges that might emerge. During Special Time or family playtime, enter the play with your child with enthusiasm. You’ll find yourself cast as his “victim” over and over again. He’ll make you the monster he captures, he’ll shoot you, he’ll put you in jail, he’ll burn you with “fire,” he’ll “cut your head off” with his sword. Let him play out these fantasies. He is letting you know what experiences he’s had in the fictional world that have troubled him. You’re learning the details of the scenarios that are imprinted on his mind.
In the midst of the play, do what you can to elicit laughter, which helps to diminish the storehouse of fears he carries. You do this by playfully exaggerating his power, and your plight. Don’t go stoically to your fate! Protest (with a warm, generous tone). Offer a bit of a fight. Try to run away. Give him a chance to try hard to get you. And do goofy, affectionate things to ward off his violence. Say loudly to yourself, “Gee, that guy wants to cut off my head! Maybe if I pet him a little, maybe he will put down his sword!” You catch him and pet him and he laughs and wriggles away. But of course, he doesn’t put down his sword. So you say, “Akk! Petting didn’t work! Maybe he needs a big hug!”
Twenty minutes of play can give you twenty chances to try the “love cure” for your superhero. Or you can say, “Hey, when you shoot me, I just get this feeling I have to love you! And kiss you! A big, wet one!” Or when you’re languishing in “jail,” you can reach out, grab his ankle, and say, “Oh, what a sweet little foot! I’m so lonesome here in jail, I just have to kiss this little foot!” Dr. Lawrence J. Cohen describes this approach beautifully in his book, Playful Parenting. (Be sure not to tickle to trigger laughter. Earn your child’s laughter with affection.)
Your attempts to counter combat with affection will bring a good tussle, which you can lose again and again. But most likely, there will be lots of laughter as you try to get close to your superhero. That laughter is healing. That laughter will relax him, bit by bit, and help take the urgency out of his play.
When children play in groups, willing adults can arrange combat play that’s safe, fun, and laughter-filled. Balloon battles, pillow fights, and sock fights, with grownups serving as the main “targets,” and keeping things safe and affectionate, are ways to engage children in combat play that acknowledges their appetite for it. Whatever laughter you secure reduces their fears and isolation. Children win together, without targeting each other. As they team up, they laugh and “get” the grownups. Tension releases. They regain their sense that the world is a safe place. And they have great affection for any grownup who plays with them in this way.
Get laughter going, and listen to crying, to replace fear with the safety you provide.
In summary, the real problem is not with the actual toys a child plays with, but with the images and feelings that are stuck in his mind. The fascination with combat play is a flag your child waves saying, “I’ve been frightened by fictional experiences, and I want to work this through!”
You have the power to help! Just keep remembering that toy guns aren’t real, that fantasies of cutting off your head are your child telling you what he’s witnessed in his mind’s eye. They indicate some gunk in your child’s mind, but there’s no real threat to you, or to anyone else, as long as you’re there to keep things safe.
We have more information on helping children release their fears in play in our booklet, Healing Children’s Fears, a part of the Listening to Children series available here.
By Patty on 12/11/08 in Columns, Editor Picks, Parents, The Connected Parent
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January 15th, 2009 at 2:26 am
I really appreciated reading this story. When my son was 8 I thought it would be a great idea to study world history. So, we got a bunch of children’s books from the library, only to find that “history” actually meant showing pictures and time lines of battles, what they won, who fought whom, and how (boats, weapons, strategies to win). I’d created a monster! All my son wanted to do after that was play with swords and guns – he made some on his own out of cardboard.
I was very grateful that this was his first interest in “fighting” play, but still didn’t quite know what to do. Having read Patty’s booklets and been to some of her play days when my son was a toddler gave me some direction. I played with him, being the victim most of the time. However, I never really wanted to encourage the violence. Luckily, he has mostly moved through this stage of development, or worked through most of the fears because we rarely sword-fight any more.
I also notice that many parents think nothing of letting their 3-yr olds watch the Hobbit, Star Wars or other such movies that have a lot of violence and non-human looking characters. It has been a bit tricky with a school-aged child (now 10), but I have managed to keep him from TV, including all the ads, as well as movies, videos and video games that are violent (but are so main stream as to be accepted as “OK” by most parents). So long as I model this behavior with myself (i.e., no TV, no video games), he thinks nothing of never having had a TV or not playing video games!
Thank you for sharing this article!
Luminara (Lynn) Serdar
January 16th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Firstly, I appreciate your efforts to make sense out of parenting in this techno-saturated world. Second,
I understand your intentions are good. Indeed, your suggestions for play with children and increasing laughter is right-on.
However, you have no expertise (none that you have listed on your website) you are not a Family Therapist a Licensed Master Social Worker, it seems you are a layperson dispensing advice to families on how to raise children. This is both dangerous and irresponsible. I suggest you enroll in a master’s level program to sharpen your critical thinking skills. Family therapy is not done practised via advice or without empiral evidence backing-up it’s application.
There is no evidence that watching cartoons such as “Finding Nemo” are deleterious to young children. Furthermore there is no evidence that watching movies or cartoons that have contain superheroes causes children to be violent.
Violence in children is a complex issue that requires a understanding of the family dynamics. Your assertions are not only off the mark but woefully-simplistic.
January 20th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
There is actually a large body of scientific evidence, compiled over more than the last decade, that finds cartoons such as “Finding Nemo” may be much more harmful to young children than is commonly thought.
Dr. Donald Shifrin is the American Academy of Pediatrics representative to the Oversight Council of the three-year long National Television Violence Study and a member of the AAP Committee on Public Education. In his 1998 report, printed at http://www.aap.org/advocacy/shifrin898.htm, on the results of the Television Violence Study, he says:
“For younger viewers, many harmful contextual features were seen most often in cartoons. The typical preschooler who daily watches about two hours of cartoons will be exposed to 10,000 violent incidents per year, of which 500 are at high risk of modeling aggressive attitudes and behaviors. One of the most critical and disconcerting NTVS findings suggests that for preschoolers, who have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality, the lesson is violence is ‘desirable, necessary and painless.’…parents are urged to be aware of the harmful influences on children of viewing repeated scenes of contextual violence that effectively teach aggressive attitudes and behaviors. These scenes in promotions or commercials also were problematic…Because television is our children’s No. 1 leisure activity, we should not minimize the ongoing impact of its thousands of visual messages on children, especially those at risk for behavioral problems.”
January 20th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
In 2007, in testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Dr. Shifrin added,
“Media Violence–The AAP recognizes exposure to violence in the media as a significant risk to the health of children. Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed. The AAP calls for simplified, content-based media ratings, and has specific recommendations for the entertainment industry.”
You can read the full report here: http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte_mtgs/110-ti-hrg.062207.Shifrin-testimony.pdf
January 20th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
I am a licensed psychologist specializing in parenting, children’s play, and family therapy. My book, Playful Parenting, owes a tremendous debt to my colleague and mentor, Patty Wipfler, the author of this column, who has decades of experience helping parents and families. I frequently refer parents to the excellent classes, workshops, lectures, articles, books and phone consultation service of her organization, Parenting by Connection. I won’t weigh in on the specific issues here but just wanted to clarify Patty Wipfler’s expertise, which I have been lucky enough to experience firsthand in workshops, lectures, and through consultation. Thank you,
Lawrence Cohen, PhD
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:32 am
Regarding Patty’s expertise
A very shortlist of Patty Wiplfler’s expertise is clearly laid out on the Hand in Hand website.
Far from ‘dispensing advice’, Patty gives her best thinking on a whole range of issues that face parents. This is based on over 30 years of experience working with parents, children and professionals, as well as her wide knowledge of relevant research.
In addition, we all get to do our own thinking on Patty’s thinking. Many thousands of parents from many countries around the globe do just that with outstanding outcomes for their families and communities. The parents and professionals with whom my organisation works have their own ‘empirical evidence’ and their own good minds with which to judge the validity of Parenting by Connection. We have a significant body of evaluations that we consistently receive from parents and professionals (formally and informally qualified) on the value, and transformative nature of, Parenting by Connection.
In addition, my organisation had the opportunity to work with a researcher from an Australian University on the implementation of the Parenting by Connection programme in childcare centres with staff and with parents. The research revealed an unusually high level of positive outcomes. Other leading researchers in the United States have stated that Parenting by Connection is one of the few parenting programs that emphasises parent-child connectedness. Moreover, the approach that Patty developed provides parents with tools they can use to build this connectedness.
I am not sure why Mr Johnson chose Family Therapy as the qualification he thinks parent leaders should hold. (As far as I know, social workers do not train specifically in the area of children and parents.) There currently exists a range of formal and informal qualifications that people working with children and parents hold. While formal qualifications can be valuable, and, in some cases, that we understandably deem necessary (for a surgeon, for example), we know by experience and logic that they do not come with a guarantee of a person’s ability to think and function well. There are critically important positions for which there is no formal qualification – such as national government leadership. Some people show outstanding qualities in this area.
Nevertheless, there are many highly-regarded, formally-qualified people who think about families who welcome, and incorporate, Patty’s perspective and knowledge – like Dr Larry Cohen who wrote the wonderful book, Playful Parenting (Ballantine) that can be ordered from the Hand in Hand website.
Patty is not a voice in the wilderness. There are many concerned citizens and professionals, researchers, academics and so on across the globe who are acutely aware of the ways in which violence is directed at children and the problems posed by contemporary super heroes. It is wise to question the interests of corporations (employing qualified psychologists) that cynically and consciously manipulate children and parents. In doing so, these corporations have turned children into a market from which they make billions every year.
It seems clear to me that it does not take an ‘expert’, academic or an ‘Einstein’ to recognise what will install fears in children.
However, it does often take people like Patty Wipfler, Larry Cohen and others to get behind parents by speaking candidly in the face of the unrelenting barrage of promotion of violent and/or stereotyped figures and toys and superheros. This backing helps parents to trust their thinking and to tackle the problem, rather than feel powerless in the face of it.
Hand in Hand provides the strategies and tools to empower parents to do their own, fresh thinking and to become the expert on their own affairs. It also trains leaders to train other parents to do the same.
Imagine if the millions spent on advertising these characters and violent toys, and the further billions spent on the purchase of these products, were spent on really thinking about what children need in order to feel, and be, connected to themselves and to others. Children have the right to feel connected. Fear disconnects children. Neither the short, nor the long-term, social impact of violent toys, superheroes and so on have been measured.
Many of us adults forget, or are not conscious of, the devastating impact on children of things that seem insignificant to an adult. A statement that Patty made has remained in the forefront of my mind in this regard – “Children are born for gentle treatment.”
It is very telling that so much contemporary children’s literature is remarkably ethical in regard to children’s young minds. There is a multitude of examples of authors who are conscious to not stereotype characters or to address stereotyping. They address issues for children such as empathy, co-operation, sadness and fears, friendships and so on in a thoughtful and useful way. These are written by individuals who, I imagine, do not earn much money from their pursuit, and are not associated with multinational corporations marketing to our society’s young. They are usually beautifully illustrated.
If so much good thought can go into children’s books, should we not expect big corporations to use their vast resources to act ethically and mindfully in children’s legitimate best interests?
Thank you, Patty, for your impeccable professionalism and your warm and intelligent collaboration with my organisation. The way that Hand in Hand works, literally, hand in hand, with others – parents, professionals and other organisations – is a valuable model. In a world that is increasingly fractured by competition and conflict, it gives my organisation and me a welcome sense of security to be taking the lead of someone with your integrity.
Thank you for your tireless commitment, solid work for families everywhere and your exceptional understandings and insights. You and your organisation are immensely effective across the world and will continue to be so.
“A gift” is what hundreds of parents and professionals feedback to us about Parenting by Connection, along with “a breath of fresh air” and “something I have always known”.
Ann Hefferan
Director
Community Transformations Inc
February 12th, 2009 at 8:39 am
Look, we live in a country where 50% of the parents believe in the efficacy of corporal punishment. Don’t you think that has more to do with what impacts children- as well as children who come in contact with children who have been treated violently (i.e. in daycare).
For sure, I am not going to treat my son to a film such as Bambi or Monster’s Inc. The original intent of Fairy Tales is to bring the child’s fear to the fore in a safe, well-constructed environment then be there to comfort him. The modern interpretation of this is the fast-forward button.
Family interaction, engagement, intervention and gentle
discipline are without qualification the most important factors in raising children to be non-violent. Movies are not the problem. Hours of unrestricted TV viewing coupled with non-engagement by parents, compounded by violence modeled by the caregiver is of course a prescription for a violent child.
Does Patty have any writing on the horrors of spanking?
March 13th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
I am the mother of a 5.9 year old boy. I have worked with Patty, trained with several organizations around parenting, teaching and working with elementary aged children, and I facilitate workshops for children aged 5-14. I have worked with thousands of children, and read tons of research about how the brain works.
Some of the latest research I’ve come across shows that movies and TV, by their passive, non-experiential delivery system, actually put the undeveloped child’s brain into a “fight or flight” state – they create anxiety in the limbic system. Susan R. Johnson, (MD, pediatrician and parent) in a great article about the effects of tv/movies on a child’s brain (http://www.youandyourchildshealth.org/articles/tv%20article.html) says:
“the majority of children’s programming (including Sesame Street) seem to put the left hemisphere and parts of the right hemisphere into slow waves of inactivity (alpha waves). Television anesthetizes our higher brain functions and disrupts the balance and interaction between the left and right hemispheres.”
It makes me sad, as a person who’s worked in the film industry and loves my movies, but I’ll be keeping my son off the media until his brain is developed at around age 11.
Check out that article above – it’s really comprehensive, technical and thoughtful.
Warmly, Amy