It was the early 1970s in Greenwich Village, and the place was filling up with new moms eager to raise a more peaceful and more enlightened generation of children.They were sure that violence was bad in every form: not only the war in Vietnam, not only street crime and race riots, but also make-believe violence on TV, in toys, and in children’s play. By eliminating aggression from children’s consciousness at the most fundamental level, they hoped to gift the world with a new, post-violent citizenry.Toy guns were banned from homes and preschools, TVs were turned off or tuned to the least violent shows, and kids caught playing war would be directed to more peaceful pursuits.
It was Passover week. The preschool teachers told the Passover story (in a nonviolent way, without all the plagues) and distributed matzoh to the kids. One little boy, let’s call him Sammy, picked up his flat, crisp matzoh and looked at it. He took a small bite, then another, and another, chomping a fairly straight line across the top. Then he took more bites, at a right angle down the edge, then a couple more, back up again, and then a few more in a line parallel to the first one. Sammy raised his now L-shaped matzoh and gazed at it with pride. What a perfect gun! Then he ran around the room shouting “pow pow pow” while his classmates squealed and pretended to fall dead and his teachers rushed toward him in horror.
The friend who told me this story said that the parents whose children passed through that preschool nearly thirty years ago still retell it–mostly with laughter now that none of their kids have turned out to be killers. I’ve heard dozens of stories like it. The boy who cradled the family cat in his arms, aimed its puzzled face forward, and started yelling “bam bam bam!” The one who grabbed Barbie by her legs and shot invisible bullets out of her head.The kids who were using a refrigerator box as a fort until their mother yelled, “No shooting games! Why don’t you pretend the box is a spaceship?” They did so, and as she settled back into her chair, pleased that she could redirect their energies into such a noble channel, she heard them hollering, “Look out! Aliens! Shoot ’em! Bzzt! Bzzt!”
A girl named Emily sparked my curiosity in one storytelling workshop. She wasn’t the only girl in her kindergarten class who used guns in her fantasies, but she used them with the most gusto. “The cat was walking through the forest when suddenly a lion tried to eat it. The cat shot it with a gun and it was gone! Then the cat found a field of flowers. The cat was walking through the field of flowers when a hunter came and tried to shoot it.The cat didn’t have its gun. But it picked a flower and the flower turned into a gun. It shot a bullet out of its gun and the bullet knocked down the hunter’s bullet and then it went and shot the hunter!” There was no anger, cruelty, or gore in her drawings or the way she described them to me, only humor and joy at the way guns would suddenly appear and predators would suddenly–BANG!–disappear. This all became even more intriguing when I talked to her mother and learned that Emily wasn’t allowed to play with toy guns, a rule that had become a major power struggle in the home.
From Emily’s preschool days, her mother, Cynthia, had been telling her that gun play was not allowed in their home, with lengthy explanations that real guns hurt people and that it isn’t appropriate to pretend that they’re fun.Within minutes, Emily would be pointing her finger and shouting, “Pchoo!” Not wanting to have to monitor and restrict Emily’s every action, Cynthia settled for saying, “Not at people!” So Emily tried shooting her friends’ parents, who would grab their chests and yell, “You got me!” Emily would laugh in delight. Seeing how good Emily felt at being able to provoke such dramatic reactions from adults, Cynthia let go of that restriction–but stuck to her determination to allow her no gun toys. “I just don’t want her associating guns with fun and games,” she said. “That’s how gun cultures are made. That’s how kids grow up thinking that problems should be solved with force.”
But Emily would see Power Ranger blasters and foam-rubber-shooting Nerf guns at her friends’ houses. Most of her friends’ parents understood that she was supposed to be a gun-free kid, so they’d try to steer her away from those toys, but Emily knew the toys were there and knew she wanted them. She’d go home snapping, “Why can’t I have a Power Ranger blaster? It doesn’t hurt anything!” Her mother would tell her again about real guns hurting people and she’d yell, “But it’s not real!” She’d make guns out of Legos and Zoobs and Toobers. She’d talk about the kinds of guns she wished she could have. She’d start bargaining:“Can I have a toy gun when I’m I’m six? When I’m seven? When I’m eight?”“By the time we give in on this gun thing,” sighed Cynthia, “it’s going to have to be a howitzer!”
Emily wasn’t a violent kid. She loved animals and she got along well with her friends. But she was boisterous and physical. She also had to stand up to some social pressures when she kept playing with both boys and girls even as the genders began to segregate themselves in kindergarten. She was strong-willed, intense in both her joys and frustrations, and she had a temper. Transitions were tough for her, and she’d argue fiercely whenever a play date had to end or she was denied what she wanted or her parents otherwise reminded her that they held the power. Her desire for toy guns was obviously as much about the fact that they were forbidden as about the guns themselves. But guns weren’t the only things she didn’t get to have. Her parents put limits on her beloved Barbie accessories, too, and budgetary restraints made them say no to a whole host of toys. She didn’t fight nearly as hard for those, however. Guns were what excited her imagination most.
Not long after I talked to her about Emily’s fantasies, Cynthia decided that the struggle over guns was only making them more important to her, so she decided to let her have one that one of her classmates wanted to give her–not a howitzer, but a plastic ray gun that didn’t actually shoot any objects. Emily was thrilled. She loved it. She shot everything in sight. She built all her play dates around it. And her parents noticed that her mood improved. She didn’t turn miraculously into an easygoing child, but she picked fewer fights with her parents, and if she was allowed to do some wild shooting at the end of a play date, the transition usually went much more smoothly.
Cynthia told me later that Emily’s life revolved around the gun for only a few weeks. Once she’d made shooting a part of her fantasy arsenal, it dropped down among her stuffed animals, her gypsy costumes, and her Legos as one of many things she did. Her passion shifted to cats and dogs, and what she now nagged her parents for was a pet. She announced that she wanted to be a veterinarian, and her favorite make-believe game became taking care of hurt animals. By first grade, the gun was something she brought out only for play dates with the male friends who suggested it.“I think it gave her the power she needed just then,” said Cynthia, “so she didn’t have to keep pushing so hard for it anymore.”
Childhood gun play is universal. Ethnologists have shown that in societies where guns aren’t part of the local symbology, kids play similar games with bows and arrows or spears. In every culture, children always develop some fantasy of projecting destructive power across space and knocking down a big opponent with an effortless gesture. Traditionally, such play was preparation for life: kids who grew up throwing imaginary spears would eventually be expected to throw real ones. But even in modern American society, in which only a minority of people actually use guns in real life, virtually every kid wants to pretend-shoot at least occasionally. Even in liberal, middle-class communities in which kids may never see real guns except on the hips of police officers and the message of adults is unvaryingly anti-gun, that need to shoot still arises. It isn’t guns as such that the kids want. It’s the power that imaginary guns contain.
Emily’s magically appearing guns are by no means unique in my experience with young children’s stories. Some kids like guns, some prefer magic wands, others like characters with powers that blast out of their hands, but their function within the kids’ stories are identical. I’ve known several kids who use them interchangeably.A boy named Jeremy had his frog hero shoot the scary ghost with a gun in one picture and then, on the very next page, zap the scary devil with a “magic bullet out of his wizard staff.” Guns or wands, they help children feel strong. J. K. Rowling understood this in her Harry Potter books. Her characters use magic wands to defeat their foes and defend themselves (making them much more acceptable to gun-sensitive parents), but most of the time those wands function exactly like guns in children’s fantasies; Harry and his friends whip them out, aim, fire, blow up things, knock down monsters, sometimes miss or have their shots blocked or comically misfire and accidentally shoot themselves.
The “gun” of the young child’s imagination is no gun at all, but a magic wand. A wand can have other functions, too, especially transformation (“Poof, you’re a rabbit!”), but when the purpose is blasting a foe, most kids find the gun to be a much more exciting form of magic than the wand.The kids I’ve known who prefer wands tend to be a little older and more adult-focused, more often girls than boys, who seem to have internalized adult anxieties about guns and aggression and prefer to project their own fantasies into a more unreal realm. The more unfettered the child’s imagination, the more likely he or she is to play “gun.” After all, a gun makes an exciting “pow,” it imitates the form of the shooter’s own finger, it can be whipped from any pocket, and it shoots discrete little bullets of magic that focus a child’s imaginary power into a single, flashing point.
But guns scare us as adults. As we try to create a less violent world, we become more and more sensitized to the dangers of real guns, and the sight of a child pretending to shoot us inevitably stirs our anxieties. A child lusting after a plastic machine gun at a toy store or gunning down aliens in a video game makes it easy to visualize him pulling a gun as an angry teenager or packing a rifle in a foreign war as a young adult. And there are real-life stories to add to our fears, stories like the six-year-old who took a real gun to school and murdered a classmate. Our fears are natural, and they stir us to think through some of the philosophical issues of modern parenting. But I believe that we burden children with something they shouldn’t have to carry when we dump our adult anxieties inappropriately onto their fantasies.
I still remember an incident from the summer I turned nine. I was running around the house with a toy six-shooter and clicked off a round at my mother. She visibly stiffened and turned away from me. I lowered the gun and looked at her–I could tell I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t know what. After a pause, she said, “I can’t look at that without thinking of all the horror that guns have caused in the world.” That horror was real: John F. Kennedy’s murder was still a burning scar for her, Medgar Evers had been assassinated a year before, Freedom Riders had been shot, the war in Vietnam was escalating, and that very summer a rampage killer had taken over the evening news by shooting people at random from the University of Texas Tower. I was aware of all that horror, and it disturbed me. But that was in a different world from the one in which I was playing then, where I was probably James Bond or Napoleon Solo bringing down some shadowy foe. In that world, with my pretend gun, I felt completely confident to handle anything that came at me. My mother’s reaction knocked me out of that world. I felt her disgust, knew I’d lost some of her regard and support, and took on some of her horror at my own fantasies.
When my mother and I talked about it decades later, she said, “I didn’t want you growing up to think that guns were honorable. I guess that might have been an opportunity for a good talk. I wish I’d been able to do that, but I just couldn’t then. Seeing you with that gun, I just felt too much conflicting emotion.” I knew even at nine that real violence was bad, and with my parents’ models I’m sure my ethical development would have continued even if I’d been encouraged to keep play-shooting. Still, a talk about real guns and play guns, if I’d felt safe and accepted as myself, probably would have been helpful. If nothing else, it would have given me practice talking to my parents about scary subjects. Unfortunately, that encounter closed that door. I felt both guilty at my own violent fantasies and resentful of her for taking the fun out of them. I just walked away, and later I tried to avoid showing her that side of myself. My mother, feeling so many confusing emotions about her little boy, never mentioned it again. That, and other incidents like it, only hampered communication between us and weighed down my fantasy play as I headed for my preteen years.
Many parents and teachers worry that letting children play with toy guns and watch imaginary shooting on TV will create a glamour around guns that will persist into adulthood and make them more likely to associate real guns with power and excitement. And they’re right: it can.
Dr. Donald F. Roberts, a professor of communications at Stanford University who has spent more than thirty years studying children’s use of media, spoke of video’s power to provide mental templates.“A generation of kids grew up with the opening credit sequence of Gunsmoke in their minds: Matt Dillon strides heroically down the street, then draws.The camera switches to a shot between his legs, as he fires and another gunman drops in the street. Then we see his face. Now, an adult could see in his stoic expression that he really wished he hadn’t had to do that–but no nine-year-old would pick up on that. He’d see the hero shooting, the bad guy falling, the hero experiencing no negative consequence. And research has shown that we experience the lack of a consequence as a reward. So Marshall Dillon, and the viewer, are rewarded for shooting. The child will be carrying that template forever–heroism, shooting, reward–and it will mix in with everything else he or she receives from life.”
But the template can be turned in many directions. The generation of kids raised in the 1950s and early 1960s was more thoroughly indoctrinated than any other in history by images of violent, authoritarian heroism. TV Westerns, cop shows, and World War II dramas flooded into their living rooms, and when they wanted to get out of the house, they encountered a cinematic flood of more Westerns, more war epics, and horror movies in which giant monsters were destroyed by soldiers with bombs and flame throwers. And violent crime did rise with that generation. But so did the anti-war movement and, along with it, an unprecedented sweeping popular critique of violence in American society. Pacifism, the rejection of the gun culture, and opposition to military and police authority, formerly positions held only by a radical fringe, became part of the culture of a generation–the Gunsmoke generation. Both the crime rates and the philosophic shift, of course, can be explained by forces far more influential than TV Westerns. But those media templates were part of the mix. Maybe an angry teenage thug had Matt Dillon somewhere in the back of his mind when he went for a gun; but then so did the war protester, seeking a model for being resolute and unafraid in the face of an opposing political establishment.
“There were two rules in my house when I was growing up,” related Dr. John White, neurophysiologist and family therapist. “No guns at the dinner table and don’t hit your sister with a pistol.” Every kid in his neighborhood played with toy guns, but none of them could rival John and his brother; the two-holstered belts with the six-shooters went on the minute they got home from school, and they stayed on, except for dinner, until bedtime. “I think our parents only outlawed them at dinner to prevent total mayhem with mashed potatoes in the middle,” he said. “My brother and I could barely look at each other without one of us trying to quick-draw the other.”
White grew up in a raw young suburb in Minnesota in the early 1960s. He described the bleak battle with the weather, his crazy restlessness during the endless winters, trying to find something fun to do on the frozen earth of a dead lawn. And he described being a bit of an oddball, a bright, shy Jewish kid in a neighborhood made up mostly of Lutheran and Catholic factory workers. “The gun play gave me something to do with my energy,” he remembered, “and someplace to go with my frustrations, because there were constant small frustrations along the way. It toughened me–I remember feeling afraid to get shot when I was little, even though I more or less understood that it was fantasy, and I remember working up my courage to come out from behind the corner of the house and risk getting killed. That was practice for being willing to take whatever life threw at me in order to achieve what I wanted. The fury of the gun battles also whipped me into a frenzy so I could tear around without even noticing the cold, or I could fall on some frozen ground and barely get hurt.”
Talking to Dr. White, I remembered what made gun play so compelling to me: it was the best tool I had, by far, for bonding with other kids. Sports segregated the kids who excelled from the kids who didn’t. So did card games and complicated make-believe games, for that matter. But anyone could shoot and fall down dead. It made us equals, it put us in control of whether we’d hit or missed, it broke down our inhibitions. The biggest, scariest kid on the block could yell, “I got you!” and I could argue back, “No, you didn’t!” and we could fight uninhibitedly for a few seconds before one of us started blasting the other again and we could let it drop.
“Yes!” agreed White, and suddenly there was an electricity in the air between us, two kids running out of the house with their plastic guns to see who they can find to shoot. “Early on, gunfighting was the only thing that could embolden me to yell at the top of my lungs and call attention to myself. Unless I had my guns I would tend just to disappear quietly. As I got to be known as a wild gunfighter, though, it became easier to call attention to myself in other situations.”
“So what happened to the guns?” I asked him.“I notice you’re not wearing them now.” He laughed:“You just can’t see them.” He said that he put guns aside at the end of childhood along with the rest of his plastic toys. “Apart from any loftier objections to guns I might have had in my teens, it would have felt simply ridiculous to want a real gun. I was a teenager. I wanted to be taken seriously in the real world. Guns were juvenile. They were the stuff of child’s play and TV fantasy. The adults who tried to solve problems with guns seemed to me, as much as anything, childish.” White went on to become a progressive political activist, a neurophysiological researcher, and a father; then he left hard research to deal more with people as a family therapist and a psychologist with a free clinic.“But the memories of myself as a juvenile gunslinger are always with me,” he said. “At every intimidating juncture of my life–dissertation, fatherhood, changing career direction–I remember the wild courage I could whip myself into then. It was emboldenment. Self-emboldenment.”
Gun play now, of course, doesn’t look the same to us as it did in 1960. More people shoot each other, for one thing, and although only a tiny fraction of young people do such things, our news industry turns those into a national preoccupation. For another, gory shooter video games have been added to the pop culture landscape. Stanford’s Donald Roberts noted, “I talked to my son about the realities of guns when he was little, but allowed him to play with toy guns. Now, when he brings my grandchildren over with toy machine guns, I find myself thinking that I really wish he wouldn’t let them play with those things–because now I see kids being moved from those toys to a context of shooting very human-like opponents in an arcade game, which brings it much closer to reality.” But how much of that anxiety is about any real anticipation that our kids will grow up to be shooters, and how much is merely about our own, very adult discomfort at being reminded of the more realistic violence in some entertainment–and thus of the horrors of real violence? Roberts acknowledged that, too, as he laughed, “Or maybe I’m just an old guy who doesn’t get it anymore!”
Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist who has specialized in children and childhood-related issues for decades, recalled, “In the ’70s everybody told me I shouldn’t have toy guns in my office. But I’d tell them that they need to shoot: they need to shoot each other, they need to shoot their parents, they need to shoot me. It’s one of the best tools they have for dealing with their aggressions, and taking that away from them only complicates the problems that the people who want to get rid of toy guns are concerned about. Gradually the bulk of professional and popular opinion came back around to what I’d been maintaining. But there will be always be someone expressing new worries about guns, especially when there’s another round of publicity about youth violence, or a new kind of media violence.”
We hear alarming reports of the violence in children’s entertainment today. A 1998 UCLA study has been widely quoted as showing that the average child will have seen 6,000 violent deaths on television by the time he leaves elementary school. On closer examination that figure turns out to be the number of violent deaths a child could see if he watched all the violent programs available to him–if he watched more hours of Homicide than Rugrats.When children’s viewing habits are taken into account, we discover that most children probably see no violent deaths through their first six or so years, then a modest number when they start to take an interest in more adult programs and movies. Similarly, a 2001 Harvard study announced that 60 percent of video games rated “E” (for everyone) included violence. But the violence turns out to include Pac Man eating ghosts and Gex the cartoon gecko tail-whipping skeletons.
There is far more gory realism in entertainment aimed at older kids than there used to be. At the same time, especially in the little-kid market, the vast bulk of toy guns are far more fantasy-based and less realistic than those of forty years ago. Children’s TV shows, although full of superheroes zapping with ray-powers, are now essentially devoid of guns. Make-believe shooting is basically the same thing it always was. The “gun” is still a magic wand. The magic it contains is still emboldenment.
Studies reveal that the vast majority of kids who take up guns in adolescence have grown up in households where guns are used or in immediate environs where guns have become part of everyday youth culture, such as gang-controlled neighborhoods. Despite the decades-long efforts of many researchers, no casual correlation has been found between actual gun use and early-childhood fondness for toy guns, finger-shooting, or gun-filled TV shows. And although parents were more permissive of gun play in the 1980s and 1990s than in the 1970s, I’ve seen no sign of a generational shift toward a glamorization of real guns in my work with young people. If anything, in the wake of gang wars and school shootings, it’s the opposite: I’ve heard even the most macho, video-game-loving boys describe packing a real gun as “stupid” and “chickenshit.”
When the story of the first-grader who shot and killed a classmate hit the news in 2000, many commentators tried to link it to violent media. The prosecutor on the case said that the boy “expected the victim to get back up again, just like in one of his video games.” But as we learned more about the boy’s life, it became clear that he didn’t live in a world of imaginary guns. He did watch violent TV sometimes. But he also grew up in a crack house full of real guns, surrounded by men who used real violence to settle their disputes and expressed their anger on a daily basis with words like, “I’ll kill the bitch!” He didn’t have toys or video games or any other safe way to relieve his anxiety or express his aggression. He didn’t have sane adult models. He didn’t have a childhood. Children deserve both: an adult world of nonviolence and well-modulated aggression, and a childhood world of fantasy unburdened by adult fears.
We don’t help children learn the difference between fantasy and reality when we allow their fantasies to provoke reactions from us that are more appropriate to reality. When a child is joyfully killing a friend who loves being killed, we don’t make things clearer for them by responding with an anxious, “You shouldn’t shoot people!” Instead we blur the very boundaries that they’re trying to establish. We teach them that pretend shooting makes adults feel threatened in reality, and therefore their own fantasies must be more powerful and more dangerous than they thought. The result for the child is more anxiety and self-doubt, more concern over the power of violent thoughts, less sense of power over their own feelings, and less practice expressing their fantasies–a combination far more likely to lead either to behavioral problems or excessive timidity than safe self-enjoyment would be.
It’s that literal meaning we keep stumbling over: this is a man with a gun, and a child who emulates him is practicing to become a man with a gun. But the more time I spend involved with storytelling, the more certain I am that a story’s most important function is its emotional meaning. What matters most to a child’s development is the emotional connection he or she makes with the fantasy and the way the child works it, through play and imagination, into his or her emotional life. This is the power of symbol, myth, and metaphor. Understanding a game or toy or TV show and a child’s use of it is a little like dream interpretation; a cheap dream-analysis book may tell us that a gun is a “phallic symbol” or a “symbol of death,” but for the dreamer to make sense of it, he needs to know whether the gun felt threatening or empowering or absurd within the dream. We could call it the emotional template of a fantasy. Matt Dillon is a fantasy version of ourselves who stands up against a threat, acts decisively, and dispatches it. The emotional message of that template isn’t “use a gun” but “don’t be afraid–and do what’s right.”
What draws a child to any fantasy is its emotional power. No six-year- old seizes upon a toy or TV show because he thinks it will improve him or feels it validates his taste or opinions. That’s why Isaac Bashevis Singer said that “children are the only honest readers.” Every toy marketer knows that no advertising will induce a child to want something that doesn’t match up with the fantasies he already has. A little girl who already yearns for the power of glamour and the chameleonesque versatility of dress-up may have her fantasies focused and intensified by a Barbie commercial. But not even a thousand viewings of that commercial will make her macho brother want a Barbie. Either children connect with a fantasy at the profoundest emotional levels or they quickly toss it aside. We often forget the intensity of their involvement with fantasy. As John Michaud, a veteran kindergarten teacher and frequent lecturer on the age group, reminds parents every year, “An eleven-year-old can learn all about tigers, but only a five-year-old can be one.”
As adults we spend so much time taking deft steps away from our most powerful fantasies and emotions that getting whacked by the raw, visceral imagination of a child can be unsettling. Sometimes we’re most disturbed by our children’s appetite for the disturbing. One little boy was telling me about his imaginary world called Stuffyland. “It’s where all the stuffed animals live,” he said, “and the king is a hedgehog and the queen is my duck puppet and all the other ones are princes.”“How sweet,” I thought. “And there are no bad guys in Stuffyland, so everyone is safe,” he grinned.“How sweet!” I thought. Then, with a huge, innocent smile, he explained, “That’s because there’s a machine like a trap at the edge of Stuffyland and if a bad guy ever tries to come in it chops him right in half! ”
I don’t know how vivid this boy’s image of the bad-guy chopping machine was, but I know from working with other kids that they’re capable of spinning out the goriest images of dismembered bodies and spurting blood with, apparently, the most casual enjoyment. To them it’s a natural progression of learning what’s inside the body and what can conceivably happen to it, and so a celebration of the wholeness of their own bodies. It’s also practice in blowing up reality and putting it back together in their heads, an important process on the way to separating reality from fantasy.
Adults, perhaps too mired in reality, often don’t know how to respond to children’s fantasies. I know the smile wavered on my lips when that boy came up with his chopping machine. Decades ago, Anna Freud wrote about young children who chattered casually about cutting up their mother’s bodies, which she interpreted to be expressions of the “death wish” and a genuine desire (linked in girls to the Elektra complex) to see their mothers dead. Amid her brilliant and valuable work in applying psychoanalytic principles to children, this stands out, at least to my eyes, as a rather nervous and humorless adult response to what may well have been rather joyful fantasy.
Once I saw a child’s fantasies virtually blow the roof off a preschool. The director wrote in the newsletter of how disturbed she felt upon hearing a little girl mutter, as she bumped two lions together in the sandbox, “Murder Mufasa! Murder Mufasa!” She blamed this on “today’s media” (“I certainly don’t remember knowing the word ‘murder’ at that age,” she wrote) and encouraged parents to keep their children away from the TV.A father named Marc Laid-law, a science fiction writer and video-game designer with a great sensitivity to kid culture, wrote a thoughtful response for the next newsletter, acknowledging that some media influences were unhealthy for children but that the right ones, in the right circumstances, could be rewarding. He described watching the cartoon My Neighbor Totoro with his daughters and the conversations and fantasies they had spun from it. The response from other parents was extraordinary: hostile, accusatory, and largely anonymous. One unsigned letter read, “I have only one suggestion for the TV-loving father: Get a life.” What had been a harmonious community of parents was torn apart and never quite came back together again.
We try to shelter our children from unpleasant truths, but they learn about these things. “It is distressing to hear ‘murderer’ screamed out in Disney’s Lion King, but it’s not realistic to imagine that kids will go long without learning the word, or at least the concept–from an adult conversation, a big kid, or the evening news. The fact is, she did hear it, and was probably troubled by it.” By playing with the idea in the sandbox, she was trying to make sense of it in the safest way she could find. Although she may not have been directly hurt by the explosion of adult rage she unwittingly set off, she certainly wasn’t helped by it. I wonder if the atmosphere at her preschool was quite as nurturing as it had been, with so many parents simmering in rage. The whole mess struck me as a microcosm of our national debate about children and the media, with so much time and energy wasted fighting over generalizations and so little effort given to communicating with the children themselves.
That was an unusually heated reaction, but an incident just a few weeks later brought home to me how reflexive it is for us to recoil from our children’s reminders that they know more about the horrors of life than we wish they did. I was leading four-year-old Nicky through a crowd at Disneyland when a little boy ahead of us abruptly turned to his mother and asked, “Mom? Will you die?” His mom was visibly thrown, and her first reaction was to look for the nearest sympathetic adult face and say in embarrassment, “Typical five-year-old question!” Annoyed, I thought, “Why doesn’t she just answer the kid’s question respectfully instead of embarrassing him?” But then I realized that my first thought had been, “God, I hope Nicky didn’t hear that!” I didn’t want to face that reality with my little boy any more than she did. I was relieved to see that Nicky was lost in his fantasy of the moment, being a savage Tyrannosaurus. Later, though, it struck me what seemed to make Tyrannosaurus so compelling to Nicky. It was a killer, and it was extinct. He was working through his own awareness of death, at the level that was best for him.
We try to shelter children for what seem to be the kindest reasons. But their most potent fantasies are unkind and unreasonable, because even as children they gather that the world’s fundamental realities are neither reasonable nor kind. The philosopher Ernest Becker argued that the driving force behind humankind’s greatest endeavors is “the denial of death.” Our science, art, and civilization compel us largely because they enable us to say, “I won’t die–not completely–not yet.” Even art that meditates directly upon death is a way of taking power over it and thus pushing it slightly away. Play is children’s greatest art.
Playing with life’s scariest realities continues through adolescence. Mary Pipher made the point in Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls that girls from restricted, sheltered homes tend to be calmer and less troubled in early adolescence than girls from more permissive homes. But those same girls are more likely to fall into crises of confidence and identity in late adolescence and early adulthood. The girls she studied who were allowed to experiment, take risks, confront adult values, and face the feelings that frightened but fascinated them tended to develop a stronger sense of self and flexibility as they took on adulthood. Those who were limited to an adult standard of acceptability early on were usually less prepared to take over their own lives.
There’s more to be said later in this book about the gory gun play found in shooter video games. However, my experience has been that most of the time they serve the same function for older kids that make-believe guns and gore serve for little ones. For preteens and teenagers, the fantasies they spin in their heads are far less powerful than they are for young children. They need something realistic to look at and the surprises that come from interacting with a game developed by someone else. Like a preschooler’s fantasies, those games enable them to play with the realities that scare them most and to take power over them. Raps about ghetto violence, rock dirges about suicide, movies about vicious killers are the same sorts of tools. In feeling that they understand such terrors better, they also feel stronger in the face of them.
For young people to develop selves that serve them well in life, they need modeling, mentoring, guidance, communication, and limitations. But they also need to fantasize, and play, and lose themselves in stories. That’s how they reorganize the world into forms they can manipulate. That’s how they explore and take some control over their own thoughts and emotions. That’s how they kill their monsters.
When we are at peace with our fears and angers, we are best able to love. In wanting our children to be happy and innocent we tend to view violent fantasy as one end of the spectrum and loving fantasy as the other. But I’ve found that the two often mingle in children’s imaginations. The little boy whose Stuffyland was protected by the hideous chopping machine was able to feel safe and snug with his Stuffies, and thus able to nurture them and be nurtured by them, because potential threats were so vividly dispatched. This is why Bruno Bettelheim and so many other psychiatrists and psychologists have argued against the bowdlerization of fairy tales. The wolf who locks grandma in the cupboard and then runs away from the woodsman is a pleasantly comical figure, but the wolf who devours grandma and is then hacked open matches children’s own imaginative and emotional power and helps them master the terrifying realities that they already know about life.
I was doing a call-in radio show out of New York when a caller asked me for advice about her sister and niece. The nine-year-old girl had made a board game of her own invention for her grandmother in the hospital; the object of the game was to help a cat eat a mouse by rolling the dice. The girl’s innovation was to have the mouse devoured piecemeal: if your cat lands on a picture of its tail it eats the tail, if it lands on a leg it eats the leg, and finally it eats the head. The girl’s mother had called it “depraved.” I asked the caller if her niece seemed morbid or troubled in creating this game, and she said no–although the girl was upset by her mother’s reaction. Nor did she ever mistreat real animals. My advice was that if the kid seemed joyous and playful in making the game, and if she wasn’t acting out in any negative way, then her creation should not only be allowed but celebrated. (Whether it was an appropriate hospital gift for her grandmother was another matter, and not for me to figure out.) Not only had she invented something all her own, but she’d confronted one of the most unpleasant truths about cats with a joyous empathy. Every nine-year-old knows that kitties eat cute little animals and that the process isn’t pretty. This girl’s game helped her to go on loving them without having to bend her mind around a denial of their real nature.
Not every child playing at violence is doing so in a constructive way, of course. But we can’t hope to understand what any child might be getting out of any fantasy until we step back from our own anxious reactions to make-believe violence. Vivian Gussin Paley, the renowned kindergarten teacher and author of many books about children, wrote eloquently in Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner of her own distaste for the violent play of little boys. The more she tried to suppress the boys’ superhero battles and gun play, the more insistent their fantasy violence became–and the more they insisted that she was being unfair.
“Shooting is all about killing people,” she told them. “It looks wrong in a classroom.” But as the boys demanded explanations, she began to see how inconsistent that was in the light of the fairy tale play that she did allow: “Is there a difference between ‘Pretend our parents are dead’ and ‘Pretend I’m killing you’? The children know it is all magical play. The same magic destroys and resurrects, creates an orphan or a mother–or the Green Slime. The ability to imagine is the magic; putting it into action is the play; playing it out is the safe way to discharge the idea.”
Paley began to pay more attention to the details of their fantasies: bad guys killed good guys and then nursed them back to life; superheroes used their powers looking for lost friends; robbers invaded the doll corner but stayed to help take care of the babies. She concluded, finally, that violent play “is serious drama, not morbid mischief.” And even when the drama turns mainly on aggression, it can embrace a child’s full emotional life. She revealed that the sounds of little-boy gunfire troubled her for a long time, until she watched a group of boys play a game in which army men shot robotic Shogun Warriors and the Shogun Warriors came back to life and decided to be army men instead. “Shogun Warriors are surely brothers who love each other,” she realized. “Once I recognized this fact, the shooting took on a friendlier sound.”
No one ever expressed any of this more clearly than the seven-year- old son of University of Chicago psychiatrist Edwin Cook. Although Cook felt that aggressive fantasies and action-entertainment could often be constructive, he also entered parenthood with grave reservations about letting his little boy grow up with toy guns and violent cartoons. He never let guns per se into their home, but bought his son Lego Throw-Bots that fling little plastic discs as surrogates. He taught him to use hockey-style body checks instead of making fists. He tried to steer him toward nonviolent programming, and when the boy insisted on watching Power Rangers or Pokémon, Dr. Cook sat beside him and talked about the dangers of real violence. Then one day his son looked at him.“You know, Dad,” he said, “you’re always trying to turn me into someone who doesn’t like violence. But the problem is . . . I do like violence!”
And so they do. Some more than others. Some for one set of reasons, some for another. Sometimes they find fantasies that help them become happier and more productive, and sometimes they find fantasies that disturb them more. But the point from which any discussion of children and violent fantasy should begin is that most of them do like violence of one kind or another, and they know it. Respecting that is where communication, guidance, and understanding start. Much has been written about the most effective responses to children’s desire to play at violence. Most of them involve discussions of the reality of violence and making them aware of other kinds of play. Those aren’t bad ideas. But the most essential response of all is the one the kids are looking for: grab your chest and fall down dead.