It’s hard being a kid. You struggle to learn to stand up, falling down over and over. And once you’ve finally got it, you try to walk–and you fall down again. You can’t stop your parents from sticking you in your stroller when you want to be held or snatching you up when you want to run (although a loud explosion of rage or grief sometimes helps). As you grow up you conquer more tasks and gain more power, but you’re also hit with new frustrations. You watch adults breeze through tasks with the greatest of ease, but when you try them yourself, they turn into disasters. Your parents make doors fly open by touching doorknobs that you can’t reach, and then when you’re finally big enough to grab one, you discover that making it work is a maddening puzzle.
Of all the challenges children face, one of the biggest is their own powerlessness. Some children face especially painful challenges: the loss of a parent, abuse, neglect, hostile schoolmates, illness, poverty, neighborhood violence. But even the best protected children, with the most supportive parents, have to wrestle every day with reminders of how small and powerless they still are. Once when Nicky was three, we took him to a park where cattails grew around a picnic table. He was running around the table, waving a cattail in his hand, laughing in joy, when suddenly his little feet turned slightly inward–and before we could grab him he’d hit the corner of the table, full speed, with his forehead. One of the happiest days of his young life had ended in pain just because he hadn’t learned to run perfectly on the uneven ground yet.
No matter how many new skills we learn, life keeps throwing those picnic tables at us. Our inability to master ourselves and our world brings pain, frustration, anxiety, and fear. One of our most profound yearnings as we grow up is simply to feel powerful.
The best antidote for life’s frustrations, of course, is experience; proving to ourselves that we can conquer a challenge builds optimism and resiliency for the challenges ahead. Almost as important is adult encouragement and support. But we need help along the way. Between the wanting to master something and the mastering of it can be a long trip, and sometimes what keeps us going is our ability to make ourselves believe we’re strong enough. We need something to drown out that voice in our head that says we can’t do it, and answer, “ I can do anything!”When reality isn’t enough, fantasy comes to our rescue.
Psychiatrist Lenore Terr, author of Beyond Love and Work, analyzed the myriad functions of play: exercise and relaxation, bonding and honing social skills, learning mastery, practicing for later life. Play gives children new perspectives on their frustrations: “A problem doesn’t look so big when compared with what Superman or Wonder Woman can do.” Fantasy play “expresses sexual and aggressive feelings, hopes, and terrible frustrations with past or present realities.” It enables children to manage and defuse their feelings by displacing what they want or fear; a child who wants to punish his parents feels safer pounding on monsters as a Power Ranger.“Children have been observed for years to use their play to make themselves feel better,” Terr noted, “to relieve their anxieties and unhappy moods. [By] enacting play stories with feeling, they release much of the powerful emotion that has built around their internal conflicts or their experiences with outside events.”
Power fantasies can be thrilling antidotes to life’s pain. I spent time with a five-year-old boy who had recently been sexually molested by a relative, and for a while afterward he spun out grandiose fantasies of his own power: “I’m so fast I can run faster than a car so he can’t catch me! I’m so strong I’ll hit him with those flowers and because I’m so strong the flowers will knock him out!” The fantasies would start verbally, but then he’d run wild, play them out, physically transform his fear and rage into joy. Gradually, as he began to resolve his fears with the help of his parents and a therapist, his fantasies shifted to ninjas, Spider-Man, and other more distant symbols of power. He displaced his feelings, gave himself more power over them, and rehearsed a version of himself that was strong and unafraid.“By playing out new endings, or corrections,” noted Terr, “children find that there are other possibilities for next time–and, in fact, that no ‘next time’ may ever happen.” Becoming a warrior or a superhero able to beat any bad guy is a generic but thrilling “new ending” to all the everyday stories of not being old enough or powerful enough to make things come out the way children want.
The lifelong rewards of play are flexibility, resilience, mental fortitude, courage–in short, empowerment. The more a child can view the most unpleasant situations in new ways, and the more he can manipulate and dispel his most overwhelming emotions, the stronger he feels. The stronger he feels, the more confident he will be, the less he will react from fear and anxiety, and the easier it will be for him to take control of his own life and behavior. And as Terr pointed out, no fantasy works more directly or effectively to boost a child’s feeling of power than rough-and-tumble play: “Play fighting helps kids learn their own strength and how to control it. It helps them learn limits and how to observe them. It helps them function confidently in the world–they learn how to handle moderate pain and forgive friends for accidental hurts. It helps them practice being resilient in the face of the real aggression that they’re inevitably going to encounter down the road–from schoolmates to unfair teachers, competitive coworkers, road rage.”
Wrestling, roughhousing, make-believe violence acted out with the whole body smash anxieties and wrestle fears to the floor. Pretended savagery lifts kids out of shyness and knocks down barriers to closeness. Games involving chasing, pillow fighting, squirt guns, and mock combat help kids learn how to judge dangers and take appropriate risks. Jumping willingly into those pretend dangers and coming out unhurt helps kids distinguish fantasy from reality. It’s hard to watch a little boy or girl becoming a kicking, tackling, body-slamming savage without wondering, “What’s my baby turning into?” But it’s in that being something–whether in the pretend of early childhood or the artificial selves of video games later–that children use fantasy best, playing with the greatest feeling and displacing their feelings most safely.
I asked Dr. Terr about the parents who tell me that they don’t like their kids’ aggressive fantasies becoming too physical and real.“When my son sees fighting on TV, he fights,” said one.“When he doesn’t, he works out his aggressions just through his toys, which is a healthier release.”
“I can sympathize, but they’re not doing their kids a favor,” Terr said. She compares aggression to a heart: block one artery, and the same amount of blood has to pump through the remaining arteries. It can still function with the blockage, but it’s healthier with every vessel open. If a child doesn’t engage in play fighting, his or her aggression will probably come out in storytelling or other fantasizing. For some kids these channels may be adequate, but often they aren’t; then children may have trouble letting go of their aggression, may allow it to become a bigger deal than it need be, and may express it in social relations or other less constructive ways. “That’s where you may get kids who are either too aggressive,” said Terr, “or so afraid of their own aggression that they turn it inward. It’s best for kids to express their aggression in every safe way there is.”
It’s easy to get lost in the debate over whether aggression is innate or learned. It doesn’t matter much in the reality of childhood. Whether we’re born with aggression that needs expression or learn aggression that needs comprehension, the logic of life makes aggression inevitable. Aggression is an expression of the need to feel strong. It’s an empowering response to an imperfect world. It also brings dangers with it. Children will face it, and feel it, and have to do something with it. Playing with it makes it less scary, puts them in charge.
Aggression isn’t easy to control, however. Hands fly, kids get whapped, tears flow. But that can be valuable, too. “Parents often come to me very worried about children’s aggression,” said kindergarten teacher John Michaud, “but I tell them that if a kid doesn’t conk some other kid on the head at least once during the kindergarten year, that’s when I start to worry. An unpleasant incident is the best way for a child to see the connections between his impulses, his actions, and real consequences. If he doesn’t get to practice, he may fear that his impulses are too powerful or not know how to handle stressful situations when they come along later. Working with children’s aggression is much more useful than preventing it.”
Aggression also taps into real anger, even when it starts out playfully. There is no emotion we feel so uncomfortable with in our society as anger, no other emotion that we dread more in our children. But anger can be creative, too. It can be an energizing force. It can kick us back into action after a defeat, push us through obstacles, knock our fears from our minds, double our strength. I think of kids in my workshops, scribbling and scratching out stories about people who’ve made them angry, starting out sullen and tense but chortling and showing off their work by the end. I think of Nicky a few hours after the picnic table hit him in the head, becoming a bloodthirsty Allosaurus and biting Jennie and me–biting us hard–on the legs. Pretty soon he was running around the table at home, roaring fiercely but also laughing, not afraid to run full speed again. Anger used as a weapon is destructive, anger bottled up is self-destructive, but play can turn anger to joy.
Play fighting can also turn into real fighting. A kid may not know how much damage he can do or might use roughhousing as a pretext to hurt someone. “Some kids are just too angry for it,” Terr maintained.“ Others have a hard time getting it right and need lots of time outs, talks, and ‘you can do it again if’ bargains before they learn. I tell parents to keep an eye on it. If kids are really picking on smaller kids, or hurting pets, or causing intentional damage of some sort, then intervene. But I also tell them to encourage play fighting–as long as it remains play.”
Nicky turned our home into a laboratory for play fighting. He created what he called “the war game,” in which he and I would battle through the whole house, running, hiding, ambushing, tackling, hitting, kicking, shooting Nerf guns, throwing Toobers and Zots. He invited his friends, boys and girls, to join us, and during kindergarten and first grade it became the one event that everyone demanded of a play date at Nicky’s house. Each of them brought his or her own fears, desires, and sensitivities into the war. Some liked to hit hard and blow off real anger. Some just liked to scream and hide. Some would hit the floor and bounce back up like inflatable clowns, others would bawl over a toe stub. Nicky himself was reticent about too much mayhem, liked to structure the games with rules, and was a little too sensitive to his friends’ anger or disagreement.
But in every game we learned to adjust. Angry kids learned some control and fragile kids some resiliency. Nicky learned some things about not taking other kids’ feelings too personally and not having to maintain so much control. The wild, tension-shattering fun of the war game enabled them all to expand their emotional and social capabilities even in the midst of explosive emotions like anger and pain. They learned to accept each other in their vast range of abilities, fragilities, and temperaments and work out ways to function together. Nicky’s war game made for great play dates and helped him strengthen some good friendships.
Much of the power of play fighting comes from the fantasies that support it. It isn’t enough to say, “I’m a six-year-old running around!” Much of the immersion, displacement, and expression of children’s play is dependent on being something: superheroes, monsters, army men. TV shows, movies, video games, and toys can nourish those fantasies. They provide symbols of power–powerful beings they can become–that their usual experiences cannot. We may be happier when our kids become dinosaurs or knights or something else that hasn’t been trademarked by a corporation, and they very often do. But there is a special power inherent in cartoon characters and action figures: they are individualized and yet universal, human and yet superhuman, unique visual symbols that can be held clearly in the mind’s eye and are instantly recognized by everyone. For a child seeking a more expansive sense of self, a less generic and more individualized bigness, sometimes only Pikachu or Darth Maul will do. Especially at around age four or five, as children become more conscious of themselves as individuals, trademarked superheroes can be the perfect surrogate selves.
Those superheroes can also inspire kids to play. Rough-and-tumble play requires effort and sometimes a defiance of adult restraints. It can take a shot of fantasy from the TV or the toy box to rev a kid up enough. But that shot may not be welcomed by adults who don’t quite trust play fighting. It disrupts our homes and classrooms and requires our anxious vigilance. It reminds us of real violence. We might respect it when it flows from our children’s own innocent ideas and high spirits, but it’s suspect when it seems injected into them from outside. Especially when it’s from loud, plastic trash marketed to them by some corporation. We already dread our children being controlled by that corrupt world. To see them being turned violent by it is too much. How much anxiety is contained in that one mother’s line, “When he sees fighting on TV he fights”?
In Boys and Girls, teacher and author Vivian Gussin Paley described the “near-riot conditions” that erupted in her kindergarten classroom when one boy brought his Star Wars record for rhythm period: “The moment it went on, the boys’ inhibitions were released. . . . Suddenly the boys turn on one another, leaping and screaming, ‘You’re dead!’ ‘I killed you first!’ Robots run into spaceships, rockets destroy TIE fighters, storm troopers shoot at everyone. Each boy is fighting every other boy. Even Teddy is pulling someone down.” She immediately took the record off and started reading Charlotte’s Web. The kids quieted down quickly. “Such events,” she noted, “cause teachers to outlaw superhero play forever.”
But, she concluded, the value of the mayhem to the children is worth too much to outlaw it. “The pleasurable aspects of the play help reduce tensions, which then build up again if make-believe aggression appears too real to the child or the teacher. . . . Certainly there is a wider variety of violence pictured today in stories and play, but not more actual fighting. The increase in mock-aggressive fantasy play may even lessen the need for real combat.”When kids played Spider-Man, trapping and shooting each other, they argued far less than when they played “workmen.” “Perhaps when you pretend to fight, you don’t really need to fight. Or maybe a superhero doesn’t need to prove he is powerful; his label tells the story. A builder, confronted by a collapsed block structure, has no such sustaining symbol of competence.”
There are dangers to commercial entertainment’s influence. Kids take in commercials and commercial values along with their symbols of power. Some kids are seduced into sitting and watching instead of jumping up and playing. The stories can be so formulaic and the toys so clichéd that they may not inspire the expansion of imagination that less popularized products can. It’s important that we counterbalance all that with other values. But those “sustaining symbols” are real to children. When I run story workshops with young children, they bring in fantasies of being princesses and kittens, crocodiles and pirates–and of being Pokémon, Wolverine, Harry Potter, and obnoxious TV wrestlers. All are equally important to them. Each is suited to what that boy or girl seems to want to be at that time: glamorous, nurtured, predatory, invincible, all-destroying.
Aggression is fun, but it’s also scary, and not just to adults. Emotions come suddenly upon kids and make them do things they never wanted to do. Aggression can make them hit too hard, hurt themselves, hurt their friends, break their toys. It can make parents tense or embarrassed or angry. It looms large in kids’ minds but defies understanding or control.
No wonder they lock instantly onto action scenes in cartoons and TV shows. Those cartooned images of fighting encourage their own aggressive fantasies, but without pulling them into any real conflict or danger. They reassure kids that even aggression can be made harmless and fun. Play based on those well-contained fantasies will seem safer as a consequence, especially since popular culture also gives children a common language of symbols for organizing play-fights with their friends. Several times I’ve seen the most aggressive kids try to take over a game until a worried player will reign it in with a line like, “That’s not how you do Power Rangers!” Superhero play has unstated but inherent structure and rules that can keep the aggression from flying out of control.
One of the joys of my work on children and fantasy was meeting Dr. Donna Mitroff. We were both on an “Ethics in Broadcasting” panel at a KidScreen conference and were expected to be antagonists. We differed on some specifics but happily agreed on the basics. Mitroff is a child development specialist and former elementary school teacher who had served as a public television producer and educational consultant before Fox Kids Network hired her to set up a socially conscious Standards and Practices unit and help keep their programming in line with FCC requirements. She arrived expecting to have endless battles about Fox’s Power Rangers, but she found instead that the struggle was to set standards that didn’t permit unacceptable images or storylines–while still allowing kids to build the healthy stories and fantasies that made the series so important to them.
“This is why we need to break out of the old dialogue,” she asserted.“ People keep wanting everything black or white: is it violence or nonviolence, is ‘violence’ harmful or not? We can’t really discuss these matters until we can at least distinguish between violence and action. Action that inspires rough-and-tumble play can be profoundly beneficial, and there’s a real loss when it’s excised or banned as “violence.” Children have a deep need, an almost physical need, for these archetypes of power and heroism.”
The art of life is the building of a self that serves us well: a weaving together of caution and optimism, toughness and openness, love and boundaries, self-interest and empathy. Aggression has to be part of that self. It can be destructive, but it can also be directed into assertiveness, decisiveness, healthy competition, and altruism. It helps us protect ourselves and what we believe in, inspires us to show off and make the best of ourselves. And as any kid in the middle of a wild X-Men game or an athlete in the moment of triumph or a writer coming out on top of a challenging chapter can attest, there is no joy sweeter and no satisfaction more unassailable than healthy aggression channeled toward a creative end.
We learn to channel it mostly from reality: parents, peers, self-understanding, life experience. But play helps, too. Most of our fundamental learning is in childhood, and play is an important part of any childhood work. A child learning to enjoy and play with his aggression is working toward his or her eventual wholeness.
One of the virtues of media entertainment is that it enables young people to play long after the normally sanctioned age of fantasy is past. “Our culture is very hard on play,” said Lenore Terr. “There always has to be a point, developmentally, where the play principle has to make way for the reality principle. But our culture insists on it earlier and more completely than a lot of cultures, and it seems to do it earlier all the time.” Far too early we tell children to get serious, get down to working on their test scores, good conduct, fashion accessories. By the third grade we’re usually taking away most of their unstructured time with planned activities and academics. We give them the message that they shouldn’t play pretend or silly games. Kids who roughhouse make us nervous by the time they hit the first grade. By preschool we may already be urging them into organized athletics, which is another good place for kids to play with aggression and power, but not a substitute for the egalitarianism, freedom, and individuality of wild play. They internalize all that, and by the middle of elementary school they may already feel that child’s play is beneath them.
Entertainment can make aggressive play feel acceptable to older kids. Television wrestling mimics roughhousing in many ways. Those absurdly brawny men picking up their opponents and slamming them into the mat, or bouncing off the ropes and flying fist-first through the air, are exactly what roughhousing little children see themselves doing in their minds. It’s even make-believe; most of the wrestling fans I’ve talked to over the age of nine know that it’s choreographed, or say, “I don’t care” (which means they know but don’t want to pop the bubble by saying it out loud). Many of the younger ones think those “Atomic Piledrivers” and “Undertaker Drops” are real blows, but even they have learned that the wrestlers are never seriously hurt and that the more likable one nearly always wins. Unlike real sports, which carry with them too much grown-up anxiety for many fantasy-craving kids, professional wrestling is rough-and-tumble play.
It’s far more vicious, of course. Its emphasis on pain, rage, and willful injury makes it exactly what children’s fantasy play isn’t. But that’s the point. That gives it a quality of seriousness, of “reality,” that makes it more legitimate to kids going through the awkward stage of disdaining child’s play but still yearning for it. Even if kids only appreciate it as fans or as collectors of the cards and action figures, they’re revisiting the fantasies of play fighting. And some kids are inspired to imitate their favorite wrestlers in physical play. It’s much cooler for a ten-year-old to pay homage to Stone Cold Steve Austin than it is for him to be a Power Ranger.
Interestingly, wrestling has had three moments of popularity on television: the late 1940s and early 1950s, the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the mid- to late 1990s. The first was in the wake of a world war, when violence was vividly remembered but being forcefully rejected, and the new style of family was suburban civility and tranquillity. The others were both times when crime rates had recently soared, adult anxiety about violence was intense, and raising kids to be nonviolent was a dominant concern. In all of them, violence was a concern of young people but one they were discouraged from exploring. Millions of them became fascinated with a publicly enacted game of roughhousing.
Video games lack the physicality and freedom of play fighting, but they retain much of the fantasy. Even the goriest shooter games are essentially variations on a kindergartner’s war game. When we look beyond the bloody special effects that shock adults–and give the games their “coolness” to older kids–we can see the player scampering, hiding, peeking out, blasting away, being blasted, “dying,” and getting back up. Gamers don’t get to throw each other to the floor, but they almost make up for it by whooping about their wins and chattering excitedly about their favorite features. When Nicky first got into Spyro, at the age of eight, he’d bounce around on the couch as he fought his battles, then run through the house yelling, “I beat Ripto! I beat Ripto!” Most of his friends had already lost interest in playing the war game by then, and even he was developing a self-consciousness when we tried it. Spyro gave him some of that back.
In one of my Art and Story Workshops, two bright, slightly geeky eighth-grade boys created humorous comic strips about video games. They obviously loved gaming, but they were making fun of it, too, thus making sure it was known that they were cooler than their passion for fight games might make them seem. They created a martial arts game about “the evil Cygon” and “the ninja of pain.” From the enthusiasm they put into the fight scenes I could tell that it wasn’t just the gaming they loved, but the fantasy heart of the fighting itself. They finished early, and I showed their pages to the rest of the class. The boys were proud but embarrassed and started getting squirrelly as the other kids were finishing up. Suddenly they got up and started to act out a ninja fight in the back of the room. “I am Cygon, master of the universe, and shall not be defeated!” “Feel my fingers of absolute destruction, evil Cygon!” They were grinning self-consciously, glancing to see who was watching, obviously enacting a “parody” of games to show their superiority to them. But they kicked and punched the air with commitment, too. They were excited. They were using every big-kid method they had to preserve their dignity, but they were having a play fight, right there in an eighth-grade classroom.
Entertainment violence embraces far more than the superhero fantasies of early childhood, takes more problematic forms and plays more complex roles. But at heart, it’s about the joy of feeling big and strong, the freedom of being able to survive anything and to overcome any obstacle. It’s about action, power, and mastering life.
Martha Breen is an artist who knows both tradition and creativity: she was trained as an archaeologist and creates Judaica and children’s books with a unique humor and humanity. She and her husband had both grown up watching Looney Tunes but debated whether they would be right for their young son. When he was three, they decided to let him watch the Roadrunner.“I can see Lenny’s pleasure in stories with violent twists,” she said. “I watch him and I can literally see how dangerous conflict energizes his body. It fills him with a kind of enthusiasm. The enthusiasm makes him feel alive. And, well, life loves itself.”