Discovering the Culture of Childhood by Emily Plank

Author:Emily Plank
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781605544632
Publisher: Redleaf Press
Published: 2016-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Children’s Violent Make-Believe

The violent play of young children, by and large, makes early childhood educators nervous. I get it; it makes me nervous, too. The sight of young children pretending to shoot each other with pretend guns triggers our fears about the safety of our world, and calls to mind a mental newsreel of horrific events. As a society, we fear for the safety of our children, growing up in what we believe is a terrifying and dangerous world. But our fears are statistically unfounded (Mintz 2004; Holland 2003; G. Jones 2002; Mercogliano 2008). Though it seems hard to believe, the world is safer now than it has ever been. Rates of accidental deaths of children are down. Teen smoking, drinking, and pregnancy are all down. If children are safer than they have been, why are we so fearful?

The biggest reason was summed up by Lenore Skenazy, founder of a movement called Free-Range Kids, in a keynote address at an early childhood conference I attended in Canada in November 2013. In her comments, she termed this panic the “Google effect” (Skenazy 2013), which basically compares our minds to an Internet search engine. If we contemplate child dangers, our minds will recall everything dangerous we have ever read or heard about, irrespective of the likelihood. Another way to think of this generalized panic was aptly defined by Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert, in a TED talk he delivered at Penn State University called “the security mirage.”

We estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. . . . If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must be a lot of tigers around. You don’t hear about lion attacks, there aren’t a lot of lions around. This works until you invent newspapers. Because what newspapers do is they repeat again and again rare risks. I tell people, if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. Because by definition, news is something that almost never happens. When something is so common, it’s no longer news—car crashes, domestic violence—those are the risks you worry about. (Schneier 2011)

What Skenazy and Schneier are talking about, this reality that human beings have a tendency to exaggerate improbable risks, takes an enormous toll on the ways we interact with young children. Their violent play makes us nervous because we worry about the dangerous world they are inheriting. Historian Steven Mintz suggests, “Children have long served as a lightning rod for America’s anxieties about society as a whole. . . . Unable to control the world around them, adults shift their attention to that which they think they can control: the next generation” (2004, 340). Using children as justifications for our anxieties is unfair and inappropriate. We must have the courage to explore the violent play of young children with unbiased eyes, setting aside our emotional reactions to their play and trying to understand it from within.

One of the most common policies in the early childhood environment with respect to war and weapon play is a policy of “zero tolerance.

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