I love play. This is most likely why I have stayed in preschool for so long (going on 20 years). When I was a kid, we were sent outside to play. We were not expected to bother our parents until they called us in to eat dinner. We had a lot of freedom and we figured a lot out. When outside was not a choice, we played cards, marathon Monopoly and Risk games, and made stuff up to do...dance routines, American Idol-type performances, long before American Idol.
Some of our play was cruel, hierarchical, and bullish. I remember playing baseball in our backyard and I was the catcher. I got too close to the batter and was smashed in the head with the swing of the bat. I was knocked out. I remember, as I came to a few minutes later, hearing my siblings and friends, who were generally older, saying, "You big faker!" and, "You baby! Get up and play." And, I did. Today my parents would probably be reported for neglect.
The day of the school shooting in Sandy Hook, CT, I was in New York City for a long weekend. I had, literally, just finished reading Under A Deadman's Skin, a book about violent themes in young children's pretend and fantasy play. The main premise of the book is that in our current culture, children are exposed to violence in many different ways. these include television shows, video games, the 24-hour news cycle, and movies. For whatever reason, many parents are not vigilant about minimizing the exposure children have to violent images and video. I do not know if this is due to parents being oblivious to what children actually take in or understand, or if there is so much of this imagery pervasive in our culture, that filtering proves to be an impossible task. There can be other factors. With divorce, the kids may be in houses with different rules for what is okay to view. Older siblings may not be aware of how they should be shielding younger children from violent images in video games and on television.
Preschoolers, like the kindergarteners in the book, work through new knowledge as they play. This is how they process information safely. They are trying to make sense of the world as it is being delivered to them. When things like Zombies, Power Rangers using martial arts moves, and Superhero Good versus Bad Guys creep into their play, they are generally trying to process and understand something they have seen or heard. They actually need to do this to process images and information they have witnessed. Since young children do not yet completely separate fantasy and reality, those shows on in the background, or video games that are way too violent for them (and are rated as such) become a part of their play.
While girls, typically (but there are exceptions), fantasy play in the area of princesses, house, and daily routines like grocery shopping and school, boys (typically, and a few girls), go for the monster, wild animal, and superhero strong-man kind of play. Of course, there are always exceptions to this typical gender division. I have known many girls who are right in there with the boys chasing each other and growling and snarling, and I have known just as many boys who are content to sit out of the mayhem and take the daddy role in family play.
When play becomes violent, it can be alarming to adults, but there are some parameters we can put on the play in order to make it work for the kids psyches, but still have some balance. In my classroom, since we spend a lot of time talking about how we are all on the same team, no real kids can be pegged the "bad guy." Teddy bears, play figurines, and invisible people can be the bad guys and we are all the good guys trying to figure out how to save the world. When the goal of the play has turned into killing the bad guy, I try to help shape it so they creatively think of ways to trap and capture the villain. This way, we can think about ways to give the villain consequences for his actions.
I also work in a place that has a vibrant hunting culture. So, rather than saying no gun play in school, we set the parameters to be that you cannot point to pretend gun at people, only pretend animals or targets that we make.This seemed to satisfy their need to include shooting in their play.
I had a group of boys and a couple of girls who really liked to get involved in rough and tumble play when we were outside. They wrestled on the grass constantly and I was regularly breaking it up and redirecting them to make a different physical choice on the playground. After listening to Olga Jarrett speak at Champlain College last spring, I changed my reaction to this kind of play. She pointed out that rough and tumble play is important to children's socialization. She compared it to what animal young do, like puppies at play. This made sense to me. That is how puppies and kittens socialize. She coached us to watch the play and look at the children's expressions when they are involved in this play. If everyone is giggling, laughing, and happy, and no one is getting hurt, could we, as teachers, just let it happen? I followed her advice, and began to see the benefit of this play for the children bonding with each other, as well as gaining more physical skills.
As teachers, we do not have a lot of control over what our students are exposed to outside of our classrooms. We can coach parents, but at the end of the day, they make the decisions on how to parent, what television shows or movies are on in the house, or letting the news play when kids are in the room. There is some research and advice on how much screen time children should be exposed to from both the American Academy of Pediatrics and from the National Association for the Education of Young Children. But, when it comes down to it, our job is to support and observe children as they play, as well as have conversations with them (and their parents) about how they are making sense of the world.
