029: Why we shouldn’t ban war play

---

Transcript Jen:  [00:30] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called The War Play Dilemma. This episode comes to us by way of a suggestion from my friend Jess, who had told me that she had joined an outing with some children in her three year old son’s preschool class and she said that some of the slightly older children were running around and playing, that their hands were guns and shooting each other and the teachers were pretty much just ignoring it, which really shocked her. Jen:   [00:54] So I thought to myself, I bet some smart person has done some research on this. And I went out and found us just such a smart person to talk with today. So Diane Levin, Ph.D Is Professor of Education at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts, where she’s been training early childhood professionals for over 25 years. She teaches courses on play violence prevention and action research and her book, The War Play Dilemma, provides a theoretical view of why children engage in war play and how parents and teachers can support the development that occurs when children engage in this kind of play and also do it in a way that doesn’t make us feel queasy. Professor Levin has a BS in child development from Cornell University, an M.S. In special education from Wheelock College and an interdisciplinary Ph.D in Sociology of Education and Child Development from Tufts University. Welcome, Professor Levin. Dr. Levin: [01:42] Hello. It’s a pleasure to be with you and being able to talk about this issue. Jen:   [01:46] So let’s set the stage here. So war games aren’t found in all cultures, but they are found in many, both today and also historically. And I read in your book that archeologists have found the remnants of what might have been toys used for war play by the ancient Egyptians. So I’m wondering if kids had been playing at war for ever, apparently, why the sudden concern what’s changed recently? Dr. Levin:   [02:07] Well, I think there’s always been some concerns from parents who were thinking that they didn’t want their boys to be aggressive, didn’t want them to focus on violence, wanted them to grow up and be humane citizens. But I, I think one of the things that’s happened in our culture in the last say 30 or 40 years as media has become a bigger and bigger force in children’s lives, in as marketing of toys has become a bigger force in children’s lives, violence is one of the one that the items that’s used to market to boys war toys, guns there, there were. They used to be cowboys and Indians; that was one of the first ways they were marketed and some people worry about that and the messages that taught about Indians, but it was a big…I grew up in Texas and count cowgirls and Indians was something I played. Dr. Levin:    [03:02] It’s always been an interest of children to figure out what does it mean to be a boy? What does it mean to be a girl? Violence and weapons has been something that’s been marketed to boys and I’m sure we’ll talk about that more, but children look in the world around them to figure out what to play and how to play and they’ll look for some of the things that seem the most dramatic, the most confusing, the most exciting, and when they see violent weapons and things, that’s one of the things that boys find for them Jen: [03:36] Hm. And so why is that? Why are boys more attracted to war play than girls? Dr. Levin:   [03:41] Because boys learn already by around a year and a half that they fit into one category, the male category and girls fit into the female category. Children tend to think in dichotomies when they’re young, good and bad, right and wrong. Boy and girl, mom and dad, they tend to think that way and what’s for me and what’s not for me, and so when they learn, I’m a girl, I’m not a boy, or I’m a boy, I’m not a girl, they then start looking at what goes to me, what doesn’t go to me, and they see very quickly. I mean they might start at immediately thinking princesses because that’s what already girls will see pink and you know, and rosy colors and princessy things. That’s what’s there for me because that’s what they see in their environment often in their rooms and the toys they get. And boys will see, you know, tough and red and blue and green and and tough and fighting and superheros and so forth and so that’s what they’re drawn to. And in part our culture has created that and in part marketers do that because they do make it very different because they can market more things to have a whole culture and a whole boys culture and if you have a girl and a boy child will end up having to get solely different things. Dr. Levin:   [04:59] Even a boy’s bike and a girl’s bike. They can’t have the same bikes, the same baby carriages, which you get a pink one and a blue one. It affects parents, it affects children, but children are drawn to the things that they very quickly learn of their colors or their objects are their toys and so forth. It makes a big impression on them when they are looking for concrete things that are for them and even when kids get to preschool or to toddler school that they’ll look in the environment to the things that are for them. A former preschool teacher, it was something, you know, we thought a lot about his teachers. I entered the field at the beginning of the women’s movement when we first started thinking about these issues and first started studying these issues and we saw at very young ages, kids where we received the great divide and we started documenting it. Dr. Levin:    [05:54] And that’s when suddenly when I was interested in this topic, the war play dilemma gotten written when I was already teaching a little bit about this topic and how to help teachers encourage girls and boys to play together more. And suddenly teachers were saying they started having boys obsessed with war play and shooting. And why was that happening? And they had taught for many years and thought they were making progress with having things less stereotyped and suddenly it had gotten worse and we couldn’t figure out why. Nancy Carlsson Paige, who I worked with on this book, we started trying to figure it out, why would we, why are teachers saying this? And what we found out was television had been deregulated, children’s television had been deregulated under the Reagan administration. Sounds like a long time ago well it was, but within one year of deregulation, nine of the 10 best selling toys had a TV show before that time you were not allowed to market products that are exact replicas of TV products. Dr. Levin:   [06:59] You could do it with movies and Star Wars had done it and it was a huge success and it was all products for boys and it was mostly fighting toys. TV wanted to do it. They managed to get the Federal Communications Commission to deregulate television for children and within one year of deregulation, nine of the best selling toys had TV shows. And it was like power rangers, GI Joe Transformers; all fighting things. For girls it was Care Bears and My Little Ponies. They use gender to do the marketing and the teachers started seeing the effects. Boys going around karate, chopping, pretending to shoot; much harder to get girls and boys to play together again and more and more kind of let less gender neutral play became a big problem for teachers who really were trying to have gender neutral classrooms or as gender neutral as possible. And teachers started trying to ban war play. Dr. Levin:  [08:00] They family had guerrilla wars in their rooms where kids were sneaking around, know gradually know things… I haven’t done direct research lately, although I teach a lot; I hear a lot from teachers about what’s going on now and you know that they’re still being the gender divisions going on, but things have changed around play as kids spend more and more time glued to screens and less time playing teachers are finding different problems she’s play rather than just the fighting and the princesses. So that’s what they focus on more. Dr. Levin:    [08:35] What are some of those different problems? Some of the different problems are now they have children who just aren’t interested in play as much. Maybe not when they’re two, but sometimes even then they come to the classroom and look for screens, if there’s a couple of screens, that’s what they want to play with. Dr. Levin:    [08:53] One teacher even talked about, she put out Play Doh and a kid poked it and said, what does it do? Like they were trying to push a button, you know, they, they just didn’t know where the, you know, what the Play Doh was all about. But you know, in the days that I was talking about earlier on when kids were not as screen dependent, even though they were getting more and more involved with screen content like power rangers, teachers would have children, boys taking the Play Doh and making toy guns and going pow pow, pow. And helping teachers and parents think about how do you deal with that was something that we had to deal with a lot. Now that you know, two year olds, three year olds like in the story start running around shooting. A lot of teachers haven’t thought about it as much now. It’s not part of teacher training, it’s not part of the standards the teachers have to meet when they’re being trained to be teachers and it’s not an issue I hear talked about that much, but people will then like you come to me when they suddenly see problems, and have questions and concerns and um, I think it’s a really important issue for us to think about what lesson, you know, kids, if they’re not playing it still very quickly get involved in violent video games. Dr. Levin:   [10:14] There’s all kinds of messages about violence being fun, violence is exciting, Violence is what you do to have a good time that children, boys especially are getting. And it’s really important that we think about it and it’s great you’re taking on this topic. Jen:   [10:32] Thank you. What you said brings up something: you said that teachers are not trained on how to deal with children playing with pretend guns in a school environment. And I had no idea. I assumed someone was talking to teachers about this stuff and what that connects to is the idea that well, why of course we wouldn’t want our children to play at guns. And so would that sort of, it reinforces something I read elsewhere that was a book by Penny Holland out of the UK I think wrote hers just before you did. And she talked about how there were pretty much blanket bans on playing at guns in the UK and nobody really had any idea why nobody had put any thought into it or done research on it or based on any kind of theoretical grounding. It was just a “common sense” thing as, as it were. And so you’re saying that teachers are not trained in any way on how to deal with this? It makes me feel as though were where we are where the UK was, you know, a decade or so ago. Dr. Levin:  [11:38] Actually, if you read the second edition of my book in the first edition came out about 15 years and I actually was in England and studied the issue there and compared it to the US when I was finishing up that and in England they were much further along. I mean they didn’t have to think about it in the same way television wasn’t deregulated there in the same way that… It was just beginning. They were just beginning to bring American television over there, so it was just beginning to be an issue and I studied it there as it was beginning to enter the lives of children in schools and families and I interviewed teachers about suddenly then becoming aware of it as an issue which I couldn’t study here; it had already taken over when I became aware of an issue here. So when will it help me a lot come to understand it, but what I say about it here is teachers have never had a lot of training in children’s play, but now they don’t impart because what they need training in is how do you teach the alphabet and reading to four year olds, you know, how do you, there’s much more testing, the common core standards, I’m so forth and there’s more and more pushed to get accredited as a teacher to get more and more formal courses on testing, evaluation, skills teaching, math literacy and so forth. And so there’s, it’s harder and harder to fit it in. I’m even more. I teach, which is known for training developmentally train teachers for over a century now. We worked very, very hard to be able to fit into a students courses given all the other mandates for them to be able to pass the state certification tests that our teachers have to take. So it’s very hard. So that it’s very unusual for it to happen. But the issue of gun play, a lot of people think, oh, it’s bad and I don’t think, oh, it’s bad. I think, oh, well it depends on the nature of the play. Jen:   [13:42] All right, let’s, let’s not get into that yet because I know we have a ton to talk about on that. Um, and I know that that your position and opinion is going to be so different than what parents might assume is the default position, but I want to lay some groundwork first in terms of thinking about theory so that your position is well understood by the time we get to it. So first I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about how children’s brains are wired. You talked a little...