Working Among the Good & Bad

by Kim Atkinson

In my line of work I meet a lot of bad guys. They carry guns, swords, sabres and fantastical weapons full of levers with complicated capabilities. These bad guys go by many names and have powers to fly, transform and disappear and reappear at will. They are all very mean.

I meet good guys as well. The good guys seem to have a comparable arsenal of weaponry and powers with the added skill of trap-making to catch the bad guys, which is often their sole occupation. Often the good guys appear just as mean as the bad guys.

I am an early childhood educator (ECE) and I work among the good guys and bad guys every day. The names change according to current trends or the imagination of the players, but the themes never change. There is fighting, sneaking, stealing, capture and rescue. Barricades are built, hideouts are constructed, roles are determined. There is killing, though no one seems to die. Identities shift seamlessly as Batman morphs into The Joker, who becomes the captain. Witches and princesses rub shoulders with Darth Vader and Spiderman. Ferocious monsters growl at equally ferocious kittens. I stand in their midst, wondering why.

Consider this dialogue among a group of four-year-olds:

“This is a gun. You guys sit here.”

“Shoot the teacher.”

“Put them here. Hide them quick, you guys.”

“My bullet can shoot through a window.”

“If someone’s talking, you say ‘Yes Sir’ (saluting) and you walk ‘Huh Huh Huh!’” (marching).

“I’ll do the rest”…“Yes Sir!”

“What power does your gun shoot?”

“168 meters”

“Mine shoots fire”

“Mine shoots pistols”

As parents we are alarmed, even horrified, to hear our child talking about weapons, shooting and killing. The intensity, the language and the appearance of aggression is disturbing. Often it seems this play emerges suddenly—one day our child is playing teddy bear picnic, the next they are shooting the teacher. We are taken by surprise with no idea of how to respond.

ECEs are often just as unsure how to respond. I have spent hours discussing weapon play and bad guys with colleagues and this much we agree on: it’s there in every group of preschool-aged children and we can never really make it go away. We can insist on “no weapons” all we want, but the children are too clever for us and make things that are “really not guns at all, just things that look like guns and shoot goo and slime.” We all know toast can be chewed into a gun.

We are conflicted, we don’t really like the play, but we know we are in a losing battle to change it. We know parents don’t like the play much either, and are looking to us to see how we deal with it.

“I have never completely bought into the ‘no weapons’ rule,” says a colleague. “Yet I still use those words more than I care for and it’s almost automatic. Who am I using those words for? The children? The parents? Or the onlookers? Lots to think about.”

The fact that this kind of play elicits such strong emotions and uncertainty among adults is not surprising. Our image of childhood is that it is a time of innocence, that children have purity that we can protect. Aggression and violence are not part of our image, thus we are shocked when we see it.

We also might be fearful of where this kind of play will lead. Will a child who talks of “shooting the teacher” become a violent teenager? Are we raising unfeeling, uncaring children?

As I sit among the bad guys voicing my objections to being shot, I watch and listen carefully. I don’t see unfeeling children, I see a complex drama with powerful characters. I see heroic deeds and negotiation. I see identities explored within the themes of good and evil.

Brian Edmiston writes in Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play, that children explore their ethical identity within the context of the mythic play of good guys and bad guys. As children try on the roles of good and evil, they can evaluate the perspective of that role, experience that identity. The adult role, Edmiston says, is to create dialogue about the issues of good and evil, caring, empathy and power.

“When we tell children what they should do without discussion or thoughtful processes we are not having a dialogue, it is a monologue,” he writes. “When there is no room for negotiation then it is a monologue.”

As the children continue to shoot one another, I ask them some questions about guns.

Do kids ever have real guns?

Yes, pop guns are real guns.

Kids don’t have real ones.

Who has real guns?

Not me. In movies.

Guns shoot bullets, you press this handle and then bullets come out. You pretend to shoot, and pretend to use the light-saber.

The real ones are in the Star War movies. The ones we use are fake, some light up, some don’t.

Luke (Skywalker) gets to use a light-saber and a gun and Hans Solo has a light-saber and a gun. He has real ones.

Kids have pop guns, marshmallow guns, light ones, you press the button and a light comes on.

Pop guns are real, but still quite different than the real guns of movies. And those real guns are not available to kids. Seems very clear. So what about the bad guys?

What is a bad guy?

Robbers and being rude and stealing stuff.

Being really bad. They kiss girls!

Good guys kill bad guys in a movie.

Are bad guys bad all the time?

Yes, bad guys are bad all the time.

Can be both.

Bad guys can be good.

They kind of do bad stuff like hurt people.

They really hurt people. Really hurt. I know, I play it.

Is it pretend or real?

Pretend game.

It would seem being rude is equally as bad as stealing, and that bad guys have the ability to be good sometimes. But most revealing to me is that there is full agreement that this is a pretend game. The bad guys “really hurt people” and this boy know it because he “plays” it. Really hurting in pretend play…the children are not confused by this finessing of real and pretend. I think it is we adults who are confused by it.

When we are alarmed by the aggression and violence of bad-guy play, maybe we are missing something. Maybe we are failing to give credit to children for their understanding of “pretend.” We see the intensity of the play and conclude that we are seeing aggression and violence. What we are more likely seeing is pretend aggression and violence. How does that make a difference? It makes a huge difference to the children playing it. They know they are acting out roles, trying out characters. They know they can “really hurt people” but in play.

The other thing we are missing is the opportunity to use this kind of play as a starting point for discussion.

“I think if we are in relationships with children we want to encourage dialogue—even dialogue about difficult issues,” says a colleague. “It is through dialogue we learn and we can think aloud.”

A difficult issue indeed, but one that might teach us something about what children learn and experience. And then we can share what we know and have experienced.

Bad guys still roam freely in my preschool and I still don’t like being shot at. I sometimes have an emotional reaction to what I see and hear and sometimes I wish it would just go away. But I am also asking questions, asking for explanations, asking for stories and drawings and really trying to listen. I am making space for the play even when it’s hard to do so because, as teacher and author Vivian Gussin Paley puts it, “When play is curtailed, how are children to confront their fantasy villains?

Kim Atkinson is the mother of two boys and an Early Childhood Educator at Lansdowne Co-op Preschool.