Teacher response to superhero play: To ban or not to ban?

Superhero play has received a great deal of attention from parents and educators in recent years. As defined here, superhero play refers to the active, physical play of children pretending to be media characters imbued with extraordinary abilities, including superhuman strength or the ability to transform themselves into superhuman entities. While some view this play as violent and aggressive, it is not so by definition.

This kind of play is a fact of life for those of us directly responsible for young children or for the training and support of those who deal with young children. A look at a bibliographic database related to early childhood (e.g., ERIC) offers ample evidence that children's involvement in superhero play is of growing concern to early childhood educators-the number of articles classified under superhero play as a subject between 1990 and 1995 is twice that found for the years 1985-1990.

Teachers of young children have become increasingly vocal opponents of superhero play, voicing concern about the behavior in their classrooms. Articles in professional publications such as Young Children, Child Care Information Exchange and Childhood Education by such authors as Bergen (1994) and Carlsson-Paige and Levin (1995) report that more and more teachers are choosing to ban superhero play from their classrooms. Newspaper articles found in the Seattle Times (Henderson, 1994) and the Wall Street Journal (Pereira, 1994) indicate that this concern has gone beyond an academic debate about child behavior. Teachers are sincerely concerned for the safety of children and themselves; many worry about violence as children engaged in superhero play grow older.

As a former child care provider/ early educator and current teacher educator, I also have concerns about reported increases in violent and aggressive behavior in preschool classrooms. I suggest, however, that banning superhero play may not be the most effective means for dealing with children's increasing exposure to inappropriate and poor quality television programming. I will suggest that 1) we do not yet have valid data on these "increases" in classroom superhero play, 2) this behavior may play some developmental function necessary for young children's healthy growth and 3) by banning superhero play, teachers may be denying themselves a powerful opportunity to teach about values, respect, safety and living in a democratic social group.

Teacher Estimates of Play and Aggression

I begin by examining the premise that aggressive, violent superhero play is on the rise in preschool classrooms. The published reports of this increase are based on anecdotal reports from teachers (CarlssonPaige & Levin, 1991; Jennings & Gillis-Olion, 1979; Kostelnik, Whiren & Stein, 1986) and from limited surveys of teachers of young children (Carlsson-Paige & Levin, 1995). These non-random samples are often drawn from participants at conference workshops on superhero and war play in the classroom, who may already be sensitized to and concerned about the issue of aggressive play. These reports lead us to believe that preschool children are spending the majority of their time karate chopping and pouncing on each other.

My own research, in which I collected time interval samples of preschool children's behavior, has led me to question this belief (Boyd, 1996). In one sample of a group of 3- to 5-year-old children at a laboratory preschool, I found that only 2 of 17 children exhibited superhero play during a 1-month observation period. The time spent in superhero play accounted for less than 1 percent of the 300 minutes of play observed. In a second sample, in which children in a full-day child care program were observed, only 5 percent of play time, on the average, could be classified as superhero play. In this group of 16 children, only 4 children exhibited superhero play. In both samples, boys were the only superhero players. Furthermore, my observers and I never witnessed a child being physically hurt by another child while involved in superhero play.

Although these findings are clearly preliminary, they suggest that teacher reports of the occurrence and nature of superhero play may not be entirely objective, and may lead to an inflated estimate of this behavior. Previous research about teachers' views of aggression offers two lines of evidence to support this hypothesis.

First, evidence suggests that children and teachers have differing perspectives on "play fighting" and "aggression." In a study published in 1985, Smith and Lewis showed videotapes of play episodes to preschool children, their teacher and the assistant teacher. The children were more likely to agree with each other or with an objective observer than with their teachers in assessing behavior as play or aggression.

These results suggest that teachers rely on some perspective not shared by children to differentiate aggression and play. This perspective is reflected in the criteria teachers reportedly used for determining aggression in this study. The assistant teacher, whose assessment of behavior was least often in agreement with the children, based her remarks on her knowledge of the children's personalities, as reflected in comments such as "Well, knowing those boys, I know they can't cooperate together. Chances are it wasn't playful, it was aggressive" (Smith & Lewis, 1985, p. 180).