Dealing with 'bang, bang, you're dead'

NEA Today, Feb 2001

Jane Katch has taught five- and six-year-olds in central Massachusetts--and audiotaped the violent fantasy games that some boys seem to love to play. Katch, who has worked with Bruno Bettelheim and Vivian Paley, has now written Under Dead Man's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play (Beacon) about what she has learned.

How did you handle violent fantasy play?

There are two issues here: what the fantasies are about and how the boys treat each other. Boys can have violent fantasies and still play them cooperatively.

But there also were rules about the fantasies. They couldn't be too explicitly gory, for example, because some people didn't like itnot because I as the authority figure decided for them.

How did they arrive at these rules?

I insisted that they talk until they came to a compromise. Most of the time, we used a consensus model rather than voting. I prefer this method because then they have to listen to everyone.

Any surprises in your study?

I didn't expect the connection between violence and exclusion. At first, I was cutting out everything that had to do with exclusion because I thought it was off the subject, but it kept coming in.

A child who is excluded sometimes feels justified in feeling violent. And the children who do the excluding seem to feel justified in violence toward the excluded child-it's okay to hurt him because he's not one of us.

The only incidents in the book that involved real violence, rather than fantasy play, had to do with exclusion.That's what really made the kids angry.

For more:

Order Under Dead Man's Skin at www.nea.org/ neatoday/01 02/innov.html, $17.60 plus s&h.