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Monday
Oct162017

Dealing with Fears Through Imaginative Play

As we have seen an increase of acts of violence in recent years, parents have become increasingly mindful of “violent” play.  A lot of parents are censoring toys that involve weapons or any kind of pretend dying.  We also have seen an increase in kids with anxiety levels beyond what we have seen in previous generations.  While I cannot prove a correlation between these two things with a formal study, let me tell you what I do know. 

 

Kids often deal with things they fear or do not understand through play.  This is why we often see kids with deceased relatives playing doctor to patients who end up pretend dying.  Making it a part of their play allows them to face fears in a safe, imagined way and gain power over those fears.  Bad guys being killed or conquered is the basis of many fairy tales for a reason.  As much as we try to shield our children from the bad aspects of the world, death and crime are a part of reality. 

 

With 24 hour news it is something that is constantly in our kids’ view no matter how much we try to prevent that from happening.  Doctor’s offices, car dealerships, and restaurants are playing news about horrible tragedies as our kids wait for an appointment or slurp up spaghetti.  Parents are talking at dinner tables in front of their kids who bring the stories to playgrounds at school.  We fool ourselves into believing that our children are distracted enough by their innocent lives to be unaffected by these encounters, but children are like sponges who soak up the world around them. 

 

By removing their options for play surrounding these topics, we are removing (i) their opportunities to work through fears and (ii) our opportunities for meaningful conversations that allow us to help our children make sense of the world.  Imaginative play for small children is not the same as exploitative video games that normalize criminal behavior.  So certainly, as parents, we should exercise our right for censorship of those things that we feel are inappropriate for their developmental level, but let’s be mindful of potential benefits of exposure to imaginative play we might otherwise view as negative.

 

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