As a dad with a six-year-old son, I have seen recently and recall from my own childhood how boys gravitate toward fantasy violence, whether in video games, books, movies, or imaginative play in the backyard with toys as simple as stick-swords in the hands of diminutive swashbucklers. Boys write stories about battles, and draw pictures of exploding space ships and interstellar dogfights on their notebooks. And boys (and quite a few grown men) like violent video games. A lot. And while most of us have long been aware that this sort of imaginative violence does not turn boys into serial killers, the age of Columbine has apparently prompted many well meaning parents and teachers to develop no tolerance policies for violence in boys’ imaginative work, stories, pictures, etc. Now, however, some folks are questioning whether this new common wisdom – that any reference to violence in boys’ play is bad – is actually wise. A piece in Ars Technica reports, “The author of The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do, Peg Tyre, claims that the recent anti-violence efforts of the past decade are actually doing more to hinder boys’ development than help them.”
I heard an interview with Tyre on NPR last summer, and found what she had to say compelling. The meat of it is this: because of classroom hyper sensitivities to violence, boys are being steered away from subject matter that may help compel them to read, write, or draw more avidly, and as a result, are being pumped full of medicine for ADD, earning lower grades and being expelled more often than girls. The solution? Let boys be boys. Tyre points out that while boys “play and think around violence,” what they are also doing “is playing around with ideas of courage and valor, good versus evil, and teamwork. These are ideas we want to inculcate in our culture.”
The expression “boys will be boys” came about for a reason. EVERY mother who has had a son knows that boys engage in “battle” and “hero” play from the time they are very little, no matter what their circumstances or surroundings. All my “nature vs. nurture” preconceptions went out the window when I saw how very different my little boy and girl were, naturally, with no influence from me whatsoever. I would certainly hope that the well-educated faculty and teachers of our nation’s schools could tell the difference between a healthy boy’s imagination and a troubled boy’s mind.