Kid picks the game

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We often buy toys not for the child, but for ourselves. We believe that boys prefer balls and cars, while girls prefer dolls, dishes and decorations. But in reality, your son may like to cook or have tea parties with toys, and your daughter may like building blocks or racing. Let your child choose their own toys. So he will be able to make his own decisions and play what he really likes.

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If a child plays aggressive games

Children today are seeing an increase in violent games. Naturally, this cannot but worry parents and teachers.

The causes of this phenomenon are rooted in the society itself, in which there is a lot of violence. The absence of widespread wars is perhaps the achievement of modern civilization, but does this mean that people are now free from fear and the need to be ready to defend their lives and dignity? Unfortunately no.

Try clicking on the TV channels. Even a couple of minutes of watching will be enough to understand that most films and programs broadcast on television contain violence: blackmail, robbery, fights, coercion, terrorism, humiliation, disasters - and this is a small part of the list. Advertising seems to be the most positive under such circumstances, but it is in fact violence against our consciousness and the unconscious. Other media do not differ much from TV: the headlines of the newspapers are full of information about violence, it has found its way into books and radio programs, although, of course, the ratio of it is different in these sources.

Can all this information not affect children, not affect their development in any way? This assumption does not seem realistic. We are not raising abstract children, but children growing up in a particular society, in a particular era. One of the global tasks set by nature for cubs of all species is adaptation to the environment. And if this environment is aggressive, then manifestations of aggression are more common in children's games.

Perhaps several boys or girls immediately appeared in your memory, who seemed to have grown up in similar conditions, but who play in completely different ways: someone prefers the role of an aggressor, and someone of a peacemaker. Naturally, the individual characteristics of children affect their ability to cope with traumatic experiences. How do they influence? What should an adult who observes a child's aggressive games do? Let's try to find answers to these questions by looking more closely at the aggressive roles chosen by the child and understanding the significance of this game for him.

Aggressive manifestations of the role are different, as well as the motives for accepting it by the child. To see the difference, let's take a look at a few examples.

Roma and Lena are addicted to the following game in the kindergarten: Lena climbs into a fabric toy house, and Roma starts kicking its walls, throwing big toys from above and destroying the house with other improvised means. Lena starts screaming: "Save me, I'm dying!" - and pretends to be dead when her house is littered enough with toys. Children repeat this game several times. Then their fantasy creates a new plot twist: when the house is littered with toys, Roma from an aggressor destroying the building suddenly turns into a hero. He shouts: "Don't be afraid, I will save you!" - then he starts to rake up the toys, scattering them in different directions, and pulls Lena out by the hands. Joyful Lena throws herself on his neck and says that she now agrees to marry him.

Obviously, the original plot of the game arose in children after terrible events - the explosion of residential buildings by terrorists. Children can learn about such frightening facts from fragments of television news, from conversations of adults, although, as a rule, they try to isolate the kids from such information. What they saw or heard probably caused them a lot of disturbing fantasies, which means the need to somehow cope with them.

Children cannot simply forget what caused them negative emotions, but they are also unable to simply accept it. They need process new information, deal with their anxiety, make them feel like they're in control. How can they achieve these goals? Of course, through the game.

At first, they reproduce in the game plot only those external aspects of the terrible event that they perceived due to their age. Therefore, at first their game is simple and cruel: a person is in a house, another person destroys this house, and the first one dies. At the same time, Roma enthusiastically plays the role of a terrorist: he furiously knocks his feet on the walls, finds more and more new toys and throws them with force. If you saw the boy's face at that time, you might be afraid for the future of our children. But can we unequivocally assume that Roma chose an aggressive role, following his destructive needs, that this is evidence of his aggressiveness? Hardly.

Notice a few details about this game.

Firstly, this is a story game in which the actions of the partners are quite coordinated. The aggressor has an assistant in the game - a voluntary victim. If the role of the victim was played by a boy, then the partners would probably change roles. But in assigning the role of the aggressor to the boy, and the role of the victim to the girl, there is an additional game meaning - working out social stereotypes of behavior (male activity and female passivity), although not in the most positive form. As we can see, it was this line of development of the game that took up later.

Secondly, after playing the fantasies disturbing the children, they were able to introduce new content into the game. Apparently, as soon as Roma and Lena understood (in their own way, childishly) what it means to be a terrorist, what it is like to be in a destroyed house, how unattractive death looks, and were able to cope with their anxiety, the boy felt discomfort from the role of the aggressor and from the most terrible event they played out. Then his freed fantasy suggested a way out of the situation - to become a rescuer, which he did.

So, with the help of play, the children created in their imagination the possibility of a happy resolution of a cruel event and further development of life (the rescuer's romance with the rescued).

Thus, the choice of an aggressive role in the considered game indicates that the boy was excited about the information about the terrorist attack, that he noticed how the media focus on sexual aspects (among the victims, children and women are more often shown, and among the suspected or caught criminals - men), that he wanted to try on the role of the aggressor (less terrible than the role of the victim) and that, having mastered this role, he wanted to change it.

All this speaks of the necessity of the game for the boy. Therefore, it is good that he had the opportunity to freely bring the game action to its own logical end, although the adults who accidentally watched this game could not help but shudder - naturally, they had a desire to immediately stop such a heartless game as it was at the beginning.

Let us now analyze the preferences of the child in another aggressive role.

Six-year-old Kolya plays with his small toy dogs of various breeds. He takes the largest dog - the bulldog - and begins to growl and hit the figures of other dogs with it, shouting insults and threats. The mother, who entered the room, was unpleasantly surprised by the words of her son and tried to reason with him. However, the son continued to swear, using expressions, some of which are clearly borrowed from action films. Then the mother changed the strategy of behavior and began to ask her son who he was and why he did not like other dogs so much. Kolya joined the conversation and between actions with the figures began to explain that the bulldog is the strongest, so he can do everything and everyone else is afraid of him. When mom asked what this dog wants to achieve, the boy shrugged.

Kolya continued to play aggressively until her mother offered to play together, after which she was able to develop a new plot and turn the senseless aggression into a more positive direction (in short: small dogs united and stopped obeying the bulldog, but he was able to establish it again relations with them, when their common booth was attacked by enemies from whom he protected them, in a word, friendship won).

In this aggressive game, the boy most likely acted out and tried to understand the conclusion that he made from his observations: whoever is stronger is right. The child could come to this conclusion not only from watching action movies (in which he caught not so much the idea as the essence of the process - the one who is stronger humiliates and destroys others), but also from his own experience (since in the group of boys of preschool age , as a rule, there is a cult of strength, and children in the process of communication understand that the weak clearly have fewer advantages).

It is unlikely that Kolya belongs to the category of strong boys of the group. Apparently, he perceives this fact very painfully: his self-esteem and dignity suffer from belonging to the weak. Perhaps he experienced a number of unpleasant moments in a collision with a force that he could not oppose anything, frightened. Therefore, his choice of the breed for which he plays shows us that , in order to protect his self-esteem, defense mechanisms of the psyche, namely, the mechanism of identification with the aggressor, have activated. The effect of this protection is such that a person is identified with what caused him anxiety or fear, therefore, he adopts the features of a person whom he himself is afraid of.

So Kolya tried to become an aggressive leader in his game, which, apparently, causes him fears in real communication. However, the question of a sensitive mother about what the aggressor bulldog wants to achieve, to which the son did not know the answer, shows us that the role he is trying on is not close to the boy. So he just copes with his fear and hatred, but does not feel the motives of an aggressive leader.

Before the intervention of the mother, the game did not develop for a long time, it seemed to go in cycles in the repeated violence against other dogs. This is probably an indicator that the problem of power and authority in the children's community has become traumatic for the child, but he did not see a way out of it.

Pay attention to how careful and competent the mother's actions are in this case. After the son did not react to a typical remark (which is usually enough), the mother realized that she was dealing not just with a game, but with something important for the child, which captured him so much that he was unable to stop. Therefore, instead of prohibitions and notations, she tried to understand what was happening in the soul of her child. She probably felt that this was not just his mastering a new undesirable behavior, but a way to cope with her feelings, to understand the situation. Then she tried to continue the conversation in the language chosen by the child - the language of the game. Developing the plot, she was able to show her son that there can be other means against brute force - friendship and solidarity, organization in actions. Mom also made it clear to the boy that aggressive people can play a good role, that they, like everyone else, need communication and recognition.

As we can see, in Kolya's case, the role of the rude aggressor that he chose also testifies not to the child's own aggressiveness, but, on the contrary, to the confusion and fear he experiences when he encounters someone else's aggression.

For comparison, let's move on to the third example of aggressive play.

Two first-graders, Volodya and Pasha, play with robot figures. First, they pretend to shoot at each other from afar, then bring the robots closer to each other and go into hand-to-hand combat (push the toys and make the appropriate sounds). After some time, carried away by the fight, they put the robots aside and start the fight themselves (the arms and legs of the boys are used), regulating their movements, but gradually this game turns into a real fight, and the children beat each other on the floor.

How is this game different from the aggressive games described earlier? First, this game is not developed internally. The children participating in it do not explore violence in any way. Secondly, the growing excitement of the guys from this aggressive game is obvious. That is, in this game, violence is carried out simply for the sake of violence, the game does not contain additional meanings. At the same time, the initial game aggression entails even greater aggression and, in the end, develops into real violent actions in relation to the partner.

What has changed in the inner world of children during such a game? What did they learn? What have you learned? Is that the new methods of fighting. Therefore, games of this kind should be a cause for concern for parents and educators.

What should adults do in this case? Should these games be banned? Select aggressive toys with which children act as shown in the relevant films and cartoons? But every parent knows that the forbidden fruit can be especially sweet, and children will continue such entertainment behind the backs of adults with even greater enthusiasm.

In order to develop an effective strategy of behavior, an adult must first of all understand what causes such games. There may be several reasons.

Modern children watch TV. In cartoons and films, as we have already discussed, violence is quite common, but, unlike documentaries on this topic, in works of art it often looks beautiful. The chiseled shapes, fast and precise movements of the robots can even aesthetically appeal to boys, which will become the basis of imitative play with robot toys.

However, even an adult who has watched science fiction series for children can hardly remember what the ideological content was. What were all those cars fighting for? The action is so stretched out in time, and even so often interrupted by advertisements, that it is absolutely impossible to remember what it was all about (even if the multi-episode struggle was for "world peace"). Therefore, only scenes of battles of all kinds, not linked to the ideas of justice or salvation, remain in memory.

Of course, such experiences for children under ten years of age are not at all safe. After all, the guys are not yet critical of many things and, in addition, they tend to master new behaviors by imitating the most striking of them.

So the first reason for the game of Volodya and Pasha can be a simple imitation of based on the impressions received from cartoons, films or computer games.

The second reason for may be splashing out one's own destructive impulses, accumulated anger, anger and resentment in this way. And at first, the boys do it directly in the game, that is, in a way that will not cause condemnation in adults (after all, children know that everything that happens in the game happens "for fun", as a joke, so adults usually do not react to it seriously). However, such a game battle only makes the real internal conflicts of children more relevant, and they cross the line between imagination and reality.

Finally, the third reason for such a primitive aggressive game may be the underdevelopment of the culture of games in Volodya and Pasha. It should be noted that this applies to many modern children who are taught before they learn to play. In addition, at home and in the garden, the guys most often communicate with their peers, which excludes the enrichment of their playing repertoire by watching the games of older children.

All these circumstances can lead to the fact that the players simply do not know how to develop the game further. They imitate what they see, but their game does not become creative, they do not bring their own meaning into it.

What could an adult do who happened to be nearby and understood the direction of the game in time? He could help the boys find this meaning of their own, show them the possible directions of play action. To do this, it was possible to ask the guys appropriate questions designed to use their imagination (for example: “What is this robot fighting for?”, “What will it do if it wins?”, etc.), or introduce new heroes into the game (the third a robot, a sage, an unfortunate child or a beautiful princess - decide for yourself, based on the situation).

If you feel that the main point of the game is that it becomes a reason for the actual fight, then use the recommendations of the article about the game ways to resolve children's conflicts. After all, you can’t just stop the aggressive actions of children, leaving them alone with their aggressive feelings.

Many more examples of aggressive roles and violent games could be cited, but the cases we have already considered are enough to help the attentive and loving parent independently begin to analyze the inner picture of what is happening in the play of a son or daughter.

Now you know that before interrupting a child's aggressive play, you should try to understand what kind of knowledge, thoughts, and fantasies he is playing out in it.

• What is the child going through now?
• What external impressions could have caused these feelings?
• Who does the child really identify with?
• Does he use his fantasy to transform the role of the aggressor into some more positive role?
• How well does he do it?
• Does this game help to stabilize the child's emotional sphere?
• What does he learn in it?
• Does his communication skills develop during the game?

etc.

Only by answering all these questions for yourself, you can make a competent decision whether to interfere in the game, and if you interfere, then how. As we discussed, in the first example it was better to let the children play on their own, in the second it was better to get involved in the game to help understand the motives for aggression and how to deal with it, in the third case it was better to try switching the children to a completely different game or to introduce some kind of positive meaning, and in addition, to engage in the systematic development of boys' playing skills.

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