Tuesday June 7th, 2011 It's all fun and games..

"How do you sign up for the team mom?" my young son asks me. "The team for the United states!" he proclaims running out of the kitchen.

I understand exactly what he is asking me...how do you join the armed forces? I have been watching his play evole into this very question for the past few weeks. What started it, I am not sure-perhaps Deadliest Warriors, with which his brother is obsessed, and they do enjoy watching it together. Quite naturally, this lead to playing war, and reenacting the scenes.

I can already hear the pacificts groaning...

Childrens play is very important. Very. It is their "work". It is how they make sense of the world. (See John Holt, see Richard Elkind) So what better way to process the very frightening idea of war and killing people, or being killed, than in the very safety of your own home, your own yard? Surrounded by people you love, people that love you, and would not really "kill" you. The more we allow children to create and re-enact scary or frightening things, the better we are helping them to cope with and understand these things.

There is a HUGE difference between playing war in the backyard and becoming a serial killer.

After the quake in Japan, and the subsequent tsunami. This same son, Dominic, would pick up the playmobil house and shake it vigorously, all the while declaring "earthquake!" He would put playmobil people and boats in the sandbox and deluge it with the garden hose. Tsunami. Of course, in his game, the people all drowned, but magically, and to his great comfort, revived again for another game. See? It's safe in your backyard. You can take something very scary, and turn it into a play where YOU direct it, YOU are in control, and then when you've worked through that, you can run inside and have lunch.

Surprisingly, no one considered him a future mass murdered when he engaged in this play. Rather, an enterprising seismologist or meterologist. It's amazing how gun play changes people's predictions...

So I remember, or at least TRY to remember, that when I open the fridge and find a "grenade" and a very young, very LOUD voice yelling "KA-BOOM!" as I am pulling out the strawberries, that there is some very serious work going on around here. Very serious.