The other day, a friend called to ask whether it was okay to buy my kids Super Smash Brothers Brawl, a game for their Wii.
I appreciated her call. More than once I’ve stood in the toy aisle before a birthday party wondering whether a water gun is PC enough for a coveted new playmate’s parents. When my kids were really little, I solved this by taking them to a bookstore to pick out a gift. But sure as milk teeth eventually wobble, there comes a day when kids acquire the rhetorical skills to call foul on selecting a present because it will please the recipient’s parent.
The game was rated, simply and unhelpfully, "teen," so she’d turned to the Internet for help. According to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, Super Smash Brothers Brawl got the rating because of "mild cartoon violence and crude humor." To wit: fart jokes.
Ugh. I hate fart jokes. Probably because I’ve spent too much time with grown-up men who still think public farting is a real knee-slapper, to be repeated again and again until the dinner party breaks up tragically early. But I’m not ready to blame this on the Smash Brothers, who turn out to be Pokémon characters. Like all those hilarious synonyms for penis, boys just seem to pluck fart jokes from the ether. Indeed, getting a break from the inevitable fart jokes is just one of many excellent reasons why a reasonable parent might use cartoon violence to lure the kids into another room for an hour or so.
More to the point, what good are cartoons without the violence? What would Tom do without Jerry? Road Runner without Wile E. Coyote? Or, to date myself, Ren without Stimpy? Without conflict, you’ve got what, My Little Pony? Double-ugh — makes even me long for a little potty humor.
My conversation with my friend propelled me to pick up journalist Gerard Jones’ Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. The book’s thesis is, in short: Make-believe violence plays an essential role in children’s development.
Stories, of course, are how children and adults alike understand the world and our experiences in it. But there’s a crucial difference: Adults, with our mature brains and vocabularies, are much better at identifying and naming our fears and feelings, of distinguishing fantasy from reality, and of coping with our own angry and violent urges and our reactions to frightening real-life events. Children aren’t yet capable of this on their own. They need stories to help them make sense of such complex and weighty stuff.
Let’s be clear here — and Jones goes to exhaustive lengths on this point: This is not to say that media violence does not have a harmful effect on some young people, or that all media violence is as benign as pinning a dyspeptic coyote under an anvil. Some of it may give dangerous ideas to young people who already lean toward violence. But for most children, it can present a way to deal with their rage.
It’s a freighted topic, and there’s a lot of nuance in Jones’ message, so you’ll forgive me the length of the following quote: "One of the functions of stories and games is to help children rehearse for what they’ll be later in life," he writes. "Anthropologists and psychologists who study play, however, have shown that there are many other functions as well — one of which is to enable children to pretend to be just what they know they’ll never be.
"Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden to them is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people."
Stories with violent elements can also allow children — particularly girls — to feel powerful. Jones examines the Pokémon phenomenon, comic books, and even Strawberry Shortcake via this lens.
His criticism of the popular notion that media imagery causes violent behavior probably isn’t helpful to the average parent — it’s too academic to be very reassuring. But the book does contain a large amount of terrific information for parents trying to decide where to draw the line on the ever-shifting continuum between "Dora the Explorer" and Quentin Tarantino’s "ultraviolent" Reservoir Dogs.
Jones also includes information on helping children to understand their violent feelings that I haven’t seen in years of reviewing parenting literature — much of which I find unrealistic in an age where isolating a child from popular culture is nothing but a hazy parental fantasy.
One major influence Jones cites is the work of Bruno Bettelheim, who won a National Book Award in 1977 for The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Fairy tales, the late Austrian psychiatrist tells us, evolved precisely to help children and parents process disturbing thoughts and impulses.
"Even more than at the times fairy tales were invented," Bettelheim wrote, "it is important to provide the modern child with images of heroes who have to go out into the world all by themselves and who, although originally ignorant of the ultimate things, find secure places in the world by following their right way with deep inner confidence."
Will the Super Smash Brothers set my boys on such a righteous path? Probably not. But neither will the game turn them into feral sociopaths. No doubt they will have their own recommendations and criticisms of the epic battles waiting to be waged. Me, I’m looking forward to enjoying a little time in a fart-joke-free zone.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
What do those ratings mean?
Look here:
Entertainment Software Rating Board
Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence
By Gerard Jones, Basic Books, 2002, $25
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
By Bruno Bettelheim, Vintage Books, 1975, $14
