Discovering the Meaning of Children’s Violent Play

"We flood our children with violent images, and then we do not want them to express their reactions through play.... They need to learn to articulate their feelings about their play, to listen to each other and to make rules that will help them treat each other with empathy and respect." --Jane Katch in Under Deadman¹s Skin

In Jane Katch's classroom of five- and six-year-olds, there is an art section with brightly colored paints, a dress-up area with outlandish pink boas and long sparkly dresses, and a quiet space for reading and resting. But Jane worries when some of the students prefer to spend their time in the drama area playing Suicide. One student hands another an apple, calling it a hand grenade. He instructs that student to blow himself up by exploding the grenade while sitting in the special suicide seat. When everyone has committed suicide, the game is over, and the students move on to a discussion of the scary and gory R-rated movie they all want to see, Deadman.  The usual adult-imposed prohibitions only seem to drive this disturbing play underground, out of view.  What can a teacher do to help children deal constructively with their violent fantasies?

Violence in our nation's classrooms has become all too pervasive, and in the wake of numerous school shootings, Americans are terrified of the dangerous consequences of kindergartners who play Suicide and watch R-rated films. In Under Deadman's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play, Jane Katch takes on this difficult issue. Katch is uniquely qualified to discuss violence in young children given her training under Bruno Bettelheim at the Orthogenic School and with Vivian Paley at the University of Chicago Lab School. Katch has also taught young children for many years at a school in central Massachusetts.

Rather than banning violent images from her classroom, Katch makes her students' fantasies the subject of ongoing discourse, helping them to make rules that will respect the views of all the children and will allow them all to feel safe.

They Don't Like Me:                                    

Lessons on Bullying and Teasing from a Preschool Classroom

School is the arena in which most children first become aware of themselves as part of a social group. It is also the place where they will experience, as nearly all children do, the sting of exclusion. Is there a way, though, that teachers can help children resist the urge to tease and bully and to take a role in stopping this behavior in others? Can children learn to listen carefully to one another, look at a situation from another child's perspective, and form groups in which everyone is treated as a valued member?

In her new book, They Don't Like Me, preschool teacher Jane Katch explores these questions while chronicling the intense dynamics among the young children in her classroom. Bringing to her observations a deep respect for her students, an unending curiosity about what influences the social world of young children, and years of experience forging democratic classrooms, Katch looks at how each member of the group, including the teacher, contributes to exclusion.

Katch's classroom has a rule based on Vivian Paley's work: you can't say you can't play. The rule works fairly well until a new girl named Zoe destabilizes classroom dynamics by insisting on having things her way.

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“This is an important, moving, and beautiful book that shows all of us a unique and powerful method to facilitate young children’s self-discovery and growth. Jane Katch writes with a spare, pure poetry as she tells the delightful, hilarious, and at times terribly sad stories of the adopted children in her class, moving us through a range of emotions and understandings. The great artistry of her writing, her self-reflection and humility, and the way she listens deeply to parents who adopt make this a remarkable book—reading it will leave you changed for the better.”  Joshua Sparrow, MD, coauthor of the Brazelton Way books