Playground Violence

reposted from kidsandgender.tumblr.com

I’ve spent most of my summer mornings in Riverside Park; a haven for nannies in the Upper West Side. In the small playgrounds that line the park, strollers congregate under the hundred-year-old trees while the morning air slowly fills with toddler babble that only the respective nannies can decipher.

The playground with the sandbox is the best. Children play in the shaded sand while you pretend you’re at a beach somewhere building sandcastles. The sand is usually damp and the kids share their toys, so there is a lot of quality castle-building and castle-smashing going on.

Like clockwork, around 11:30, preschool groups arrive. They’re usually groups of around ten 4 year olds and, since their teachers remind them to “watch the little ones”, they’re generally respectful of the toddlers.

Today’s group was a bit larger, and they had all the makings of Upper West Side preschoolers: summer-y dresses, sparkly flats, Keens, and car t-shirts. While the class had one teacher for every four children, things seemed more chaotic than usual.

The 2 year old I was watching for the day was playing contentedly in the sandbox. She had spent the last hour shoveling sand onto her legs with a Dixie cup. When the ‘big kids’ entered, she stayed seated as usual, watching them find their respective playgroups.

I watched with her, promptly noting the gender groups that had formed. While one of the groups was mixed-gender, there were groups two each of boys and of girls. This is a common observation of mine at any playground, so it didn’t surprise me that the groups were also playing very differently from one another. On cue, the boys found cars in the sandbox and began their active play, while the two groups of girls settled into the sandbox with shovels and pails, digging deep holes and burying one another’s feet.

Three of the boys who had been running around came into the sandbox next to my 2-year-old companion and me. Still sitting and shoveling, she and I watched as one of the boys grabbed a car from the other’s hands and bent over it in fetal position so as to protect his stolen goods. The other boy started at him, yelling, “That’s mine, you took my car! That’s my car!” before he hastily kicked him in the head.

I scanned the benches, expecting teachers or other nannies to react, but the boy continued without consequence. When I looked back he had begun punching the boy in the head with a closed fist, repeatedly. I ran over and put my hand on his back and told him to stop hitting, that he needed to tell me what was going on. “He took my car! I was playing with it!”

I responded with, “Okay, but that doesn’t mean you can hit anybody,” as he gave one last kick. I told him, firmly, that if he had a problem he needed to go talk to his teacher; that he wasn’t to hit anybody. He got up, found his teacher, told her, and he got the car back. There were no consequences for his actions. In fact, he was rewarded.

Two minutes later, I saw him running around with another child who was pretend-flying the car he had (literally) fought for in the sandbox. He threw a punch at the boy and the teacher saw it, responding with a passive discussion and, again, no consequences or mention of his aggression.

Boys learn to feel empowered through masculine aggression that in turn oppresses them. Neither this little boy nor his peers who felt or saw his violence received any guidance around his aggressive behavior. They’re learning that, for boys, self-worth comes through power and aggression instead of introspection or self-expression. The ‘boys will be boys’ mentality excuses aggression, and as these little boys grow into men, it quickly develops into violence that manifests itself in some dangerous way or another. It’s a script in our society that is followed over and over again by men who were once a little boy in a sandbox waiting for someone to teach him that hitting is wrong.