“I killed you!”

February 12, 2014| Jason Michael Reynolds|4 Minutes
February 12, 2014|By Jason Michael Reynolds|4 Minutes

“I killed you!”

Recently, Jonny went to Grammy and Papa’s house. This is almost a weekly ritual. I’m sure most of you grandparents out there need your arm twisted to spend a day with the grandkids.

Anyway, after one such day, Papa came up to me and said he needed to ask me about something. Apparently Jonny was playing “pretend” with Papa and Jonny said “I killed you!! You got dead now!”

I asked Papa what they were pretending and he said Jonny was pretending out the movie “Brave,” and Papa was the “bad guy,” Mordu. Keep in mind, Papa has never seen the movie Brave so he didn’t really have a frame of reference. In the movie, Mordu (who is a colossal bear) does indeed die when he is attacking the main character’s mother (who is also a bear at this point). A rock tumbles onto Mordu and we are lead to believe Mordu is dead.

Merida, the main character from the movie "Brave" escapes from Mordu.

Jonny, ever the observant 5-year-old was simply reenacting something he saw on a movie. My dad asked me about how I was handling that sort of playing, and I told him it was fine. Pretend is pretend. Real is real, and Jonny is old enough to know the difference.

Around the same time, we got finally got around to telling Jonny that Captain (our kitty who was killed by racoons last year) was actually killed by racoons. Jonny understands the whole bit except the actual “being dead” part. When I told him Captain went to heaven, Jonny asked, “How? Did you drive him there? Did he walk?” The kid is a smart cookie, but he doesn’t quite grasp the “spiritual” concept so I left it unanswered. Jonny has decided Captain must have walked there. I’m not correcting him at this point.

The more I think about it, the more I am starting to question if I should reconsider how I approach “playing dead.” On one hand, I want the kid to have a vivid imagination. I know I used to pretend to kill people playing “ninja turtles” or “cops/robbers,” and Lord knows how many people and things I killed in video games. I used to play “army dudes” with the neighborhood kids and if I got “pretend shot” I would “pretend to die.” That is what playing is.

My problem then is how times have changed. It seemed inconceivable that a kid would actually really DO something like that. But nowadays, some kids ARE actually shooting and killing other kids, or bringing REAL guns to school.

People don’t know if there is a correlation between violent music/video games/movies and real violence. School administrators are trying to equate pretend “violence” to real violence and that’s where it gets dicey. He can be suspended or sent home from school for any number of “zero tolerance” violations of which he is not even aware. How do I address that? Is it the administrator’s problem? Is it society’s problem?

Do I tell Jonny that he can’t pretend to kill anything? That his pretend pirate sword won’t kill other pretend pirates? That his “cannons” on his toy pirate ships won’t actually kill Captain Hook? What if Jonny plays “Brave” at recess and gets written up or sent to the office for “pretending” out a scene from a Disney or Pixar movie where a character dies, and yells out “I killed you!” or “bang bang, you’re dead?

Thoughts?