Valerie Tobias
Raising a child to be a good human being can seem deceptively straightforward when they’re little. Don’t hit or kick people. Share. Take turns. Just be kind.
Things get complicated fast. They start to see things on TV — an ad for a pro-wrestling match, say — and it’s hard to figure out how to explain why these adults are doing these things that clearly don’t appear to be kind. Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him to network television at age 4, but eventually I have to explain that some people find violence entertaining. As tempting as it may be to limit my son to PG-rated movies forever, sheltering him indefinitely won’t prepare him for the world at large. Not to mention, it’s impossible.
Turns out my son learned violence’s entertainment value on his own, as he learned to read a few years later with the help of graphic novels featuring Sonic the Hedgehog and Mega Man.
I skimmed what he was reading and it was all fight scenes and evil scientists making evil robots and the good guys trying to save the world. “Boy, this seems really violent,” I commented.
“Mom, it’s ok, I can handle it.”
“You know in real life guns and bombs kill people.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
When and how exactly did that happen? When did my innocent little boy determine that violence, if in cartoon form anyway, is not real and in fact, entertaining? Lots of kids love comic books and graphic novels with stories of explosions and shooting and the demise of bad guys when they careen off a cliff. I wasn’t about to take away the books; after all I wanted to nurture his love of reading. But I want to be aware of the messages he’s consuming. I told him in real life there aren’t always good guys and bad guys, that most of the time people are a little bit of both.
I don’t know when the line was crossed, but it was. Society, or the culture at large, now deems my child to be mature enough to consume violence and play with guns. Nerf guns, squirt guns, the Transformer that alternates between a robot double fisting what look to be assault rifles, and an armed fighter jet. 8+ says the box. My son, eight-and-a-half, has crossed over the line.
Real fighter jets regularly fly overhead in our neighborhood, always too loud for my son’s sensitive ears. I watch him play with his Transformer fighter jet, making it spiral through the skies of our living room. Kids have long played at war, trying to make sense of the violent world around them. My understanding is a lot of the classic comics have World War II themes. Captain America, Wonder Woman…weren’t they fighting evil fascists?
Now there is a real life war going on. From many people’s perspective it even has a clear good and bad side. Zelensky is the comedic, yet brave and inspiring family man, and Putin is the ruthless, power-hungry dictator. They fit seamlessly into the hero and villain roles.
When the war started I figured I should talk about it with my son. But what to say? I didn’t want to scare him with the images and words that scared me the most. The pictures of kids, his age or younger, sitting with their mothers on trains leaving the country, waving goodbye out the window to fathers staying behind to throw Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks. Or the knowledge that armed planes were flying over nuclear reactors nudging the atomic clock perilously close to midnight.
I told my son that we were all sad that a war had started because people get hurt in wars. I told him that it was especially scary because Russia has nuclear weapons, and if one was ever used it would be very, very bad. I told him that the U.S. is trying to help Ukraine. He seemed to take it all in stride.
I am a selfish mother. As much as I want to teach my son to stand up for what’s right, I don’t ever want my only child to become a soldier. To ever put his body in the way of an authoritarian army, even if it is for the just and noble cause of protecting democracy. So I told him about his grandfather being a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war. How instead of carrying a gun and going overseas and serving in the Army, he served as an orderly in a hospital at home.
What I am not yet ready to tell my son is that another generation back, his great-grandfather helped build the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos. I’m not ready to attempt an explanation of that legacy, or the paradoxical argument that a horrific war could only be ended with a horrific weapon.
While I ponder how to describe to a new generation the terror and existential fear of the threat of nuclear annihilation, my son’s graphic novels may have already done the job for me. Except in them all it takes is a dog-man, his robot friend, and a little imagination to swoop in and save the world. If only.
In the future I am sure I will have more conversations with my son about current events and history. He will learn about the Holocaust and Hiroshima, Vietnam, Ukraine. I hope and pray that the fighter jets flying overhead never carry nuclear weapons or make Madison a target. I will do what I can to help my son make sense of and navigate this violent world of ours.
Be kind, kid. Just be kind.
Julia Richards likes to write about health and environmental issues. She lives with her son in Madison. Photo by Valerie Tobias.
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