Gog.org.nz

Parents should not be alarmed if their preschoolers play dead, a new study from Researchers into the Bloody Obvious has revealed. Dr Brent Mawson, a researcher from Auckland University’s Faculty of Education, has studied three- and four-year-olds playing “without constraints of adult supervision”, which is in itself a major achievement in this age of molly-coddling and cotton-wool-covered care. Where did he find them? Dr Mawson “discovered” that death was a common theme in play, and he describes it as a useful trigger to explore the concept and maintain the games. “Everyone knew it was pretend, that the dead character would wake up, the monster would be chased away and someone else would die again tomorrow.” Alas, if only real life was like that… but pretending is supposed to be part of childhood.

And who’d have believed it? Dr Mawson says that mums and dads and teachers have been wrong in focusing on a physically and emotionally risk-free curriculum. One of the most alarming things in the Doc’s report is that he says this approach is “traditional”. Really? How long has the nonsense been going on, and how much emotional damage has been done to countless tots, forced to remain alive at all times? Have we been raising generations of wusses and girls’ blouses, who learned nothing about death apart from the constant torrent of fake blood and guts they see on TV?

Today’s grandparents knew all along that playing possum is perfectly natural and, indeed, should be encouraged. It merely mimics wild animals such as the hedgehog, and we can all remember continually being shot dead while playing Cowboys and Indians (oops, sorry; these days it’s called Cattle Drovers and Native Americans, and is strongly discouraged). For many of us, death is now not so much a concept as a fast-approaching certainty, and we might have been better prepared through lessons about it at kindy.

Having established that re-introducing the concept of death to the very young is a Good Thing, Dr Mawson should not cease his labours. It might occur to him that some concepts of life would also be worth exploring, such as the reality of winning and losing, and the fact that the world is teeming with complete bastards. What better place to begin than on the sports field? He might recommend the restoration of competition, and the approval of refereed thuggery (for which young members of two college rugby teams have been so cruelly punished, when they were merely copying grown-ups’ behaviour).

Dr Mawson seems to be coming around to a revolutionary new acceptance of risk for the young. With a little help from colleagues at the medical school in Dunedin, he might explore the hazards of being a young couch potato in a germ-free home, as compared with the beneficial effects on the immune system of consuming at least 15 kg of good honest dirt before the age of 10 by playing outside, preferably in mud.

There could be something primevally significant in young lads’ interest in weapons and explosions, for example – something that the late and lamentable Lady in Red tried to stifle by banning decent Guy Fawkes fireworks and promoting disapproval of kids’ cap pistols, crude bows and arrows, catapults and so on.

Until the tide turns, though, there’s a host of other things that parents should be keeping an eye on. For one thing, children under the age of 15 should never be allowed near knives. There is a risk that they might use one to whittle something looking like a gun from a piece of wood, for their Cattle Drovers and Native Americans-themed playtime.


But after they reach 15, it’s perfectly safe to let the little treasures loose with a driver’s licence, a hot hatchback, several cans of high-octane alco-pops and an open road, any Friday night, because – thanks to our enlightened educators – we will have produced yet another generation of thoughtful, mature youngsters who know exactly what a real corpse looks like.

Dr Mawson’s ground-breaking study revealing what we always knew will no doubt end up being paid for by the taxpayer in some way or other. This sort of funding is merely another method of keeping academics from emigrating, and massaging the unemployment figures.

Level-headed parents should be on the lookout for researchers who appear to be brain-dead. It is not make-believe. They probably are.

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