'Kiling Monsters'
Read an exerpt from "Kiling Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence"
Chapter 1:
In March 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement declaring that entertainment violence had been proven to have harmful effects on children.
That same month, I found myself addressing a roomful of psychiatrists about Pokémon. I wasn't expecting to come out of it very well liked.
As adults were debating the dangers of the media, the schoolyards of America were being swept by the most intense and most universal kid craze I'd ever seen. The craze was a true product of kid culture. I began hearing about this strange universe of battling pet monsters from preschoolers and middle schoolers, boys and girls, computer nerds and blossoming jocks, months before the Nintendo marketing machine caught on to what it had. I was fascinated. This new world was noisy and combative, but it was also warm and fuzzy, and funny, and infernally complex, and kids were weaving it into every sort of fantasy and game. When Viz Communications asked me to help adapt the Japanese Pokémon comic book and comic strip franchise to the American market, I jumped at the chance.
My unusual position as a creator of superheroes, an analyst of children's entertainment, and an American interpreter of that global fantasy fad landed me on NPR's "Fresh Air," explaining the Poké-phenomenon to puzzled parents nationwide. On the basis of that interview, the Southern California Psychiatric Society invited me to deliver the keynote address at its 2000 conference on "Violence and Society." Although I'd been supported in my research by enthusiastic psychologists and psychiatrists, I was still under the impression that the mental health establishment as a whole condemned entertainment violence. Now I was about to tell a roomful of veteran mental health professionals stories illustrating the positive effects of cartoon mayhem. I braced myself for a rough question-and-answer period at the end.
One of the powers of stories, however, is to remind us that people rarely obey generalizations. We may view an abstraction, "psychiatric opinion" or "media violence" as threatening. But stories of people wrestling with the fears, pains, and challenges of life bring us back to our own realities. Anxiety gives way to empathy, and suddenly we're not speaking in recycled newspaper headlines; we're discussing the endless individuality and unpredictability of human beings. The people at that conference, having spent their careers listening to stories, understood that well, and when my speech ended I found myself launched upon one of the most exhilarating conversations I'd ever known.
One child therapist related his own rewarding uses of Pokémon action figures with young patients. Another said that his concern was for children who didn't have the chance to talk through what they'd experienced in the media and that "what you've demonstrated here is how beneficial any media experience can be in the context of constructive adult attention." An especially enthusiastic psychoanalyst said, "We're so afraid of aggression in this society that we haven't been able to talk intelligently about it. You're doing for aggression what Papa Freud did for sexuality!" "You've made one little boy very happy," said a psychiatrist who'd come with her husband, another doctor. "We haven't let our son watch shows like Pokémon, but I think we will now."
Then Elizabeth Thoman raised her hand. President of the Center for Media Literacy in Los Angeles and a longtime critic of media violence, she, I assumed, was going to express some objections. She did have questions about whether lurid games like Duke Nukem could be beneficial in the same way as Pokémon, and I explained how they could be, depending on the young person and his reason for choosing the game. Then she said, "This way of discussing media violence in terms of individual experience could be really valuable, not just to groups like this, but to the kids themselves. You should take this into the schools."
"I'm glad you think so," I answered. "Because I already have!" Beginning with my son's kindergarten class, then expanding into the higher grades at his school, I had been leading workshops in comic-strip creation in which I encouraged kids to put down their own stories and fantasies through words and pictures.
As simple as they were, those workshops were sources of an astonishing wealth of juvenile imaginings and experiences. So, drawing upon the wisdom of educators, psychologists, and media literacy experts, I used those as the foundation for what I've come to call the Art and Story Workshops: programs adaptable to every level from preschool to high school that help kids pull together the images, thoughts, and emotions in their minds through individual storytelling in a comic strip-like form. I'd take over a classroom for a day or a week, get the kids talking about their ideas and passions, and challenge them to put them down on paper—in both words and pictures.
Children are usually taught to compartmentalize their communication into either linear narrative or static portraits, but storytelling that is both visual and verbal leads them to transcend the compartments, to experience their thoughts and feelings more completely. Comics also have an inherent funkiness that frees kids to express fantasies that the more adult-approved media inhibit. Visual storytelling unlocks the images they've stored up from cartoons, movies, and video games and helps them make more sense of the media-transmitted stories that fill their environments. The process gives young people a sense of authorship, of authority over their own emotions and the world's influences. It also reveals the way that children use fantasies, stories, and media images in building their sense of self.