If you work or live with young children, tolerating death play can make life easier. You need not like or promote it; simply tolerate it because it will happen. Not with all kids all the time, but with many kids some of the time. Kids bring the real world into their play, and death is omnipresent in the real world. There’s death in movies, video games, cartoons, and fairy tales. Goldfish, marigolds, and grandfathers die.

Tolerating death play, instead of prohibiting it, creates a haven for children to explore the topic out in the open and shine a light on it. Trying to ban it makes it taboo and drives it into the shadows. The death play still happens, but it happens behind your back. Trying to deny such play can also drive up interest…and maybe children’s anxiety because they cannot explore the topic openly through play and reap the therapeutic benefits such play offers.

Tolerating death play does more than allow children to explore the topic; it sparks plenty of learning and development. Kids happily engaged in death play are building social skills, improving language skills, wiring their eight sensory systems, honing self-regulation skills, practicing problem-solving, and more. When you start looking at all the benefits, you may move beyond tolerating death play to embracing it.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Tips for tolerating death play are what we’re concerned about here, so let’s get started.

See Beyond The Aesthetics

Death play can look and sound violent and gruesome, like something that shouldn’t be happening in an upstanding and respectable setting. My friend and mentor, Dan Hodgins, used to say, “We need to stop making moral issues out of developmental issues.” This happens with death play. Adults look at how it sounds and looks and label it bad without looking deeper and seeing all the developmental benefits.

Remember That It’s Play

Tolerating death play can be tough because sometimes it looks genuinely violent and aggressive. When this happens, pause and remember that what you’re seeing is pretend, fantasy, imaginative, and role-playing. Play is separate from the real world. Peter Gray writes, “In play one enters a realm that is physically located in the real world, makes use of props in the real world, is often about the real world, is said by the players to be real, and yet in some way is mentally removed from the real world.”¹

Focus On The Learning

Tolerating death play is a tad easier when you remember all the learning it can inspire. From a funeral for Mama Frog to murderous intergalactic space wars, death play is a jumping-off point for a wide range of beneficial learning and skill development. From building strong bodies through heavy work to developing emotional awareness to coping with the loss of a loved one, death play is a rich source of learning.

Ensure There Is Consent

Checking in periodically to ensure consent makes tolerating death play easier for some adults. Remember that play requires consent. Two kids agreeing to pretend to kill each other is play. One child whacking another with a lightsaber without consent is an aggressive act. Our job as adults is to make sure there’s consent. That can be as simple as checking in: “Things are getting pretty wild here. Are you both still playing?” Differentiating between consensual play and true aggression makes supporting the play a bit easier.

Trust In The Children

Finally, tolerating death play may be a little easier if you trust children to lead their own learning. Early learning curriculum should grow from the interests of the children. Their experiences, interests, likes, fears, and knowledge should serve as launchpads for learning.

Kerry McDonald writes, “Trusting children to learn, when appropriately supported by grown-ups, is not a revolutionary idea. In fact, progressive educators have long advocated for providing young people more freedom and autonomy in their learning, for surrounding them with gentle teachers, and for making the curriculum more interactive and more relevant to childhood experiences.”We Don’t Play With Guns Here (affiliate link)’>³

Death is part of life, and kids are curious about it. Play is one way they explore that curiosity. We should be supportive of their efforts.

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Browse Trainings

1. The Value of Play I: The Definition of Play Gives Insights
2. Unschooled (affiliate link)
3. We Don’t Play With Guns Here (affiliate link)