Daddy Says 'Knock You Out'

By Jay Allen

Hi. My name is Jay. I'm a violence hobbyist. I wear that label proudly, and am busily in the process of passing it on to my children.

Despite growing up under the tutelage of my uncle, who exposed me to such cinematic classics as Dawn of the Dead and Videodrome before I'd even sprouted hair on my chest, I never intended to start my kids young - or to start 'em at all. Sure, I had collected stacks of comics with 40-issue-long fight scenes. But my childhood was sung to the tune of Jeremy: I was a "sensitive" kid who served as a fist magnet to any jock or miscreant with a grudge against reality. Little wonder that I identified with those two-dimensional misfits, who held the power to avenge injustice with a snap of their fingers.

But now I was older. Wiser. I wouldn't be enslaved to my past. No, I would be a spiritual parent. Heeding Jiddu Krishnamurti's admonition that we are the cause of the world's suffering, I vowed not to induct my own kids into the culture of violence. No toy swords or guns. No ninja costumes. Nothing but board games and PBS Kids as far as the eye could see.

I can't remember the precise moment when all that spiritual crap went out the window. Problem was, I never went cold turkey. I not only kept my anime stash close at hand, but supplemented it with ass-kicking schoolgirl fare like Sailor Moon and Project A-ko. Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, and L.A. Confidential produced years of guilty pleasure; they were films I "knew" I should shun because of their gore and disreputable characters, but reeled me in nevertheless, like a fish who knows there's a hook somewhere within that worm. Every time I watched Vincent blow Marvin's head off I would laugh my ass to bits, while wondering silently which circle of Hell was reserved for Cathartic Murderers.

So I had little moral standing when my daughter Neve began watching The Powerpuff Girls, or when Jaxon discovered all the animated staples of my youth, from the old Warner Brothers shorts on up to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Life carbon-copied art, and before I could say "Give Peace a Chance", Neve and Jaxon were practicing their kung-fu on one another, with all the sore limbs and bruised egos that entailed.

I wanted to scream "Damn the hypocrisy; full speed ahead!" and clamp down Parents Television Council-style. But what would my wife and I forbid? "Violence" is heterogeneous. Should we forbid just action shows? One of the most-violent Nickelodeon shows on the PTC's 2002 Cable Study is All That, a teen variety show, the 21st-century equivalent of You Can't Do That on Television. What about "pratfall violence" such as characters falling off cliffs, or diving into drained pools? And is "violence" infectious? If a single episode of Spongebob Squarepants depicts Spongebob and Sandy Cheeks pummeling one another with their kah-rah-tay, is the entire series tainted?

And don't get me started about psychic violence. Talking sponges, freefalls that don't kill, explosions that don't maim. Most of these shows play fast-and-loose with the basic laws of physics, not to mention common sense. Shouldn't I be concerned that I'm eroding my kids' very ability to comprehend reality? Next to that, a little ninja sword-clashing seems trivial.

I did what any good parent would do: nothing. Outside of South Park, Sex and the City, and Good Morning Miami, we left the kids to watch what they pleased and kept an eagle-eye on their play, reining them in whenever they emulated the aggressive behavior on the set.

Then came the Xbox. And everything changed.

When the Xbox first released, I spent the first half of the year ridiculing it. "What idiot would spend $300 just to play games? We already have a computer."

I spent the next half drooling and dropping hints. "Well, it is optimized for superior graphics performance. And the controllers do that jiggly thing when you get killed." (I may even have dusted off the old "hand-eye coordination" shtick - it's all a blur now.)

It was just an idle thought, though. I never took action until one month when we came into a spot of money, and my wife suggested I Just Do It. "You hardly ever buy anything like that for yourself," she shrugged. Which was true. On our budget, a latte is a luxury. An Xbox? My head spun. I felt like "The Donald".

I pounced before my wife had a chance to change her mind, swooping into the toy store with a fistful of dollars and swooping out just as fast - the happiest kid they'd seen all day. I hooked it up in minutes, but had to wait until after the kids went down to jack in to the violent fare I had purchased. I was instantly re-hooked, like a heroin addict after a ten-year dry spell.

This wasn't a game console, it was a time machine; a return to the better parts of my childhood, when I was so obsessed with my Atari 2600 that I scrawled my own game designs with crayon on lined paper, and mailed them to Neil Bushnell (Neil never wrote back. Jerk. ) Shredding alien Covenant scum on Halo reminded me of my three-day Metroid marathon when my mom bought me my Nintendo in seventh grade, and gave me enough money to order one additional game from the Sears catalog store.

But I couldn't keep this pleasure to myself. Nick.com had already hooked Neve and Jaxon on low-octane versions of the second-person shoot-'em-up. When they discovered I was buying a machine that did nothing but play games, they demanded a timeshare. So we picked up a Harry Potter game for them, as well as a cute number called Blinx the Time Sweeper, where an anthropomorphic cat sucks up garbage and shoots it at the Time Monsters in his bid to rescue a princess. Jaxon fell hard for Blinx. He'd slap on his jean jacket and run through the house wielding an extended arm grabber as his "time sweeper", telling the Time Monsters to "take dat! and dat! and summore of dat!" Unfortunately, his big sister was often on the negative end of "dat".

Kim had to sit him down several times and remind him, "Blinx is a good guy. Blinx only hurts bad guys. Got it, little man?"

Jaxon would nod vigorously, and return to playing King Kong to Neve's Empire State Building. Kim would pierce me with The Look™, a wilting, eyebrow-cocked glance of death that says, "This is thy negligence, and thou knowest it."

But we both knew it was a lost cause. Come birthdays and holidays, we let the Power Rangers costumes, super capes, Ninja swords, and combat games rain down like manna. Not surprisingly, this didn't make Jaxon any gentler, but it did give him a stable of new moves, including the Running-Clothesline-with-Balled-Fist, which he chose to use on me six days after my vasectomy.

One time, after he had pummeled my abdomen with the Hong-Kong-Fooey-Fists-of-Fury, I had had enough. I shook my finger at him and said, "I don't care what you see on games or on TV, you do not hit people. Are we clear?"

"But daaaddy!" he said in his best whine while bobbing at the knees. "I super 'ero! I beat up the bad guys. Like this!" He proceeded to kick and punch in the air, punctuating each strike with a cartoonish burst of air through his teeth, until he caught his heel on part of his Donatello costume, fell on his butt, and started crying.

I did my best not to laugh. I failed. I couldn't help it: I was relieved. I wasn't corrupting my child. I wasn't raising a monster, or a "man's man". I was fueling the fantasy play of a healthy, happy four-year-old boy, swaddled in innocence. He took his play a little too seriously at times, and we would do well to convince him that making us all villians in perpetuity wasn't our bag. But these were problems I felt fit to conquer.

I still consider myself a very spiritual person, and our home a spiritual haven. We cultivate and maintain a reverence for the Goddess in our house via holidays and household rituals. At bedtime, Kim will often share with Neve the wisdom of the world's great spiritual traditions. Most important, we steer clear of the cultural flypaper that demands one worship material success über alles, and strive to put the needs of our children above our own. But that doesn't translate into a Dalai Lama-style pacifism. The combination of religion and nonviolence is a relatively recent idea even in "peaceful" religions like Buddhism; historically nonviolent traditions such as Jainism are the exception. The Warrior archetype has roots deep in the human psyche. Cultivated properly, it can grow into a fierce sense of moral right and wrong (as defined by one's own spiritual insight), and a knowledge that there are things worth fighting for.

This is why I permit my children to be - well, children: not because I value violence, but because harnessing that moral fire will make them better people.

Or maybe I just want a partner for Halo.

But that's the beauty of raising kids: as you bring out the adult in them, they bring out the kid in you.

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Copyright 2004 Jay Allen

Jay Allen lives in the Seattle area with his tolerant wife and five of his six kids. He writes daily about what it means to be The Zero Boss, and is busy writing a book, also entitled, The Zero Boss. Jay's work has also appeared at The Imperfect Parent.