Over the last few months, we've been discussing the subject of identity being a key factor in the development of our young people. To continue exploring that subject, let me share with you another story from my teaching days.
When I was a high school teacher, my classroom became a lunchtime hangout for a handful of kids. One group of students asked me if they could play Dungeons and Dragons during this lunch period. For the uninitiated, Dungeons and Dragons is a sort of shared storytelling experience, where multiple players create fictional characters and use dice rolls to determine if a character’s actions are successful. For example, if you want your character to jump over a pit, you roll the dice to see if they make it. These dice-determined decisions create the next events in the overall story and can lead to great fun. But first, players have to decide what type of character they will play from a wide range of choices, such as a mighty warrior or an elven wizard.
When my lunchtime crew started making their characters, I began to notice a trend.
“I’m going to play a half-elf assassin,” said one.
“My guy is going to be a dark wizard who kills people and raises them from the dead to serve him,” said another.
One by one, each student described a character that, in one way or another, was seriously lacking in virtue. Put more bluntly, they all wanted to play evil characters.
I quickly put a stop to it. I made a rule that they could play in my classroom, but they couldn’t play evil characters, or have their characters do immoral things. I said, “I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you’re pretending to murder people during your lunch period!” But in the years that have followed, I’ve come to see a deeper reason that I was uncomfortable with kids pretending to be evil. And that reason is rooted in the topic of identity.
The author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Aristotle is credited with saying something similar: “We are what we repeatedly do.” If we restate those concepts in the language of our school, we might say that virtues are habits, and thus we want to practice good and positive patterns of behavior. If it’s true that we are what we repeatedly do, we should be asking our kids to do and practice the good--even in their leisure activities.
Did I think that any of these high school students were going to become assassins because of a game? Of course not. But it is important to consider how the things our children are exposed to shape who they are. If you’ve ever observed a child watch Star Wars and then turn the nearest stick into a lightsaber, or saw a kid jump off the couch onto his brother because he just watched professional wrestling, you know how the things we expose our children to can influence them and their behavior. So, one way to help our children develop healthy, positive identities is to connect them with things that influence them in positive ways.
The scriptures tell us that there is value in surrounding ourselves with that which is true, good and beautiful.
St. Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians, "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."
In other words, we should be filling our lives with that which is good--from friends to films.
Please understand, I’m not advocating that kids only watch Bible stories or Veggie Tales, as good as those things can be. All truth comes from God, and we can find His truth in all kinds of media that is not specifically Christian, from television to movies to videogames. But as the adults in our children’s lives, we need to surround them with stories, shows, games, and even friends who are going to help them develop into the people we want them to become--the people God intended them to become. We, the adults in their lives, need to be the curators of what our children watch and listen to, and help them to see the good and discard the bad in anything they encounter. You should be deciding if and when your child is ready to read, say, The Hunger Games. There are real lessons of heroism and virtue in those stories, but also violence and evil. It’s important as adults to decide when our children are ready to engage with that content, and to guide them to embrace what is good in those things and think critically about what is not.
If we surround our kids with “good stuff,” we are paving the way for them to lead lives of virtue, so when they are adults, it won’t be, well, a roll of the dice.