Saturday Observations and Thoughts

While playing with my son, we touched on a few concepts, but I largely followed his lead and noticed som interesting trends.
Here's what happened:  T-rex and the T-rex baby (who is just popping out of its shell) kept chasing brachiosaurus and triceratops (both of whom I was responsible for) away from the trees and watering hole.  The T-rexes caught them and ate them no matter how well they hid. Then, they got covered in mud (a blanket) and turned to skeletons.  Then my son insisted that even though they were dead, they needed to play again.  Repeat ad nauseum.

What is interesting to me is that despite his t-rexes eating the herbivores, my son actually stated, while my herbivores were running away, that he wanted them all to be nice to each other. However, my dinos still died in an attack directly following that statement.  I was happy that he was playing fairly realistically despite his spoken desire for them getting along, but a piece of me was sad that he didn't break from dinosaur theory to make them play nice.

This brings up a constant struggle that I have about violence exposure.  I have VERY little tolerance for violence, and I have banned all weapons in our house.  I realized when talking about carnivores that nature is not a very kind place and that by learning about predators and prey that I was actually opening up a whole new world of potentially violent play. I do think that learning about what happens in nature (or in this case, what scientists believe dinosaur behavior to be like) is important, but we're cautiously approaching HOW to play out these scenarios appropriately so that no people get hurt.

I welcome comments about what you might have done with children to keep them playing realistically, yet kindly with others.