Tremblay – play fighting; rough and tumble

Well, one of the most surprising findings that we are getting concerning the development of physical aggression is that play fighting is probably one of the best ways to learn alternatives to physical aggression. Play fighting is play and you can see that children are play fighting when they are laughing and having a lot of fun. You can see that they are not play fighting when they’re crying that they’ve been hurt. So play fighting is a time where you are learning the limit between play and aggression. And if you are not play fighting it’s hard to learn where are the differences. One of the best examples of play fighting is tickling. And if you’ve ever tickled someone, you may hurt that person the first time you do it. So you need to learn where the limit is, where it’s fun and where it starts to be hurting the other person. And aggressive behaviors, if they are sort of in-built because we’ve needed them throughout evolution, there are behaviors that are fun. And that’s why we see cats play fighting, and dogs play fight, and children spontaneously want to play fight. So having fun in doing these exercises, in playing, is a good way of learning alternatives to physical aggression.