Five Year Old Girls and Play

Imagination at play!

Like dmvmom my daughter kills her dolls parents on a regular basis. I guess since there are no parent dolls something needs to happen to them.

I also have seen her pretend to be attacked by a shark and then die from it. I have been shot and stabbed and had to play dead many times (with tongue sticking out - I have been informed that if my tongue is not out, I am not dead).

That said she is also a pretend vet... I have assisted her in bandaging her animals more times than I can count!

In theory they may be working through thoughts or ideas, but mostly it just seems like having fun!

They were playing. Perfectly normal.

If it were me, I would have pulled my arm/hand into my sleeve and yelled/screamed. "I'm bleeding! Argh! Put pressure on the wound! Someone get a tourniquet! Is there a doctor here? Can you sew my hand back on?"

But I'm a combat medic. And I have two boys who love crazy play like that.

ETA: Our children LOVE IT when we get silly with them. Try not being so "grown up" sometimes and just enjoy being a kid. One of the true joys of being a parent is being able to act like a kid with them!

I don't know about you, but when I was about 13, my 11 year old cousin decided she was too grown up to play pretend any longer. I wasn't ready to let go of my pretend play life, and was MAD! I still miss that part of being a kid and take advantage of being a mom whenever I can. :-) I get to pretend again!

I haven't read the other answers yet, but I just wanted to share with you what my daughter, who is turning 6 soon, said to me this weekend. We have a family vacation coming up, and we will be sharing it with my cousins and their oldest son and his wife, and they have a daughter the same age. The wife and I were texting each other about how much fun the girls were going to have. Their daughter is really into doll babies and pretending like they are real babies. My daughter is not so much into that, but does have an American Girl doll that she likes to dress up. I asked my daughter if she would play dolls with the other girl and she said, "She can have the babies, my American Girl doll can be the big sister, and we will pretend their parents went on a date and died in a car crash and now they are dead!"

I couldn't help but laugh at her, but told her that sounded really sad, and she just thought it was funny. I told the other mom about it and she said her daughter sometimes says morbid things too - it seems that her doll babies Daddy is always getting killed off somehow.

I know it sounds awful, but I think it's pretty normal - I think it's just their way of working different situations and scenarios through in their heads.

PLay does not need a purpose. It's play. Kids playing at cutting people up are not destined to become axe murderers. Relax.

Not sure I understand the question...."What is its purpose?" Kids play nonsense all the time. There's really no "purpose" for any of it except to expand their imaginations and social skills. I wouldn't think too much of it. There will undoubtedly be a time when your kid decides to act out something slightly unsettling or embarrassing to you, but most of the time it's because we have a tendency to put adult standards and experiences onto our kids. For example, kids playing doctor and adults playing doctor are two VERY different things, lol. Kids are innocent and naïve and that's a beautiful thing. Unless they are acting in a truly inappropriate way, just let them be kids.

It's called imagination. So few kids use it these days because of electronics, you may not recognize it.

Normal not nuts as Keith Ablow would say!

I would not consider that normal. None of my kids have ever done that, nor any of my nieces or nephews. My 5 yr old will sometimes act like the "food" she is preparing has something on it or similar but never where she is pretending to hurt someone. If she ever did something that showed she was pretending to hurt someone, it is diversion time and time to stop.

When my son has his dr. kit he gives us shots and he knows that shots hurt, so he will tell me or my husband " I am going to give you a shot and it HURTS" so we are then to pretend..

It is on the same lines.. nothing to worry about. But do, keep in mind that kids will do things sometimes just for the reaction. Keep that in mind when you think something needs to stop.

Kids will do anything that gets a reaction. I don't think that type of play is abnormal, we used to play with doctor sets all the time when we were young and our favorite thing to play was operation where we'd "cut" the patient open and then pull out all sorts of funny things hidden under the shirt (we'd stuff our shirts with funny toys). We were normal, non-violent kids.

I think the mother made a normal mistake in trying to play along. The thing is the kids got the reaction they wanted so they kept doing it. If she had squashed the action from the beginning, it wouldn't have gone on for 10 minutes. She was probably trying to be extra-nice because she was in front of other people, and in doing so the kids just kept walking all over her. Her first mistake was playing along, they kids wanted to do anything to keep her playing along.

I don't think the play has a purpose other than causing a reaction. You can get a child to do something positive or negative by giving a reaction to it, especially at that age. They're not thinking of actually cutting, they're looking for attention. When I worked in daycare I learned quickly that to give a big negative reaction to something was just as bad as giving a big positive reaction--and that as soon as kids saw one kid getting a lot of attention, the others were quick to follow. So if a child did something negative (like pretending to cut the teacher) even if it was done in innocent play and for fun, I would probably calmly and quietly confiscate the play knife and say gently "we don't play that way." If I made any bigger deal out of it than that, I'd have a bunch of kids running over with play "knives" laughing and trying to cut me.

You can turn that around any way because if one kid came over and offered me play fruit and I said "Yum, thank you!" and pretended to eat it in a funny way, I'd also have all the kids running over to me with play fruit trying to get me to eat it in a funny way.

So bottom line, don't react to negative play behavior. Squash it quietly, calmly and gently.