Paul Rouse: Can you coach aggression? And should you?
Kids play football
There’s a really interesting thing to observe when you’re involved in running children’s football and hurling teams. It is the extent to which some children are timid or reticent or don’t really compete with aggression for the ball, while other children are really driven and aggressive and deeply competitive.
This is still more interesting when a child, who is somewhat placid off the pitch, changes entirely when they cross the line in a pair of boots. And the opposite scenario is also similarly intriguing.
If you train a team for a long time and bring them up through the grades, you can often see changes. The levels of aggression or commitment manifest in the play of a child can wax and wane over the years. This, too, is fascinating to watch.
Against that, there are other children who grow from near-toddlers into and through their teenage years and hardly seem to change in this at all. It is as if every game or every drill or all words of advice have disappeared on the wind, leaving not a trace.
There are, no doubt, child psychologists who have written several square miles worth of rainforest in research papers examining why all of this is the case.
Maybe, in theory, psychologists could offer an explanation. It would be interesting to see, though, how they can capture the sheer diversity of experience within any explanation.
By the same token, it is also interesting to consider to what extent the way in which children play sport changes how they act in other aspects of their life.
This is one of those things that parents have wrestled with for years: does the way children play foster violent behaviour?
For example, there are those who believe that playing with war toys moves some children from just playing aggressively to actually behaving aggressively.
War toys have been part of children’s play for millennia. Toy soldiers have been excavated by archaeologists working across the ancient world, from Egypt to Asia and later in Greece and Rome.
These toys were the preserve of the few but from the middle of the 18th century the mass manufacture of tin soldiers through the factory systems created during the Industrial Revolution eventually brought these toys into all manner of homes.
By the end of the 19th century, all Europe’s leading economies were making tin soldiers in big numbers.
Some historians credit this form of play with inculcating ideas of militarism and a build-up of aggression that ended in enormous swathes of people dying in World War 1. It is claimed that playing at pretend war made it easier to move into the real thing. On top of that, the design, the appearance, and the feel of the toy soldiers allowed for the romanticisation of war, by posing the soldiers as heroes, or so it is said.
It should be pointed out that the evidence that is produced to substantiate this claim is far from convincing.
So what of the more recent phenomenon of video games? There is no hiding from the violence that runs through many of the most popular games – and has done for the guts of 50 years now.
Equally, there is no hiding either from the fact of their immense popularity, even with very young children. From the dramatic success of Mortal Kombat in the 1980s to Gears Of War 2 in this decade, violence is beloved of many gamers.
The reality that – unlike watching violent images on screens – video games are actors in the games they play must bring a different emotional involvement. But in what way does this play impact on a child’s behaviour outside the frenzy of the games they play?
The American Psychological Association has stated that there “is a small, reliable association between violent video game use and aggressive outcomes, such as yelling and pushing. However, these research findings are difficult to extend to more violent outcomes.”
The Association’s president, Sandra L. Shullman, said: “Violence is a complex social problem that likely stems from many factors that warrant attention from researchers, policymakers and the public. Attributing violence to video gaming is not scientifically sound and draws attention away from other factors, such as a history of violence, which we know from the research is a major predictor of future violence.”
The closest that many children get to actual fighting is play fighting or wrestling. These are activities that have been enjoyed by generation after generation of children. And they are a reminder that for all that things change, they also stay the same.
There are times, of course, when play-fighting can lead to an actual fight among children when one sustains an accidental injury (for example) and things spiral out of control.
Usually, though, play-fighting (or horseplay or acting the goat!) is just playing, with no intent to cause any injury. Those of us who grew up in houses where even Snakes & Ladders was a contact sport will understand that entirely.
That being said, for other parents, guardians or minders, even play-fighting is unacceptable – usually because they cannot distinguish between aggressive play and aggressive behaviour. In this respect, it is all about how you choose to interpret what is happening.
It can be argued that play-fighting is a fine way to get rid of pent-up energy and act as a safety valve.
And maybe that’s what sport does, too. That is to say, rather than teaching behaviours that see aggression spill out into wider society, sport could be – for some at least – a way to corral and manage such behaviour in an organised manner.
Mostly, though, simple explanations for why some children are more competitive than others, more aggressive than others, more driven than others rarely convince. Arguing whether it is primarily a matter of nature or of nurture sheds heat but not much light.
You can coach somebody to perform a skill on a pitch. Generally speaking, if you spend enough time at it, that skill will become possible, even if some are obviously better at it than others.
Similarly, you can train a person to get fitter and stronger – although there is nonetheless a limit to everyone and that limit naturally varies.
But can you actually coach competitiveness? Or is it simply a decision that a person makes for themselves in time, one way or the other?
