February 2, 2013 by blue milk
Cormac (age 3): I am shooting everyone. I am killing all the baddies.
Bill (his Dad): You know, when you shoot everyone you are not one of the goodies? Killing everyone is what baddies do.
Cormac: I am not a baddie! I am a goodie!
Bill: You’re not, you know, mate. At best you’re morally ambiguous.
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blue milk 
Did the 3yr old win the argument by bursting into tears or pretending to shoot Bill? Although he will be the best arguer at pre-school I suspect.
Funny, my lad at that age always wanted to be the baddie.
At a 3 year old’s party yesterday the kids drew baddies in chalk on the fence and then threw water bombs at them. That’s what you do to baddies!!
We are currently having exactly the same arguments with our 3.5 yo son!
Well, at least he’s a step ahead of mine – they both want to be the bad guys.
I’d really like to move away from the whole false good guy/bad guy thing altogether though. It’s so hard to explain why bad guys do certain things without also telling them that the bad guys often think they’re good guys. It feels more honest (and easier, frankly) to say that really there aren’t good people and bad people, but people who make good choices and bad choices. Eventually I’m hoping to be able to point out that sometimes people who are cast as “bad guys” can make good choices, and that people cast as “good guys” can make bad ones, but they’re … not really there yet.
(And, er, it doesn’t help that I’m prone to over-meta-ing. “Why is it raining, Mama?” “It’s called Mood Rain, sweetheart. It’s a cheap cinematic ploy used to inflate emotional buy-in from the viewers.”)
I’m with you here. When my 3 year old brings up bad guys I just bore the hell out of him by asking many questions about why they are bad and how they must be feeling.
Ahaha, sv, did we obvs. went to the same school of parenting…
Hah! I just tried to have that conversation with Libra the other day. “Why do you think they are bad guys?” etc. He got tired of it pretty quickly and eventually began pretending to be a train instead.
one of the results of our schools’ anti-bullying efforts is now instead of “bad guys” my goddaughter says “bullies”.
Leading me to have to say to her “if you all gang up on them and keep them away from the playground as soon as you see them, it’s you who are being the bullies.”
Oh ouch. I hadn’t imagined those campaigns could backfire quite like that!
You know I just realised that while Cormac will move beyond this stage, esp with questions like that from Bill, it seems that many in the NRA in America have not.
I love that response. “At best, you’re morally ambiguous.” It sounds like a conversation I would have with my 4YO DS!