This is only tangentially directed at your reply, but this is the kind of statement that I'll sometimes hear other parents say, and it makes me think that they've completely forgotten what childhood was actually like. Like, the idea that normal, fun activities and sports are bad because they bear some abstract resemblance to adult violence feels very contrived and misses what childhood play is about.

I wouldn't say "violence", rather, an opportunity to demolish something on (good) purpose. Same reason children will be glued to the window if workers outside are going at it with jackhammers, or, better yet, an excavator is crushing and scraping off the asphalt. (Yeah, I remember exactly how awesome that was.)

Destroying things is part of human experience. Kids got to have that.

Is it? Or is that just you, projecting. You could argue baseball, golf, hockey, are all violent as you smash a stick into a ball.

Those who don't lose the fun of hitting things graduate to hitting things with swords and end up in the SCA (not the coffee one).

I see the point about violence but I'm ok with it because it's based on fun and not anger. Olympic archery, javelin, or even fencing have an obvious past in warfare but today they've become sports.

I can only speak for some of the European versions of SCA-like clubs but there's a lot of pride-flag flying strictly-no-fascists fun activity with a dose of pretending to be children again.

(Buhurt is a bit more complicated.)

I dislike them because someone inevitably gets sacked in the groin.

There is no violence, because the pinata is not alive.

There is no more violence in hitting a nail with a hammer.

is play not an indirect method of practicing the physiological mechanisms designed for violence ? baby lions are both happy to play with other animals, and to eat them ... which inevitably progresses to predation only ... and humans are the apex predator ...

As a child I did not see it as violent

That you see the world this way says more about you than the piñata.