Dear Susie,
My husband and I are super anti-gun –
anti-violence – and with all of the gun related tragedies of late,
we are even more sensitive to anything gun related.
It was pretty easy to keep guns out of
Marshall's toddler play He wasn't interested in guns at all.
Then...enter transitional kindergarten
last year! He met friends who were allowed to watch Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles and all kinds of stuff that he is not. They
started to play fighting games on the playground. The teachers
stopped it but Marshall was interested! With Legos (which he LOVES to
use for building and to role play with after he builds)...in came
many many weapons and guns!! Tiny guns, tiny nunchuks, tiny
crossbows...
I think he is wrestling with good
versus evil. He NEVER wants to be the bad guy in our role plays with
his Lego guys - but he sure wants to shoot missiles at them! He wants
to shoot them down!! His dad always has the bad guys doing
things like replacing all the good food in the land with candy so
everyone gets cavities and their teeth will fall out, etc. And we try
to make the guns water guns or say they shoot sticky jelly that makes
the bad guys get stuck.
And he indulges us...but boy, he wants
to use those little plastic guns and missiles and shoot those bad
guys down. I'll add that there's NO violence or hitting issues with
kids ever. It's just in Legos play or role-playing.
Okay, so we just want to make sure we
are instilling the right values and steering him in the right
direction. We talk about how we don't like guns and how they hurt
people in real life. (Keep it pretty simple.) I feel like we need a
game plan!
Dear Parent,
Thanks for a thoughtful letter. A lot
of the things you are already doing with Marshall strike me as sound.
This topic is a perennial, especially for parents of boys. For some
reason, gun play just doesn't resonate with little girls as much.
As I see it, there are two main issues.
One is the fascination with guns and violence, which drives
peaceable parents nearly to distraction. I think this is just how
kids manage natural aggression. The second issue is good versus
evil, as you noted. The combination of the two themes is played out
every day in sandboxes as well as on the world stage. I don't know
of a single culture that believes war is a best option, but most
cultures will go to war – and do despicable things to other human
beings – if they believe they are “good” and the other is
“evil.”
First I'll talk about the obsession
with weapons. You raised your baby and toddler with gentle,
peaceable toys. Then the world intruded: ideas that are taboo in
your home found their way into his play. A lot of parents shrug and
say “Oh, heck, he can bite the corner off a graham cracker and make
a 'gun.' You can stick two Legos together and make a 'gun.' He can
pick up a stick off the ground, point it and say 'bang bang.' Why
not just buy the kid a gun?”
My answer to that is that once the
graham cracker is eaten, the gun is gone. The Legos can be taken
apart and used to make something else – beaten into plowshares, if
you will! The stick, tossed back down, gets ground into the earth.
A plastic gun sitting in the toy chest is a standing invitation to
violent play, and only violent play. Any toy in your home has
your tacit endorsement.
Your home is the place where you impart
your values. You can say “please don't point that banana at me and
say 'bang bang.' I don't like guns, even pretend guns. Guns are for
hurting people.” You can suggest, like the proprietor of a western
saloon trying to run a peaceful business, that “weapons” (the
Lego gun, the half-eaten graham cracker, any weapon created by your
enterprising and creative kid) be stopped and stored at the front
door. You can't keep the ideas out (that would be mind control –
good luck with that!) but you can let your child know in no uncertain
terms how you roll.
But fantasy violent play is just that –
a place to put aggressive thoughts and feeling. You mentioned that
his play never spills over into hurting other kids. It's just
pretend and it doesn't lead to mayhem. This means that, with fantasy
play as an outlet, he's doing a pretty good job of expressing
aggressive impulses while keeping them in check. Sweet! He can also
do this by means of drawings and stories that don't hurt anyone in
real life.
And yes, the second part of this
discussion is the struggle between good and evil, which fours and
fives generally obsess over. This goes along with a fascination with
power (at a time where children are just beginning to realize how
very powerless they really are...interesting, yes?) Very young
children, toddlers and preschoolers, hold an absolutist view of
everyone in the world as all-good or all-bad. This comes to a
crescendo at around kindergarten age, and then subsides. (As a side
note, this is about the same time that a child begins to get a solid
grip on his self-control so he can do what he is supposed to do
instead of what he wishes to do. He has learned to listen to the
cartoon angel whispering into one ear instead of the demon hissing
into the other!) No wonder kids this age love fairy tales.
Everything about good and bad is so clear-cut. There's always a mean
perp, a helpless vic, and a hero who knows the difference and has the
power to set things right.
Later, at six and seven, kids start to
realize there are shades of gray, that real-life heroes like their
parents are flawed – that we're all imperfect. This is huge.
With a child of four or five, who
hasn't reached that level of nuanced thinking, I'd read him lots of
hero/villain stories. I'd ask to hear his stories, and maybe write
them down. I'd ask what's good about the hero, what's bad about the
villain. Without dismissing his story lines, I might ask if there
are alternate ways of fighting evil. What is powerful besides
weaponry? The sun, the wind and water are powerful. Love is
powerful. Words are powerful. A decision to say yes or no to
something is powerful. As a parent you can help your child use that
same creativity that made a gun out of a twig to think about the
struggle between good and bad and all the ways we can harness power
for the better.
For more reading about this issue, have
a look at
Who's
Calling the Shots?: How to Respond Effectively to Children's
Fascination With War Play and War Toys
by Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane E. Levin
and
Killing
Monsters: Why Children NEED Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe
Violence
by Gerard Jones
