Early this month, a six-year-old in Silver Spring, Maryland, was suspended from school after he pointed his finger like a gun and said, "pow." In a letter to his parents, school officials described the incident as one in which their son "threatened to shoot a student."
In one way, this reaction is understandable. After the horrific events at Sandy Hook Elementary School, seeing any sort of gunplay at school would be, on a gut level, distressing. This sort of reaction certainly has historical precedent: in 1968, following the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Sears Roebuck Christmas catalog pulled all toy guns from its pages.
But, beyond visceral reactions—exclamations of distaste at child behavior that uncomfortably resonates with tragedy—does pretend violence perpetuate real violence?
Not necessarily. According to Stuart Brown, psychiatrist and the founder and director of the National Institutes of Play, "Play can act as a powerful deterrent, even an antidote to prevent violence. Play is a powerful catalyst for positive socialization."
But parents and teachers—like the teachers in Silver Spring, Maryland—are often not inclined to see it that way."Teachers…often see normal rough and tumble play behavior such as hitting, diving, wrestling, (all done with a smile, between friends who stay friends), not as a state of play, but one of anarchy that must be controlled."
In a study of adults who had committed violent crimes, including the Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho, Brown discovered that their childhoods had been marked not by violent play but, more strangely, by a lack of play: the very thing that helps people, especially little people, work through conflict and aggression safely and productively.
An adult may see a kid wield a thumb-and-forefinger "gun" and think of Adam Lanza. But unless the child is already troubled, he is thinking of nothing like that. More likely it has nothing to do with a desire to harm another human being.
Experts at the Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood encourage parents not to suppress children's aggression in play. "Children turn to play so that they can learn what they need to learn about aggression. We should become concerned about children's relationship to aggression only if they appear to be overly pre-occupied with aggression in their thoughts or actions outside the sphere of play."
There's a part of me that wishes my two young boys would be satisfied with the same sorts of stories and toys that I enjoyed as a child: Anne of Green Gables, Beverly Cleary, and American Girls dolls. Instead, they love anything involving bows and arrows, pirates and cannons, whales and harpoons, and knights slaying dragons.
As a Christian holding to pacifist convictions, I feel sheepish admitting that while early on in our family life, I resolved not to allow our boys to engage in any sort of gunplay; over time, that rule has slowly disintegrated as my children weaponized various items: Legos, hobbyhorses, sticks, blocks, and, hilariously, a sheet of edible dried seaweed bitten carefully into the shape of a gun. It wasn't that they'd seen guns on television or in video games. I'm still not sure where the idea came from. I did notice that the relentless weaponization of everything actually waned once I stopped actively saying, "No guns!"
"Isn't a 'pacifist boy' kind of an oxymoron?" a friend recently asked. According to one study, 60 to 80 percent of boys played with aggressive toys at home, including guns, while only 30 percent of girls do. Whether this is in how they're wired or how they're socialized is tough to tell, but the difference is real, and the impulse for some parents and teachers to squash it is strong.
That's not a great idea, says Michael Thompson, Ph.D. and author of It's a Boy! Your Son's Development from Birth to 18. "Boys think, 'If you don't like my play, you don't like me.'" Furthermore, studies have never shown any link between playing with toy weapons in childhood (including neutral playthings—sticks, blocks—that have been "weaponized") and violence in adulthood.
When they zap imaginary monsters—or each other—with "space guns" that they've crafted from Legos, they're not acting on hate, or mental disturbance, or a desire to harm. They're playing. It certainly does seem that what my children do in play is in an alternate reality altogether. "Who is the only One who can give life?" I'll catechize. "God," they'll reply. "So who is the only One who should take a life?" I press. "God!" they say, with a barely suppressed of course. I asked my precocious seven-year-old why, if that's true, he still likes to play with guns. "That's why we play with toy guns, Mom," he says, neatly summing up Stuart Brown's entire theory of play "so that no one will get hurt!"
I applaud the White House's effort to address gun violence holistically, through measures providing for mental health coverage and sensible limits on weapons and accessories that do nothing but facilitate mass killing. I agree with Sharon Hodde Miller that all Christians can back better gun control "to ensure that these most vulnerable members of our society are not subject to on-going violence for the ideals of a privileged few." I believe that every child has the right to a childhood that is free of violence… and a childhood in which they are free to play in ways that (however paradoxically) make for peace.
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Comments
ANDY ROWELL
I too am close to being a pacifist but our kids (boy 7.5, boy 5, and girl 2.5) love wrestling, and Nerf swords and blasters. I think it is an important skill to learn how to wrestle without hurting others--best probably learned wrestling with parents (e.g. no hitting in the face or throwing balls in the face, not hitting too hard or with hard objects). Yes, sometimes someone gets angry and there are tears but this happens as often with block and train track building and stuffed animal pretending at our house as with Nerf weapons. Pacifism is closer to a posture of war than many suppose. It involves determined, cagey, aggressive, gritty, persevering, courageous assault. But rather than killing other people, it involves changing minds--breaching hate with love. Think Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gene Sharp. I hope that by also filling kids' minds with stories of what it means to be true, good, and beautiful from good books, they will apply their feistiness to that one day.
Marshall Shelley
Competition is a powerful and needed experience for most people as they grow up. Winning and losing is an important lesson (and not letting initial losses prevent you from achieving eventual victories). Any sport: wrestling, softball, soccer, gymnastics, or chess (!) is about overcoming a foe in a fair way. Whether it's play guns or play karate or strategy war games, they are all extensions of competition. At times in business, education, art, entertainment, science, or any professional field, elements of competition have to be applied. And it's better to do them well than to do them poorly. Some of our tools for honing the competitive instinct include archery ranges, video games with zombies coming at you, and paintball. It's better to learn the rules of engagement in safe simulations like these than to not learn those things at all.
Tim Fall
You brought back a lot of fun memories for me, Rachel. When my two cousins (twins) and I would get together, we'd play army with a lot of shooting and running and falling down. Those two guys have grown up to be extremely cerebral and mild mannered, and I think most people would say that I am fairly restrained in my manner as well (the jury's still out on that cerebral thing with me, though). Back in my junior high health class, our teacher talked about the fallacy of gateway drugs because he said if you wanted to you could show that all those drug users started with chewing gum, which meant that all of us gum chewers were in danger of addiction to heroin. Same goes with kids and toy guns. There's no way these are the gateway to deadly violent behavior, as the studies you cited apparently show. I think we all really knew that already too, including the school officials who sent that poor 6 year old home. Tim (timfall.wordpress.com)
Ken Smith
I'm quite willing to believe that boys are hard-wired for this sort of thing. My wife is very strongly anti-violence, and as a result, our two young boys had never seen even a toy gun. But when they were three and one, we visited a friend's house for a birthday party, and they spotted a little toy M16 on the floor. My three-year-old immediately picked it up and started shooting his little brother, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. They're a little older now, and have named their favorite games "Rough Tough" and "Bull Fighting", both of which basically involve knocking each other down by running into each other at full speed. But as I watch them engage in this sort of "violent" play (and occasionally partake in it myself), I very much get the sense that it's a very complex and subtle negotiation. They're figuring out how to do it (mostly) without hurting each other or getting hurt themselves. It's a very important set of lessons they're learning.
Adam Shields
(We need more than 100 character) In limiting play fighting, we also limit the ability to be a hero. Being a hero was very important to me as a child. There is probably no other area that where play lead me into christian life. But being a hero means giving yourself up for others. So comic books like God's Smuggler showed ways I could be a hero as a Christian. I won't speak for all men, but I at least learned from play fighting that the role of hero is important.
Adam Shields
As a former boy, I support the idea that boys should be allowed to be boys (and girls should allowed to play fight if they want as well.) I was very violent as a pre-teen. I got into fights all the time. But I was moving, I was trying to find my place, I was trying to learn how to control myself and my emotions. I have to think that this is similar to other ways that we want to prevent children from learning how to grow up. When we make decisions for our children we take away their ability to make decisions for themselves. I learned how to make decisions for myself and I am an adult that is very much against violence. I am not quite pacifist, but I lean pretty close. There is a similar idea here with video games. It is not quite the same, but most of the studies I have seen seem to indicate that there is very little relationship between playing violent video games and actual violence. In some cases violence is reduced.
Hannah Anderson
I also wonder with Rachel Simko if the environment and context isn't a key factor in how children engage and understand violence and whether or not they grow up to be violent people. Because despite not having the same pacifist leanings as the author, I am highly aware when my children's play turns from good vs. evil to simply mimicking destruction. My husband and I try to help our children frame even their play in terms of good fighting against evil--which in our house, more often than not, means freeing princess leia from the Death Star with everybody fighting their way out with laser blasters and light sabers.
Rachel Stephan Simko
I appreciate all the studies you include in this post, because it's something that I've been curious about for a while. I don't have boys (we're a girl family over her), but my twin nephews are reaching that age where they are picking up sticks and pretending they're guns. There are no play guns allowed in the house, but it just seems to be some sort of innate play that comes out of young boys. So what do you do? My older brother always played with fake weapons -- from guns to swords to bows to whatever -- and he grew up to be one of the most sensitive, empathetic people. It seems that play fighting is not the issue, but probably the overall environment in which one is raised. My parents were very loving people who lived out their Christian faith, and play fighting was just that: PLAY. There was no blurry lines between reality and fantasy when it came to play fighting, you know? But I totally understand our culture's uber-sensitivity. rachel (evenonesparrow.blogspot.com)
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