November 15, 2012 by blue milk
Cormac (age 3): I killed all the baddies in my bedroom.
Me: Great.
Cormac: There’s no baddies left in there but there’s a lot of blood.
Me: Great.
Cormac: I couldn’t clean the blood up. My gun* is not a vacuum cleaner.
Me: Great.
* Yeeees, going to write about our feminist parenting failures with the gun-play soon.
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blue milk 
He’s adorable 🙂
When my now Mr15 was pre-school aged he would collect gun sticks which I would then insist be left outside rather than being brought into the house and strewn around my living room. Our gardener asked me if David was planning on a bonfire because the pile in the front garden was getting rather large. He now has an equally large nerf gun collection.
Yes – every stick is a gun. As are wooden spoons & sometimes pastry brushes. Very frustrating.
Within this exchange I see the solution to the world’s gun violence problems: all guns manufactured from now on must be able to convert into vacuum cleaners.
Hmm if only vacuum cleaners could really clean blood up…
According to all the literature our kindy has put up about gun play it is normal and okay within certain boundaries.
Hope you aren’t really beating yourself up about gun play…my mom tells a story about when my mother was in pre-k and his friend came over to play. The friend’s mother was vehemently anti-gun so Ma dutifully hid the arsenal of toy guns. She found the boys firing a couple she had missed at each other so she took them away and sent them outside. Where they fired sticks at each other. When the friend’s mother came to pick her sun up they were pointing their fingers at each other making “pew pew” noises. “I’m sorry, his fingers wouldn’t come off.” The small children…they do the gun thing, our ability to curtail it is limited and, judging by my brother, the long term harm his negligible when in the context of an otherwise peaceful home.
They will make guns out of anything, no matter how vigilant you are. Mine chewed a sandwich into a vague gun shape and shot his brother 🙂 I finally gave in and went the nerf gun route. He had quite an arsenal! I refuse to bring air soft guns into the house though, much to his 17 year old dismay.
Hahaha! He’s so cute, bluemilk. I’m glad you’re writing these things down.
I kind of wish my son would play guns with people! Instead, he and his friends make every stick into a sword, which hurts a lot more than a pretend bullet. 😦
Funny, mine’s always been swords over guns, too.
We had stick swords too, still do in fact, bamboo shinai, and metal ones. And a collection of rubber swords and axes. That’s what historical reenactment does to you.
Ha and my three year old (boy) is obsessed with fairies and glitter… and the 7 year old (boy) thinks it is ‘not natural’ and is worried the 5 year old (boy) will get a hard time at school next year with his pink lunchbox, ‘but not for long mama. I’ll sort them’ ! Adorable all of them, fairy lovers and gun obsessed alike!
MyNigel is a member of a clay target shooting club, so saying no play guns in our house is a bit hypocritical. But then our kids do get to see people using guns properly so I’m not that concerned. It is pretty cute when they ambush him with their nerf guns too. The giggling gives them away but they manage to get him sometimes. He of course immediately wrestles one off them and shoots back. I have managed to convince them that I am not a target.
Oh please do write more about it! We’ve failed too. I have a tutu wearing, imaginary gun wielding 3.5yo son. No idea how to handle his overpowering desire for a ‘real’ toy gun!
My younger daughter plays sword all the time, cutting her opponents to pieces, but is not so obsessed with guns. We’re happy to encourage it, as we consider that pretending to have physical power is a fairly normal and healthy response to the relative powerlessness that is being a child. My older daughter loves to wield a fake knife and/or sword too, slashing a pretend goblin to bits. Probably sending the younger one to martial arts to allow an outlet for her love of physical fighting. I wrestle with both daughters fairly regularly too. They also love fairies and princesses and playing house and doctor and dolls and vet. I don’t have boys and everybody tells me boys are very different, but perhaps for both genders balance is key. And discussion, putting both princesses’ helplesses (in our house, princesses rescue people) and warriors’ violence into context and understanding urges to play violence. I loved physical fighting and swords and even guns as a kid and trained martial arts as a young woman but moved on to peaceful yoga as I aged. As a result I lack the reflexive dislike of violent play: I recall how much fun it was and how wonderful it was to pretend to be strong and to conquer all.
Thanks dandelionfield, your line about lacking the instinctive dislike of violent play and remembering how fun it was to pretend to be strong and conquer all has really given me something to think about 🙂
Despite my feminist mother’s best efforts it is not something I have experienced. I have maintained her stance of no guns, no barbies. They can do what they like with sticks and cardboard boxes, but a small person pointing a realistic looking plastic hunting gun at people is to me rather obscene. Water guns and nerf guns we have had and no doubt will again…
My 3 1/2 year old was exposed to guns by his “cousins” (my husband’s cousin’s kids) who are a little older than him. they also exposed him to “bad guys,” zombies, and creepers. So Niko runs around “shooting” things and “killing” them but he has no idea what killing or death really is. It’s just… making noise and saying stuff. My husband is very upset by it, especially when he does it in public (but that’s more boundary issues– you have to ask people if they want to play fight before play attacking them– than, like, embarrassment) but I’m less so because I remember making guns out of barbies, hangers, and a wooden folding ruler. So we talk about boundaries and asking if people want to play specific games instead of assuming they will etc, and we talk about using gentle hands and being kind.
In some kindies in NZ, kids have to get a ‘gun licence’ which can be revoked if they break the gun play rules – they have to make the toy guns themselves from cardboard etc, ask others if they want to play, shoot at targets not people, leave the toy guns in racks when they’re not playing etc. The teachers say the gun play is a lot more positive than if it is banned outright, and the kids are learning about gun safety – which can only be a good thing considering the number of stupid and tragic hunting accidents happening here. I think I might try this approach when my son inevitably starts wanting to shoot things.
Tell him that he can probably get some kind of attachment for that 🙂
Relax Blue Milk. My lovely young man, he’s 23 now, when little, loved high heels, make-up, my jewelry and guns. I didn’t buy him any, in the early 90’s it was nigh impossible to buy toy guns, it was considered the height of evilness. He made his own. And when about 8 had a big birthday party his friends still talk about on our 10 acre bush property stalking and ‘killing’ each other. ‘Rules of combat’ were set after discussion. It definitely included ‘cleaning up the blood’!!!! Mother wasn’t a camp follower tending to the fallen and wounded.
When a teenager he ‘promoted’ to the computer versions of violence. Just remain open and use moments as they arise where you can talk about and discuss pretty important things about violence, defense, aggression, equality, death and dying, the aftermath of war (both my parents were prisoners of war) and even heroism. These subjects otherwise are only terribly abstract, It’s great to have opportunities to talk freely and openly about confronting issues such as violence. I’ve had some really thought provoking discussions with all the children.
That’s what I see as ‘feminist’ mothering, having free and frank discussions on all and any topic. Not censorship.
I am pissing myself laughing about your PS. Oh how I can relate. If my child wasn’t so horrid we could catch up again and commiserate together….
What a great lot of interesting comments you have attracted! I gave up worrying too much about the gun play a while ago (we have no toys guns, but that makes absolutely no difference!), partly for the reasons people have given above and partly, to be brutally honest, out of exhaustion. I am holding out yet on barbies…
As for princesses rescuing people… they *do* do that in our house too, BUT, it becomes sooo much harder to manage all the images and stories as they get older and select their own library books, plus, did I mention exhaustion? So I am sad to say we have a lot more ‘traditional’ princess being rescued type stories in the house now that my 6 year old (daughter) loves, than we did for my (now 10 year old) son, and god help my toddler.
I’m just hoping the diversity of stories and role models makes a difference, but I know that with all the images in the dominant culture, wading against the tide has to be very determined to be effective. Sigh.
Back to your post – I loved you “Great”s – such a familiar response 🙂
Thanks for these really interesting comments – I am very much still developing my boundaries with gun play and hearing how you are all sorting it through is very helpful.
I’m still wondering how we will handle it when it comes up. I think that outright forbidding it will just make it more appealing, but I’m also uncomfortable with the idea of gun play. I dunno!
A couple of Christmasses ago I heard my brother teaching the assembled kids to only aim the nerf guns at the bbq and never to bring their guns into the house, I wasn’t exactly thrilled, but they weren’t hurting each other (or pretending to) so I left them to it.
A friend with older kids told me they’d come to a rule about avoiding realistic-looking modern weapons, but permitting light sabers, medieval flouro coloured water pistols etc. Basically, if it’s a toy version of something you might see on the news it’s out, but jousting is ok. Some toy soldiers came into our house a while ago, from pass the parcel, the boy played with them for about 15 minutes, we talked about playing at killing people, then said “I wish I got lady shoes” (the girls at the party had got plastic high heels). Then the toy soldiers went in the bin.
I recently confronted ‘the killing’ with 3-year-old Shimmy, and as recounted (http://bit.ly/RuAGf1) discovered it probably sounds more like censorship than a meaningful intervention about violence and aggression.
I came away thinking I probably need to be more concerned about the messages I am giving him about what he wants to do and who he wants to be than I need to be concerned about him pretending to kill imaginary beings.
[…] Remember how I said I’d failed spectacularly in keeping toy guns out of our house? I wrote an article about that and how I have made a sort of weary peace with it and my feminist parenting and it is published over at Essential Kid. […]
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