Boys and Gun Play - An Inquiry
Question - How do you handle boys and gun play?
Serious responses, please. I respect diverse opinions. There are no easy answers.
I find this inquiry extremely difficult and fruitful, particularly because one of my students' fathers was shot and murdered two years ago, just days before the beginning of the school year. I knew this man. He was a good father, and a beloved member of our community.
I myself played killing games as a young boy. In fact, my best friend and I had a game we played on his front lawn all the time, which we simply called "guns." I recall it having very little plot development, largely full of bad guys coming out of nowhere and the two of us killing them in ways we thought were cool and last minute. So it's real for me. I relate to kids I see playing fighting games, and I think most men do.
As a child, I recall having had no issue whatsoever with this behavior and no one attempting to rid me of it. In fact, as crazy as it sounds, it never felt mal-intentioned to me. We were killing bad guys, invisible bad guys, and my young brain met with no challenge to this idea.
Today, I find myself with a very different ethic. I'm not an absolutist about anything, but I support gun control legislation unequivocally. This in itself informs me and my methods for dealing with violent childsplay, because not only have repeated studies demonstrated little to no link between violent children's games and real-life violence, I myself have experienced that weak link. But I'm only one person. I also respect people with different opinions (something I value a lot), and I have no doubt that some gun owners know some important things I do not.
My students and I live in a fairly protected worldview, largely because of our rural setting. At early ages, it was not uncommon for gender roles to be mixed and diverse in play - boys being princesses, wearing dresses, girls hunting elk, etc. But by age 6 or so, that shifted - probably for larger cultural reasons, but probably also for other reasons I won't pretend to understand.
The boys got more violent, and that has only increased. I don't doubt that some of this is cultural, but neither do I think it is "just" cultural. I observe a very plain and straightforward tendency in every single one of my male students to play fighting and killing games. The girls almost never do, and if they do it's mostly as a joke. The boys are serious.
So what do I do with it? Do you face this question, this behavior? What do you do?
Like many parents and teachers, I've gone through a whole gambit of responses - forbidding it, talking over their heads about cultural issues, ignoring it, or some combination of the three. I honestly can't say what's right. I find it a true inquiry, and that's why I share it here. Anyone who claims to have the one right answer is, in my opinion, unworthy of the discussion.
My current response when play turns this direction (a daily occurrence) is to establish one basic rule: no shooting, killing, or annoying real people. I enforce that quite firmly, as well as the general rule of consent for anyone involved in the game. If I sense that someone is sort of being "used" in the game, I disrupt it, though this happens rarely. This jives with my own memories from childhood, which is that these games, though outwardly violent, are rarely, if ever, ill-intentioned.
But I don't enforce a strict prohibition, and that's a very hard call for me because, as I mentioned, one of my students' fathers was murdered with a gun only two years ago. I often question whether I'm being grossly negligent.
I will refrain from any personal information. But I would very much appreciate hearing wide and diverse responses of how other parents and teachers are managing this kind of behavior - whether boys or girls, guns or lasers, knives or whatever. The essential question is - How do you orient to a child's tendency to play games where killing or violence is the goal?
Please be kind and thoughtful in your responses. No BS and no hard lines.
(See the Facebook thread, which is more lively)
--
Photo by Flavia Gava. This is a generic photo taken from UnSplash, not one of my students.