When I became a mother I was certain my children would grow up enlightened. And for me enlightenment meant my children would not ascribe to any traditional gender stereotypes or roles. My girls would play sports and revile Barbie. My boys would wear bow ties and be fabulous dancers and artists. And there would be no guns or violence.
In the daily struggle to get everyone properly shuttled and dinner on the table, gone are my daydreams, and I’m accepting who they are as people rather than who I imagined them to be. Welcoming Barbie to the family was difficult, but the biggest adaptation for me has been learning to appreciate the traditional masculinity of my boys. I’m all about honoring them finding their nurturing characteristics, celebrating their wanting to wear pink or being enthralled with cleaning the bathroom. But when it comes to rough and tumble play, toy weapons and killing the bad guys, I get squeamish. How can I teach them to respect the inner-connectedness of all life yet engage in a light sabre battle? How can I tell them killing is wrong but let them play Angry Birds?
We were going to be a weapons-free home. Until my boys began making guns from their duplo legos at church and aiming them at the speaker. Until they bit their toast into guns and shot each other at the breakfast table. Until innocent sticks became guns. Even this week my 7 yr old son told me he had made pizza with his nanny for lunch and got to shape the dough any way he wanted. I asked what he made his into and he replied “a gun.”
I spent a lot of time judging myself and my boys over this, believing these tendencies to be fundamentally flawed. Worried I was raising future felons, I banned the very thought of touching another person with anything other than a hug. But there was no containing it, particularly with my oldest boy.
Instead I began to channel this energy. I enrolled him in karate. There he learns control, respect and discipline as necessary components. For him, it feels like jedi training. For me, it’s an outlet for his love of weapons and intensity tied to an age-old tradition.
For some boys, playing cops and robbers, superhero and war comes as naturally as playing house or dancing comes for some girls. Rather than judge them, we came up with some rules I feel good about. Chatting up other mothers who’ve been down this road, I’ve heard everything from “no guns” to “no killing people” to “eat what you kill.” For us what seems to work is that playing is limited to those who agree to be in the game. That means no attacking those who are uncomfortable with this kind of play. We also limit screen time and monitor the violence they are exposed to.
But it also means we have killer (excuse the pun) water fights as a family. It means we play Star Wars in real life and on the Wii. And it means occasionally someone gets hurt and we need to apologize for our overzealousness.
There are many schools of thought on rough play and weaponry. I tend to believe the most important thing is that we teach empathy along with it. Those times it gets out of hand, when something playful turns into something hurtful, are the times to teach about how there are other ways to see things besides the way we see them. To me, more important than what the rules actually are is the idea that my rules show that I value and respect life and people.
I still wince when I watch him do a sword routine or spar. I still get squeamish when the brotherly wrestling takes a turn for the worse. And it’s still hard to hear that my son dreams of going to war. But rather than see this as violent aggression and something that needs to be corrected, I choose to see it as his way of expressing a desire to keep the world a safe place.
How have you handled toys and weapons in your home? Is it different if a daughter likes to play like this instead of a son?
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I am a pacifist – I just can’t support the majority of the war that takes place on this earth. I also believe that teaching tolerance and respect and gentleness begins at home. I’ve also struggled, raising two boys – two boys who LOVE to game – how to balance their desire to control, kill, and maim which seems just as natural, as evolutionary as their gentle cuddly sides.
I tow a tough line at home – no pretend guns, no “I’m going to kill you” is allowed to be screamed through our house. Yet, I’ve allowed the gift water blaster, the hand-me-down sword from the neighbor. I try not to make it too big of a deal, as I understand that it’s somewhat natural and that their archetypal playtime doesn’t mean they will grow up to be sociopaths. And, I’ve totally banned any first-person shooter games, or violent video play – mostly because it’s an energy I don’t want in my house.
As the boys grow older, they disagree with me for sure – but I am adamant that I don’t want mindless violence playing through the house on a regular basis. I don’t want their default mode to be strategizing an us vs. them scenario, or even a good vs. evil mentality. I want to be mindful of their instincts and their mindsets, and disappointingly, there’s no Family Home Evening lesson in the manual on how to teach that to kids.
It’s been a tough balance for us, I give a little and they give a little – but non-violence is a family value that I am really committed to. While I see that war games might be a way to keep the world safe, I strive to teach them that the world is a friendly place and most of our enemies are creations of the mind.
I’ll check back in with this post in about 10 years, and let you know how the dance is going….
Laurie –
I appreciate your sentiments here and I know you to be a woman of sage wisdom.
I struggle when I say we value non-violence in our family because there’s always a line you can call someone a hypocrite at, so everyone draws a line at which they are comfortable. But as a general rule, we do value non-violence. I disagree with every war I’ve lived through, and most (but not all) of the ones that came before me. Yet I wouldn’t vote for someone who said it was never an option. 2/3 of my family eats meat, which is the result of violence, though I spend the extra money for humanely raised and slaughtered animals. We also kill bugs we don’t like that come into the house – I just can’t do a “live and let live” with cockroaches. I believe I would physically harm someone who came into my home and threatened the safety of someone in it. But we don’t use violent language or force to solve problems, though we all break this rule on occasion, but in typically age-appropriate ways. I sometimes yell. My tween girls find power in their material possessions and wield them like weapons to try to harm the other (not physically, but it’s still harmful) or get their own way. And once in a while, one of the boys gets out of control and will hit. But so did the girls at that age and they never played video games of any kind or with toy weapons.
To me, the type of play I describe in my OP is not violent because intentional harm is a necessary component of violence, and because this is play and everyone has agreed to play and negotiated the rules, that piece is lacking. To me, this type of play actually helps them deal with the aggression and other emotions they are naturally feeling, finding safe ways to to channel the energy that is already there.
But more important than any of those thoughts, I believe that different families make different things work, that parents who are thoughtful are making the best decisions for their kids and our society and I trust them completely.
Mel – that’s an interesting perspective on the idea of play and I’m not one to believe that kids intend to harm usually – they act out what is arising naturally. And, I get you on the line of hypocrisy, and the truth is that violence comes in many forms and is always a work in progress.
I’ve observed that violence within is something that seems to naturally arise, that we learn to deal with. I haven’t met someone yet who hasn’t felt that urge to yell, to manipulate, to put themselves before someone else. And, it’s nuanced, for sure.
My main intent on confining violent play at our house is not that the play is actually harming itself, but that all violence begins within, and I don’t want their inner default-mode to be one where violence – even imaginary violence – is seen as normal and acceptable. I don’t want my kids to think that hurting someone – even blowing up “bad monsters” is fun. I want to encourage a mindfulness around the topic, and a sensitivity to what many think is normal. I think that if we are ever going to live in an less violent world, it will take some intense introspection on what seems to be a natural part of our human evolution – the urge to push against, to fight, to create a world of us-vs-them.
Such a good conversation! I keep visiting this topic over and over in my life and I don’t expect my mind to close on the subject anytime soon.
You bring up some very good food for thought. I’m trying wrap my brain around the idea of mindfulness at play and what that means.
I remember my dad telling me about asking his dad what it was like to be in war. He was young and excitedly asked, “did you get to shoot someone?” and his dad answered “I got lucky and didn’t have to.”
I think we really all want the same things, we just see how we get there differently.
Mel–
I really do think it’s something hardwired in them, especially after reading your third paragraph. I wrote a blog post on Friday about my husband wanting a gun and my unease with it, and a discussion started in the comments. My reply to someone who said they weren’t allowed to play with toy weapons was:
I tried that (not allowing them to play with guns). But boys find a way. Ben would eat his toast or his cheese into the shape of a gun, or build one with Legos, or simply pick up a stick on the playground and pretend it was one. So, I decided it wasn’t worth my energy preventing him from getting toy guns, when he’d just create one out of anything.
So, unless you were lifting content from my blog comments, it must be a fairly common experience with boys. :)
Wow – that’s such a coincidence!!! Send me a link to your blog. You go somewhere even further with this than I had and I’d love to read more about how you worked that out!
Very interesting, indeed. I also had a friend who vowed to never let her sons play with guns, but she gave up when she noticed one of them wielding a circular cucumber slice as a gun one night after dinner. ;)
This hasn’t been much of an issue in our house (which those of you who know anything about me and my son Stuart can attest). I don’t like rough play, however, and I know that’s something that a lot of people (kids and dads, don’t know too many moms who love that) enjoy.
Our kids play video games, but only the Wii, so they don’t really even know what’s out there. Actually, that’s not true–they have seen their dad play some Xbox first-person shooter games, but he limits that to 1-2 weekends a year when we visit a buddy of his who lives 2.5 hours away. And they aren’t allowed to play them . . . because I said so.
I obviously haven’t put nearly as much thought into it as you have, Mel, but necessity hasn’t forced the issue for us the way it sounds like it has for you.
P.S. The picture of your boys is so darn cute.
Heather – for me it has been harder to accept the traditional gender stereotypes of my kids than those that differ.
We all have to figure out where the line is though. I think technically the Wii is violent as well, at least what we’re playing. They’re technically Star Wars figures as legos in the one we play, but they’re moving around so it still seems like killing? Even pac-man had us killing ghosts. I read an article once about where to draw the line. The author drew the line at people – killing alien type things and monsters in a video game was ok but not people. What I loved about the article was that he admitted that the line made no sense, killing is killing, but that having a line was important.
The picture of my boys was on the 1st day of school a few years ago. We have a tradition of meeting the bus with squirt guns and ice cream on the first and last day of the school year – so they were waiting for their sisters.
“Until they bit their toast into guns and shot each other at the breakfast table.” Too damn funny!
Yeah, boys will beat their plowshares into swords and their pruning hooks into spears, no matter what. The only thing to do is make sure they understand the real consequences of violence rather than the stylized versions of Xbox or Hollywood.
Like most people, you’ve discovered what happens when our youthful theories and philosophies of childraising are exposed to actual children. Let kids, both boys and girls, play. But let it be done in a fashion that teaches respect. Sometimes that’s as simple as enforcing the idea that the nerf war in the basement does not extent into the dining room.
So, read this entry while my husband was watching a new DVD on elk hunting. Needless to say we have toy guns galore and real guns locked up at my house. I would rather my boys not be interested in them at all. But, I belong to a family culture that participates in hunting. I have had many a discussion about guns and why men (and boys) want them. And I often return to a great public radio story years ago that was working through gender roles and our anthropological historical roles. I still sometimes think about how it explained that it was the man’s responsibility to protect his offspring and extended family as well as hunt to provide the iron and vitamins to replace the blood his woman would have lost at childbirth. And it was the woman’s job to provide the sustenance the wild grains for the daily carbohydrates. My husband doesn’t need to kill a deer, meat is readily available at the grocery store. But, he really seems to have a deep drive to get out with his other man friends and accomplish this ancient feat. Did he learn this hobby from his Dad? Or does every man want to kill and eat their prey? Back to the boys. I wonder if males share a collective, gender memory, I’m pretty sure I can’t blame my five-year-old’s testosterone level, that urges them into warrior play to prepare to protect and hunt. I guess it helps me to think about this ancient history seeing as how the guns at my house are here to stay. So, I try to focus on the emotional intelligence and teaching my boys to identify their anger and other aggressive emotions and talk about them instead of turning to the potentially violent toys at hand to solve their battles.
Hinged, very interesting idea re: a “collective gender memory.” I’m gonna have to think about that one some more.
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