Why We Play With Weapons

We spend a lot of our time around here playing heroes and villains. It seems like from the moment my son wakes up to the moment he falls asleep (and probably continuing into his dreams), he is fighting a battle between good and evil. Usually he is good. Sometimes he plays evil. Whichever side he chooses, he fights fiercely and imaginatively for his goal.

I know a lot of people these days are really uncomfortable with play weapons and play violence. It is certainly understandable if you turn on the news for 2 minutes and see how many young people are committing violent crimes. Our children can see so much violence—real violence in the news and in documentaries, graphic imaginary violence in TV, movies, books, and games—and it can be disturbing to see them act out the things that they see. We can limit how much of this our children see, but it seeps into their from all kinds of unexpected places. It is easy for the line to blur between play violence that serves the purpose of processing challenging new ideas and emotions, and violent play that is practice for enacting real violence and can really hurt other children. The PBS series on Understanding and Raising Boys does a pretty good job of explaining the difference.

I've noticed some things that tend to happen when gun/weapon/fighting play is forbidden. For example, when my son was in preschool, all weapon and fighting play was off limits. But because it's not off limits in our home, he felt free to share with me the games he was learning at preschool. Pointing hands and fingers like guns was not allowed, so the kids came up with other ways to symbolize a gun, like crossing their fingers and holding a hand up. I think with toy weapons, and so many other things in life, a simple formula applies:

natural interest + forbidden mystery = obsession

On the days that I was the classroom helper at preschool, I saw the play that was happening. And it was quickly evident that the kind of secretive play they were engaging in while no one was looking happens very differently from the play that goes on at our house. By allowing play fighting, and getting involved in it, there are a lot of social skills that my son has learned that can transfer to other interactions throughout his life.

Things like:

• gaining consent to play fight before you start slicing and shooting other people
• reaching some agreement about the ground rules (i.e. no pointing/squirting guns at faces, swords only hit swords not bodies)
• making sure that the play isn't interfering with the peace and/or play of others around you
• learning to set limits with other people
• learning to hear and respect other people's limits
• continually adjusting the play and rules as needed
• deciding to fight against each other or together, and renegotiating as circumstances change

There is a lot of negotiation, self-regulation, advocacy and self-advocacy, reading of social cues, self-expression, listening... really rich social interaction that can happen when you get involved and offer a little guidance with weapon play and play fighting.

Getting involved in the play has also given me a chance to take some advice from Lawrence Cohen's Playful Parenting, to influence and rewrite common scripts so that they fit with my values. Whenever we are rescuing  a princess, we free her and help her find her weapon, then she helps us rescue the prince and fight the bad guys. When we are at war, we offer opportunities to negotiate a truce or to work together toward a goal. Sometimes we are successful at making peace and sometimes we are not, but either way it's good practice. When we are battling dragons or other creatures, we usually discover that they are attacking because they are protecting their young or their food sources and we are usually able to end those conflicts peacefully. Dealing with conflicts like these is a huge part of life so it makes sense that it would be a huge part of play too.

Plus, I really liked playing these kind of cops and robbers, heroes and villains, superheroes and supervillains, kind of games when I was young, and I still do enjoy some good swashbuckling. Neither I, nor any of the neighborhood kids I played with, have grown up to become violent people. And I'd like to think we are actually good people who stand up for what we believe in, help people when we can, and try to do what is right when we are faced with difficult situations and decisions. And all that practice playing good guys and bad guys—I think it helped.

The Gardener!
A Modern Day [Imaginary] Hero [Mom]

Since we are always playing heroes and villains around here—all day every day—and sometimes I want to slip some other stuff into the mix—like gardening—so that I can get something done and still have fun, I came up with a new hero persona this week: The Gardener! I had been avoiding fighting by claiming to be just a peaceful gardener who needed protection from these alien bandits who were destroying our gardens that provide food for our village and the whole world. But the hero was fighting so continuously that he was getting exhausted; he couldn't keep fighting on his own to protect the whole village and he was requesting my help. “You cannot just stand by and hope for protection!” he told me. “I cannot do this alone. You must fight or your village will be destroyed!” And so I became The Gardener! My weapon is a garden shovel powerful enough to shield blasts from the evil bandits and to knock them out with one blow. It's rumored that it is even more powerful than money! (More powerful than money? Where on Earth did that come from?)

First I tried to negotiate a peace with these bandits, but they were not interested in peace or reason. They had one goal only—to destroy. We decided to track down the leader of these alien bandits, because no matter how many we fought off, more ships full of alien bandits would come to attack leaving weed mines all over the place. We tracked them back to a secret laboratory where they were doing terrifying experiments with our own garden plants. They were manipulating the plants so that they still looked, and kind of tasted, like food but were actually poisoned. They were destroying whole villages at a time by selling people poisoned plants and taking their money and then watching them eat the poison. We had to stop them before they poisoned all of our plants this way and there was no food left on our planet. We searched and searched until we found the evil genius mad scientist behind it all. He was hard to find because he often disguised himself as an innocent farmer. But we searched and searched until we found him. He was big and huge from eating all of the food from all of the gardens, and he just wanted more more more for himself. His eyes glowed red with evil. And his name was Insanto.

It was a long and difficult battle; there were many casualties and we destroyed as much of the lab as we could. But we knew it was not enough to keep the evil Insanto and his evil bandits from their evil mission to poison all of the plants in the world. So we made our own diabolical device and snuck it into the laboratory. The device put a label on all of the plants that came out of their laboratory so that everyone would know that those plants were poisoned and no one would buy them. Without people buying their plants, they would not have the money to continue their experiments and the evil Insanto would be defeated once and for all!!!!

…

So I got pretty swept up in this play (apparently my inner 5-year-old is still thriving) and didn't get a whole lot of gardening done, but we had a lot of fun and I think we accomplished a lot more than pulling weeds. I love all of this good guy/bad guy play for so many reasons. I love that my son gets to practice being aperson who protects the innocent. I love that he influenced me to stand up and fight when the time came, because you can't always rely on others to fight your battles, and that he was willing to continue fighting right there with me. I love that I get to interject my values into the play, like trying to negotiate peace before I am willing to fight and casting an unethical company as a villain. I love that it is active physical play. I love that it is imaginative and we collaboratively created this storyline together, building off of each others' ideas. I love the hope and optimism and sense of efficacy to fight the forces of evil—evil at this age being clear-cut bad guys who only hurt people and do no good. I love that this kind of play and these kind of stories leave the door open to explore the complexities of right and wrong and where they obscure and overlap and are sometimes difficult to distinguish. I love that it brings up fond childhood memories of playing much the same way. And mostly I love that we are having fun together.