Shannon Phillips

A couple posts back, Maike commented: “On the topic of toys (kind of!), I would be interested in a blog post on your views of swords and guns. From your manuscript, I assume you will have a different take then most people around me.”

Yeah, probably. The Bay Area consensus comes down pretty hard on the side of forbidding make-believe games that involve weaponry (but especially toy guns). The truth is, though, I don’t have a problem with it. I’m only waiting until Robin and Davy are big enough before I buy them these:

Aren’t they adorable? And if I’m willing to condone pretend swordplay, I can’t see a logical basis for forbidding pretend gunplay: the violence quotient is the same, and kids are a lot more likely to have access to real knives than they are to have access to real guns. Anyway, I don’t think that pretending to be pirates or G.I. Joe is going to turn a normal, healthy child into a violent rampaging killer or anything. I tend more to sympathize with the researchers who believe that there’s more likely to be something harmful about denying boys—because, let’s be honest, we’re mostly talking about little boys here—access to this kind of aggressive play. As far as I can tell, barring those tragic cases where a child mistakes a real gun for a toy, there’s no convincing research linking gun play to real-life violence: the “expert consensus” seems closer to that described here:

In a culture already filled with violent video games, TV programs and images of a real war, it can be unnerving to see an innocent child pretending to kill someone. Yet no study has yet linked pretend gunplay to future violent behavior, and most child experts agree that by forbidding gunplay entirely, parents give it far more power and will probably drive it underground.

I have no doubt you can find research to support either side, and certainly I don’t think that those kids whose moms don’t allow toy guns in the house (because again, we’re also mostly talking about the moms: it’s pretty rare to find a dad leading the charge against Cops and Robbers) are destined to have a crisis of masculinity when they grow up or anything like that. I will say, though—and this is a tangential but related issue—that I think often mothers who try to raise their children with “no gender roles” are biased by the fact that they are themselves women, and so their idea of a gender-neutral environment is actually a very feminine one. I don’t want to impose a gender role on my boys either, but neither do I want to get in the way of their own explorations and constructions of what being a man will mean for them. Sometimes that means playing war: exploring the idea of having and wielding strength, of being a protector of family and community.

This is all entirely theoretical in our household, as so far Robin is interested in trains and penguins rather than swords or guns—and Davy is mostly interested in boobies, and that only for the most practical of reasons. If one of them asked for a toy gun as a birthday present I’d try to find one that looked cool, but not so realistic that he could get into trouble with it. I might try and steer him towards science-fiction style lasers, because you can get some excellent Star Trek and Star Wars replica toys, and then if his friends had disapproving moms I could teach him to say that “It’s set on stun.”