All My Children

Charity begins at home, and so does learning about aggression. A child will understand that shooting and killing people is wrong when the parent who was playfully made a target inquires who is going to pour the milk in the future or go to the store for ice cream. Such a question can convince a child of the need to keep his aggression under control in his own best interests, as no abstract description of the horrors of war could do. To be told that what we want to do—shoot the gun—is wrong annoys and frustrates us, and puts us on the defensive. But realizing things on the basis of one’s own experience and interest—that is, a parent who has been shot can no longer serve the child—makes the learning become positive.

Whatever the parent’s response to being “shot,” he must take the play seriously, and not respond with sermonizing or counteraggression. On the other hand, when children play shooting games among themselves, counteraggression is an age-appropriate response which does little harm and perhaps some good. While the child may discharge some aggression by shooting at his playmates, he also accumulates a great deal of new anxiety when other children shoot at him. A buildup of such anxieties created by shooting games eventually may impress on him that everybody loses in a free-for-all, since the shooter is also the target. However, this important lesson goes by the board when adults, trying to be “nice,” let their child riddle them with “pretend” bullets without showing any appropriate reaction.

Some adults may overreact to this type of shooting play. Parents who fall into this trap are usually more concerned with their own feelings about aggression than with helping a child master his aggression through such play, as opposed to merely repressing it. This is also true for sexual or other types of anxiety with which many children try to cope through shooting play. So when they forbid it they block the safe and necessary outlet it can provide.

At the same time they rob the child of the valuable lesson that if we try to shoot others, they will shoot back, and everybody will lose.

Some parents, out of their abhorrence of war and violence, try to control, or forbid altogether, any play with toy guns, soldiers, tanks, or other toys which copy and thus represent implements of war. While these feelings toward violence are most understandable, when a parent prohibits or severely criticizes his child’s gun play, whatever his conscious reasons for doing so, he is not acting for his child’s benefit, but solely out of adult concerns or anxieties. Some parents even fear that such play may make a future killer of the child who thoroughly enjoys it, but the pitfalls of such thinking are many and serious.

First, as playing with blocks does not indicate that a child will grow up to be an architect or builder, as his play with cars and trucks does not foretell the future auto mechanic or truck driver, so his playing with toy guns tells nothing about what he will do and be later in life. Second, one may reasonably expect that if through gun play a child feels he can well protect himself and if he discharges much of his aggressive feelings, then less of these will accumulate and press in later life for dangerous ways of discharge. Shooting games provide outlets for accumulated frustrations and thus are apt to reduce them. Hence the child’s aggressive and hostile feelings can be more readily controlled by him than when a parent prevents their discharge, rendering reduction through symbolic play impossible. Such prohibition also leads to additional frustration and anger which accumulate because the child is prevented from using an outlet that he sees freely available to other children and is suggested to him by the mass media.

Since in regard to violence the issue is control of aggression versus its discharge, the best way for parents to deal with this problem—whether or not it is one in their estimation—is to do everything in their power to prevent their child from experiencing frustration or accumulating hostile feelings. While it is impossible to shelter one’s child entirely—for all life, and particularly that of children, is full of frustration—one can try not to add to it, such as by prohibiting play the child wishes to engage in.

Third, and by far the most important attitude because it is most pernicious in its consequences, whether spoken or implied, is parental fear that the child may become a violent person, perhaps even a killer. This thought is far more damaging to the child’s emotional well-being and his sense of self- worth than any play with guns can possibly be. This is particularly true because of the importance to him of his parents‘ views of him. After all, a child gains a view of himself primarily from his parent. It is apt to make him very angry at them and the world for holding such a low opinion of him, and this increases his propensity to act out his anger, not just in symbolic play but in reality, once he has outgrown parental control. He knows that he wants to play with guns, and if his parents think that this presages a future killer, his image of the kind of person he is, or may develop into, is in danger of becoming seriously distorted. As the example of Goethe has shown, a child’s need to discharge aggression has little to do with war, or even violence on the streets, but usually mostly with events taking place at home, such as jealousy of a sibling or anger at a parent. Hence, permitting a child the opportunity to discharge his anger symbolically at some third party—at other children, perhaps, with whom he plays Cops and Robbers—is much preferable to his having to repress his anger. If then there is no permissible outlet for it, it will continue to fester within him.

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