EchoBlog

Dave Stroup and his 3-year-old son had traveled to Ohio to see the solar eclipse with family friends, but it wasn’t just the celestial event that captured the little boy’s attention. As they sat outside in their friend’s yard, Stroup’s son noticed a couple of brightly colored Nerf blasters strewn in the grass.

“Are those toy guns?” he asked his dad. Stroup said yes, and explained that they couldn’t hurt anyone. The moment passed. But back at home, the preschooler started asking another question — “When can I have one?” — and Stroup and his wife realized they should figure out an answer.

Their son has already experienced lockdown drills at his preschool, where playing with pretend weapons of any kind is forbidden. Just a few weeks ago, as the child and his mom walked home from a nearby restaurant in Northwest Washington, they heard shots fired and hid in a neighbor’s yard as the gunman sprinted past on the street.

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Stroup and his wife didn’t want their son to be desensitized to guns; anything resembling a real one, they decided, was out of the question. But given that guns are already part of their child’s world, “I don’t know that it’s helpful to say, ‘in our house, we are going to have a rule where you cannot pretend to shoot at anyone ever, with anything.’ I don’t think that’s realistic,” Stroup says. Colorful toy guns or water guns feel like a reasonable compromise, he says, when their son is a bit older. “Kids are going to act things out, especially when, unfortunately, we’re emphasizing to them how much they need to be scared of these things,” he says. “He’s not going to sit down and journal about it; he’s 3.”

Should parents let their kids play with toy guns? Kirsten Nottleson, a parent and teacher educator and consultant of 30 years, says the issue has become a more frequent concern for parents: They’re worried because their kids are drawn to toy guns, or won’t stop engaging in pretend shooting battles.

“Parents are hearing about gun violence on almost a daily basis,” she says, “and of course we’re terrified. We don’t want our child to be the victim. We also don’t want our child to be the one who does it.” So when parents see their kids playing with toy guns, or pretending to shoot someone, she says, “our mind rushes forward and says, ‘oh, what does that mean?’”

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For parents raising families in America, where mass shootings are rampant, school lockdown drills are standard and firearms are the leading cause of death for children, the answer might feel especially complicated. But some educators and play therapists suggest that for the young children themselves, the matter is actually far simpler.

Chazz Lewis, an early childhood educator and parent coach widely known as “Mr. Chazz” to his online following, used to be firmly against pretend gun play, “until I started to actually work with children and learned more about it,” he says. Over the past 14 years, “I saw that a lot more play therapists and teachers who work with children have more of a nuanced way of thinking about it.”

Now Lewis approaches pretend gunplay as a way to observe what a child is working through and an opportunity to reinforce lessons about awareness, consent and boundaries. He asks kids: How are the people around them responding to the game? Do they feel safe, are they having fun? Rather than shutting down this kind of play, he says, he sees it as an invitation to connect.

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It can be challenging, he says, for parents to understand the divide that lies between a child pretending to shoot a toy gun and the adult watching them do it. Children aren’t thinking about the social or political context of guns, Lewis says; they can’t yet conceptualize the horror that guns can inflict. Meanwhile, an adult might have difficulty thinking of anything else.

Research has not established a link between playing with pretend weapons and future violence — but still, when we see a child pretending to shoot a gun, “We can get triggered to that survival state,” Lewis says. “We are not operating from a place that helps children thrive.”

Nottleson offers an exercise to parents in her workshops to help pull them out of that head space. She brings a bag of household objects — paper towel rolls, rulers, tennis rackets — and dumps it on the floor in the room.

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“Choose your weapon,” Nottleson tells the parents. “We’re going to do some gunplay.” She instructs them to focus on connecting with the other participants and having a good time. And for about 10 minutes, she says, the parents dash around the room, pretending to shoot each other, laughing and ducking and theatrically dropping to the floor.

“Parents get so into it,” Nottleson says. “But what’s most amazing is the discussion that happens afterward.” They note what they don’t feel — anger, aggression — and what they do feel: a closer bond with one another, and a clearer understanding of why their kids want to play like this. It’s an epiphany, Nottleson says, to step outside their own fear and experience a child’s perspective.

“I ask: ‘How was that for you?’” she says, and “so many of them are so surprised at how fun it was.”

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That approach might not appeal to everyone, though, particularly within families or communities that have experienced trauma related to guns.

Maci Philitas, a mom to a 3-year-old in New Jersey, practiced target shooting at summer camp and played with Super Soakers as a kid. But ever since she was robbed at gunpoint in college, the sight of any handgun elicits that memory. Last year, when she decided to buy a bubble-blower toy for her son, she scoured the internet until she found one in the shape of a dog instead of a gun.

Philitas doesn’t want her child to be numbed to the reality of guns — or endangered by a realistic-looking toy. When she considers her child pretending to shoot a weapon, she thinks of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Black boy with a toy gun who was killed by Cleveland police in 2014: “We’re Black,” Philitas says, “And we don’t have the same spectrum of grace, if you will, that our White counterparts have. Tamir Rice was a child, a baby.” For these reasons, she says, toy guns are “kind of a non-starter in our household.”

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Allison Van der Veer’s son is 10, and she also wishes she could keep him away from all toy guns. But her family lives in southeastern Georgia, so “that’s just not realistic,” she says. “The gun culture here is crazy.”

Her son sees what his friends and neighbors play with, she says. “We’ve had big conversations around realistic toy guns,” she says. “He’ll say, ‘What about BB guns?’ No. ‘What about airsoft guns?’ No.” They’ve settled on Nerf guns, she says. “They’re colorful, they’re fun, they’re unmistakably a toy. So that’s our concession.” Otherwise, she says, she has focused on reinforcing real gun safety with her boy, reminding him to come straight home if he ever encounters an unsecured firearm.

An understanding of gun safety is critical, says Shannon Flores, senior coalition manager for Giffords Gun Owners for Safety and a mother of three in Texas. She also believes those lessons can coexist alongside pretend gunplay.

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Flores and her wife are avid hunters. So is one of their 11-year-old twin daughters, who joins her parents every fall to hunt white-tailed deer. Their 8-year-old brother enjoys Nerf guns. The family sometimes visits their property in the countryside to shoot clay pigeons.

Though the children have played with toy guns, and the twins have shot real ones — which are always locked away when not in use, Flores emphasizes — they are in no way desensitized to the reality of gun violence. Several weeks ago, when a rumor circulated that a student planned to bring a gun to the twins’ middle school, “They didn’t want to go to school that day,” Flores says. “They were terrified.” When the family goes hunting, “They see how lethal guns can be.” The sixth-graders know that their mom’s job involves advocating for gun safety legislation, and it’s a topic they discuss often as a family.

That kind of communication, Flores believes, is more essential than which toys a child is or isn’t allowed to play with. “We have to have open conversations. Each family is different, and each family will make those decisions based on what is best for their child,” she says. “In our family, we are gun owners, and we also acknowledge that gun violence is a problem. Those things are not mutually exclusive.”

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Lewis agrees that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the question of pretend gunplay. But when adults determine guidelines around this, he wants them to think: “Are you making your decisions from a place of fear, or from an informed place? And not just informed about gun violence, but informed about children and child development?”

They should keep in mind that young children do not have a lot of power, he says. “We are constantly telling them what to do, where to be, when to be, we control most aspects of their lives,” he says. As they grow, they make sense of power dynamics through play. “Maybe they roar like a dinosaur or a lion, or do a superhero move, or pretend to pull out a pretend gun and go ‘pow pow pow,’” he says. “All those behaviors serve the same purpose for children.”

Forbidding this kind of play is also about power — exerted by adults who might otherwise feel helpless, he says.

“Parents might feel like, ‘I can’t do anything about the gun culture that we have, but I can control what my kid does, and I can control how my kid plays,’” Lewis says. But pretending to play with guns, he says, does not cause or perpetuate the underlying problem, which won’t be solved by limiting a child’s imaginative exploration.

“That’s us projecting our trauma onto the children,” he says. “They’re just processing the world that we have created for them.”

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