The Advantage Tactical Sight Blog

Regardless of their political leanings, it’s not hard to find urban parents that are not only opposed to their children being around firearms, even in the most responsible of environments, but many seem to oppose their boys or girls playing “cops and robbers” or any sort of imaginary play that would involve play guns, swords, etc.  Even parents more neutral about these topics often preclude certain types of children’s fantasy play, so as not to upset other parents with whom they socialize.  Reports of school officials who have harshly admonished children for making impromptu guns out of sticks and fingers are common knowledge. The erroneous belief is that such play (or, God forbid, being in the vicinity of responsible and educational firearm handling), would stimulate their children’s brains toward realistic violence, perhaps even using real versions of the same toys of their fantasy play.  Is toy weapon fantasy play bad?  How should parents handle children that are unrelentingly interested in guns, swords, knives, and the typical fantasies of childhood play, especially among boys?  Many who know me also know that my first profession, before I got into the gun sight making business, was as a licensed psychotherapist with a specialization in child clinical psychology.  The following was a real case of a boy with a knife obsession. This child had loving parents who were very against all suggestions of violence, including their son watching super hero movies, engaging in fantasy sword or gun play, etc., etc.  The more they opposed their son’s knife preoccupation, the more obsessed their son became.  One might say that his obsession with knives was partly due to his parents’ opposition to them in their son’s life.  For legal and ethical reasons, the names, some situations, and other identifying characteristics of this family have been altered or obscured.

CASE OF THE BOY WHO WAS OBSESSED WITH KNIVES:

The mother of an eight-year-old came to me with the following complaint.  “My son is obsessed with guns and knives, especially knives.  He has begun to collect them.  He begs me constantly to buy him yet another knife.  He wants to handle even our kitchen knives.  My husband and I have made every attempt to discourage our son’s interest in weapons, play that involves toy weapons, movies that exploit violence, even super-hero movies, and I have kept them from him and out of our home.  These things are not attitudes or values that we want to maintain.  However, this has made life with my son sometimes unbearable.  We fight a lot, especially about he is wanting another jack knife.  He recently has had bad dreams that wake him in the night.  The theme is always the same.  He says foreign soldiers are attacking our house and he wakes up frightened and disoriented.  Because he has had these dreams, I now firmly believe that I must continue to oppose any violent theme, which I believe is the cause of his nightmares.  My sone is often angry and disrespectful to me and his father.  Anymore, I just don’t know what to do.

The following is a synopsis of my advise to this mother and father, after having spent some time with this family:

“Barring other issues that may be at play in your child’s and family’s life, aggressive thoughts and interest in weaponry and play that involves toy weapons is normal for boys of your son’s age.  An interest in collecting things is also normal for grade school boys.  When a parent, for seemingly good reasons, overly suppresses normal “aggressive” feelings in his or her child, those feelings go underground and the child may feel guilty and even unacceptable to his parents for having them.  Your son’s foreign soldiers dream, I believe, represents his unacceptable aggressive feelings that he is unable, in his mind, to completely suppress to the satisfaction of his parents.  They are, to your son, a bad part of him that compromises his relationship with his parents.  This can be a very frightening concept for a child.  The result is that he may become more fascinated with this subject and be resentful toward you for not understanding.

There are a series of things that you can do to help your son with his knife fascination.  I think it is now obvious that the more you oppose your son’s normal pursuit of “aggressive” play, interests in toy weapons, knives, and movies of suitable age-appropriate violent content, the more fascinated he becomes with those themes.  To begin helping your son, he needs you to understand and accept his, if you will, normal male aggressive parts of  his personality.  Denying and/or not accepting those aspects of your son does not give him an avenue to safely explore, with your help and guidance, his emerging and sometimes distorted emotions.  Parental inattention to those normal aspects of a child’s emotional development can sometimes cause the negative behaviors you were hoping to squelch.  So, rather than completely oppose his cutlery interest, teach him how to safely handle knives, how to sharpen them and, in general, how to be a responsible knife owner.  Maybe you could even help him come up with a way to display his knife collection.  Of course you must continue to monitor his behaviors with knives and correct and admonish any misuses of them.

These suggestions or similar ones convey to your son that you as a parent do understand and can find a way to deal with the various and sometimes complicated aspects of his emotional life.  This is enormously comforting and reassuring to a child.  Your son needs this from you.  As time goes on, his interest in knives and knife collecting may or may not continue but his obsession with them should diminish.   The outcome of parental acceptance, along with thoughtful guidance, of normal childhood expressions of aggression in play and fascination with super heroes may eventually contribute to self-confidence and other successes in later life.”

Playing with toy swords, guns, knives, etc. is normal boy (many girls, too) behavior.  It is one of the ways a child can experiment with the limits of his personal power, work out concepts of good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, the need to make contact with others, and establish himself as a player in the universe and then leave it all behind, healthfully completed in his fantasy world.”

If you are the parents of a child steadfastly interested in guns, and whether or not you come from a shooting tradition in your family or origin, it might be a good idea to see that your son gets some firearm education.  It also may even bring a stronger bond between parent and child, if one of the parents became interested and took part in that education.  This kind of monitored approach, along with parental involvement, will most likely lead to healthy and responsible behavior in the presence of firearms, and perhaps could even extend to other situations that may require a virtuous response in your child.  These days fewer fathers have been in the military and/or have had experience with firearms.  It is so unfortunate that many of our children have a generally distorted view of firearms, not at all helped by TV and video games. To so many urban children, given the various social environments in which they find themselves, a gun has become a status symbol and not a tool that has an appropriate place in our history.  It is up to us as parents to correct those distortions, in whatever way we can.  However, in saying all this, I also realize that these suggestions may not be for every parent and child.  Ultimately, it is the responsibility of each parent to understand his and her child and to know the limitations of what may or may not be appropriate for that child.

This is how I advised the parents of the boy who liked knives and is also my position when it comes to firearms and an interested youngster. I realize that there is no real end to this discussion. If you have different ideas or opinions, please share them with us in the comments section below.

Richard

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