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Dear Care and Feeding, 

I am not a mother, but I am a proud Auntie and frequent babysitter/playmate to my friend’s children and kids in my church’s nursery. I have a bit of a hang-up when it comes to one style of play in particular.

I am adamant that guns are not toys, and that children should not play with any toy that takes the shape of a firearm, even water pistols. However, I understand that this kind of play is common in kids of a certain age (especially boys) and it’s usually in the context of something like superhero roleplay. Can you help me craft a response when a child picks up an angled stick or builds a gun out of Legos and turns it on me with a “bang bang! I shot you!”? It makes me uneasy, especially since I am a teacher and live in not-unreasonable fear of being involved in a school shooting.

—Southern Pacifist

Dear Pacifist,

This is, I’m sure, something that is a dilemma for a lot of people whose childhoods took place before the school-shooting era. (What a sentence to type!) My parents are not what you would call “gun people.” We had a .22 rifle when we lived out in the country. But, like, my mom is a retired preschool teacher with longstanding interests in children’s literature and environmental education. Pretend violence as a form of play was not exactly the kind of thing she was trying to cultivate. That said, I still had a BB gun, which I used to defend the Alamo, and a green squirt gun that was a Star Wars laser blaster. When I got older I played a lot of “first-person shooter” video games without thinking too much about it, and I remain an enthusiast of John Wick-type movies. So it wasn’t as if I came to parenting expecting to have a black-and-white attitude on the issue.

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But it turned out that kids pretending to shoot each other (or pretending to shoot me)—eh, it just doesn’t feel right. I guess it brings up too many memories of shootings whose victims included people their age. Gun violence was an epidemic problem in the 1980s too, when I was a kid happily pretend-playing with guns, so I recognize that this isn’t an entirely logical position. Nor could I immediately articulate why I think gun play-acting is different from watching pretend violence on a screen, and I am fine with them watching age-appropriate movies that include violence. Still, I don’t think the impulse to convey the real-world seriousness of what guns do, to younger children, is a bad one, so I go with it.

As for how that’s expressed, in our house, I usually just tell them that “we don’t play killing.” If my kids or one of their little buddies does something like what you’re describing—pointing a Lego gun, etc.—I tell them I don’t like pretending to shoot guns because guns are dangerous and it’s a little too scary. In my experience little kids are usually pretty receptive to that kind of messaging. Making it about your own feelings means you don’t have to give someone else’s child a speech about the history of the gun control debate in the United States.

—Ben

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