FSFRebecca Posted January 9, 2017 Posted January 9, 2017 This is an extremely interesting article: Toy guns: 'Children have an innate, inquisitive nature to explore good and bad, right and wrong' I know that it is an emotive subject in nurseries ... we have had parents getting very distressed about it in the past and I think that if I had had this article that I could print and give to them it would have been very useful!
AnonyMouse_1469 Posted January 9, 2017 Posted January 9, 2017 Interesting; only last Friday, I had a conversation about guns with a 5 year old. He is convinced that guns are a good thing. They MUST be, because, after all, 'God gave us the things, the stuff to make them with, so why would he do that if guns are bad?' We talked or some while about this, I careful not to dismiss his belief and he, firm that they can't be bad. he asked me, well what if a burglar came into your house to steal your things; wouldn't you want to shoot him so he didn't? So i said, honestly, that no, I wouldn't want to shoot a burglar, nothing I own would be worth shooting someone for, even if I was very sad to lose my things. And I asked, what if we shot the wrong person, what if we shot someone accidentally??. He thought about it for a while, then said, 'what if my (little) brother picked it up and accidentally shot ME??'.............so, we then talked about how it's not the gun itself which is bad........but maybe the people who use them and maybe even the reasons they use them? And we came to the conclusion that maybe guns are something we could do without. 2
FSFRebecca Posted January 9, 2017 Author Posted January 9, 2017 Yes, I've had conversations with pre-schoolers about it recently too. Some children love the 'thrill of the chase' and the catching aspect which you get when playing 'Baddies v Goodies' - other children (and I would have been one of them) find the whole sense of being pursued utterly terrifying. We concluded that the games were ok as long as everyone was a 'willing participant'. I've put a link in here to a recent discussion about this that included how children make sense of terrorism, which was fascinating How children use play to make sense of terrorism: Guardian article
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