What to do about Pretend “Guns” #69

In this episode, Jon addresses one of the most loaded questions parents ask quietly: what does it mean when my child wants to play guns, war, or “bad guys”? Grounded in the idea that most parents aren’t reacting to the play itself, but to the meaning they’re afraid it carries, he looks beneath the behavior to what high-arousal play is actually doing in a child’s brain. All of this plus "What to actually do...." 

Chapters

• 0:00 The Pickup-Line Panic And Big Question
• 2:00 Framing The Topic And Disclaimers
• 3:46 Why Guns Are On Kids’ Minds
• 7:35 Play As Processing: Research And History
• 15:20 Question 1: Reframing “Killing” Play
• 26:16 Question 2: High Arousal And Meltdowns
• 33:41 Completing The Stress Cycle With Games
• 41:16 Question 3: When A Child Won’t Stop
• 49:26 Teaching Consent, Repair, And Empathy

Transcript

Jon @WholeParent: 0:00

You're in the line at pickup and another parent is laughing, saying something like, They were playing war again today, like it's nothing, like it's the weather. You smile back and nod and spend the entire drive home replaying that word in your head. If you're parenting a kid who loves to play bad guys or battle games or nerf wars or who or who can't pick up a stick without turning it into a pretend gun, you've probably had that uneasy, panicky thought. Is this normal? Or is this something that I'm supposed to stop? Like now? And if you've Googled it, you already know the answers are all over the place. Some people are going to tell you that it's harmless imagination, others warning you that basically you're raising a future menace. In this episode, we're going underneath the behavior to look at what pretend weapon play is actually doing in a child's brain. And when it does cross into something that needs adult intervention, not from a place of fear or shame, but from the sake for the sake of clarity. Because most parents aren't reacting to the play itself. They're reacting to the meaning that they're afraid that it carries. We'll break down what's normal, what's on the border, and what to pay attention to, instead of just the toy or the word or the game. And we'll talk honestly about why this topic really hits such a nerve for so many of us. Because it should. A quick note before we start. These all basically don't shut down gunplay at the source. Feel free to say that it's a totally legitimate stance not to allow any gunplay in your family, especially in today's day and age. Maybe you want to discuss guns in an open dialogue instead of letting me tell you what the research on kids playing war or guns says. That's up to you. It's your call as a parent, and I trust you to make the best decision for your family. Welcome back to the whole parent podcast. Uh today the weather is rain. Rain, rain, rain. So if you hear in the background what sounds like a bunch of rain, it's because I am out here on the porch and it is pouring. Thankfully, uh there's no water coming through this porch and the front porch of my house where my kids play, and there's carpet, unfortunately, it does tend to leak like crazy. This porch only leaks when the rain comes sideways because of like crazy wind or something. But when it when it comes through these windows, it can flood too. So uh just suffice it to say, when you live in a hundred-plus-year-old house, sometimes it's not always dry. And I did have to fix the sump pump more than once today already. Um, this is a heavy topic today, and you know, I have a million stories about my kids playing guns, and I'll just start by saying that when my wife and I were j first, we had our first, and he was young, like maybe three or four, and he would want to pick up a blaster or whatever. We were pretty hard stance, no gun playing, no guns in the house. And still the word gun is a little bit triggering. I'm sorry to use that word, but is a little bit triggering to me. Uh, I would rather call them blasters or something like that. But we dug into the research, my wife and I, and what became exceedingly clear as we learned more about child development and weren't just going from our kind of initial visceral responses, was that there is a place for play to help kids process some of these big things. And really the story that I want to tell is why I think this is an important topic today. And that is because we live in a society where for the last several years, and I don't know what the statistics will are for the year that just finished yet, but for the last several years, guns have been the leading cause of death in children. Now, some of that has to do with uh increased safety measures in cars and cancer. I don't want to, you know, uh make statistics tell an incomplete story here or something like that, lest I be accused of manipulating the data. But um it nevertheless, guns are the leading cause of death in children, not the leading cause of accidental death, the leading cause of death. And so it is really important that we ask serious questions about firearms. This is not an episode about whether or not you should allow your kid to go over to somebody's home where there is a known firearm. That that may be a conversation that you need to have. This is not a conversation today, really, about school shooters, although we'll touch on that. Um, even though that's obviously a really important topic, and that topic has been really kind of a driving mission for me, uh, awareness around school shooters and prevention of school shooters and things like that in comprehensive gun reform. And this episode is not even about that, it's not even about gun reform. But if you are interested in school shootings andor not interested in them, if if this is a topic that is important to you, I would recommend watching a movie, a documentary that I was able to screen this fall before it came out. It's available everywhere now. It's called uh the All the Empty Rooms, and it's a documentary about students who were killed in mass shootings in their schools and their homes, their home life. It's not really a documentary about guns, it's a documentary about the aftermath of a school shootings uh globally nationwide in the United States. Because this is kind of a unique problem in the United States that we have more gun deaths than basically any other developed nation. And so, all of this to say, it's important that we talk about how our kids play with these topics because play is the way that trauma is processed by kids. And if you don't think that kids are keenly aware of guns and guns' effect on society and the scariness that is guns, uh, I want you to just um banish that lack of concern from your mind. Uh, kids are aware of this, not only because they go to schools where they're do active shooter drills and things like that, but because this is all over our cultural conversation. Uh there was a gun-related death that has been all over the news in the recent days. It wasn't a child, but it was a mother of children who was killed by uh an ICE agent in Minneapolis. That's that's the context under which, you know, I'm recording this episode. It was not planned to record it. I I was not like I heard that story and said, oh, I need to record this episode. I was planning to record this episode and then that happened. Such is the prevalence of gun violence. And so our kids are experiencing this all over the place. They they are aware of it and they pick up on so much more than we are even aware that they pick up on. And so, with that being the case, I am not surprised when I get lots of questions about guns. And it's a hot topic. It is a topic that draws lots of very visceral reactions. Again, the statistics are there, school shootings are far too prevalent, and not only that, obviously, gun-related deaths in children are the number one leading cause of death. Those are those are statistics that you can't ignore. And so I'm not surprised, but uh I boldly go into this topic and um hope that uh it can provide some tools. First question comes from Caroline, and she says, I don't know how to ask this without sounding like I'm that mom, but my five-year-old is obsessed with bad guys and shooting them. He's all about turning Legos into guns, drawing guns, holding sticks like guns, etc. We don't own any actual toy guns or nerf guns, and we don't watch violent stuff, but every time he plays with his cousin, it turns into, I got you, you're dead, and it makes my stomach drop. I keep saying we don't play like that. And then he just goes right back to it later. Am I supposed to be shutting this down harder or am I overreacting? Because it feels not great. You know, Caroline, I don't think that you need to be shutting this down. That said, I think that we can reframe it and I think that we can have conversations around it. If parents do attempt to take the full ban on guns approach, we don't play guns, we don't talk about guns, we don't um, you know, play killing, we don't any of that stuff. What usually happens is that that becomes a taboo for kids that they are really interested in, and they become obsessed with playing it within contexts where their parents aren't going to find out. Also, we know that play is the way that kids process difficult things. So, an example of this, and this is a very extreme example, but if you look at the work of Bruce Perry, who is a very famous child psychiatrist, and he specifically wrote several books about treating traumatized children. I've read more than one of them. And in his work as a child therapist to traumatized children, he often plays or role-plays or plays out their trauma happening to them. Not that he's directing it, he is a passive participant. But the kids will try and play like if they had a parent who was who was brutally attacked or something like that. They will actually play out that scenario over and over and over again in order to kind of bring it into their world. Another example of this is uh from the book Free to Learn by um Peter Gray, who is a play specialist and a play, brilliant play researcher. And he talked about how children in the ghettos in Poland during World War II, Jewish children, would play like SS officer and uh Jewish person. Like they would, like instead of cops and robbers or bad guys and good guys, they would actually play out what was happening to them in real life. And, you know, this horrified their parents. But what Peter Gray points out, what Bruce Perry points out, what all of these brilliant child psychologists and psychiatrists point out, is that this is the way in which ch children process these big scary things. And so what your childhood is experiencing, and not always, but often, is a playmate brings in something that elevates the stakes of a game, like a pretend gun or like um death or something like that. And they bring in this topic or this idea in order to kind of gain severity. And and I want to just pause here and say that if you are a person who actively engages in the kind of renaissance that is modern uh television, where why did I say television, not TV, modern shows? Uh if you look going back the last 20 years, in the kind of this renaissance that we're experiencing, where a lot of the best stories are being told via big budget TV episodes, you know, tens of millions of dollars per episode TV shows, what you come across is that all of the kind of biggest top shows that are not soap operas are shows that include a lot of high-stakes, stressful in uh scenarios like Game of Thrones, like The Walking Dead, like uh I'm trying to think of the more recent ones. Uh, can you tell I had kids and then I stopped watching TV? Stranger Things. Um boy, I'm trying to think of think of others. But a lot of times, like main protagonist characters in these shows will die or be at risk of death, and you don't know whether they're going to die. And that elevates the stakes of the show and it makes it more enjoyable for the participants to watch because, or the participants, the viewers to watch, because the viewers see all that stuff happening in a group, invokes an emotional reaction, and and that emotional reaction is what kind of ties them and trauma bonds them in a way to the show. And so this is a lot of what your kid is doing. Like this cousin is bringing in this idea of guns, and immediately not only is it an older cousin, it sounds like probably, uh, an older cousin who maybe your child is looking up to, seeing as kind of like a big brother type figure, um, or big sister type figure. I guess you didn't give me uh any genders here, I shouldn't assume. But you you're that you're bringing this uh this up that as the or you gave me the gender of your son, but not of the cousin. Um, but when the the cousin brings these stakes, your child might be saying, Oh, okay, well, I'm I'm wanting to connect with them, and so I'm gonna go with this, and then it's you know, the way same way that it makes your stomach drop, it makes their stomachs drop because the stakes are high. But what they're doing in that moment is that they're actually playing through that scenario. So, what I would recommend that you do is rather than ban the play altogether, I would try and reframe the script of the play. And I'm not a big advocate for intervening in play between kids. I think that as much as we can, we should let kids kind of define their own rules and define their own play, and they're gonna be much better off for that. And I want to say, if you choose to just say, I'm gonna not ignore, but I'm just going to passively observe this and just let it be, that is not a horrible thing. Like if you choose to not do anything in this case and just go, okay, John said that it's okay. Um, yeah, I'm saying it's okay if that's your choice. That said, if you want something to do, I would reframe rather than reframing the like we're not gonna play with guns or whatever, reframe this the the level of the stake. So say something like, okay, I'm noticing that you want to, you know, play a big game, a powerful game, you want to let like bad guys and good guys, I see that, I see that you're trying to play that. Um, I don't, I don't like the killing play stuff. That makes me feel yucky. I don't I don't like how that feels. But we could play rescue, or we could play capture, or we could play protection, or we could, you know, and then you you then free them up to say you guys get to go and figure out the rules of this. It keeps that kind of arousal state that they're trying to go for and the power, which is what that brain their brain is seeking in this moment. They're trying to process this by gaining agency over it, while you get to direct the name the narrative to be a little bit more socially confined, and you know, it's it's a little bit more regulated by you, and so that it doesn't escalate into like total chaos, and you feel like they're not getting desensitized to it. There isn't a lot of evidence that kids who play in this way get desensitized to violence. In fact, if anything, they're less likely to commit violence, but um, it's still if it makes you deeply uncomfortable, then I would say just intervene in a way of saying, hey, how about we're on the same team and with the bad guys or imaginary instead of you're the bad guy or you're the bad guy. Like you can reframe a lot of this while still giving them that agency and that power. The other thing that you can do is just reframe the words so you can just say, yeah, instead of playing guns, let's play blasters, right? It just kind of can take the edge off it. But again, if your kid is playing guns because they, you know, they need space to think about these things that they're hearing, probably hearing at school, probably hearing out in the world, probably hearing when you don't even realize it when you're listening to a podcast or something like this, right? They're hearing about this stuff and they may just say, Oh, okay, well, I'm, you know, internalizing some of that and I'm looking for an outlet for that. And I'm looking for that kind of yes, that arousal state that comes from, and remember, arousal here is just the activation of one's like stress response, uh, not route arousal in the way that we usually use that with adults, but you know, this uh uh an activated like amygdala, basically, like an activated stress response. Uh, if they're looking for that and they're looking for that that agency and that power over it, then you you have to kind of let them do that, or not you don't have to let them do that, but but it can often be helpful for them to do that rather than just kind of shutting it down. So that that's what I would offer to you. The brain hack here is to reframe the narrative or that that you're finding is troubling rather than reframing all of the context, because if you just ban the context, they're just gonna they're just gonna find outlets for that context, and then you're not gonna have any say in it, right? Like you want to maintain some semblance of oversight, then they can't think that they're never allowed to play it in front of you because you're just gonna shut it down. So, yeah, that's how I would respond to that. And let me take a quick break, and then we will go on to number two. Our second question is from Jamie and the membership. I think we've actually had another question from Jamie and the membership in the past, but that's kind of the nice thing about the membership. There's there's not a ton of people who are super active in it, and so you get all of your questions answered. So here's another one for you, Jamie. Uh, she says, My seven-year-old and his friends are always doing war games whenever they hang out. Nerf, fake battles, teams, arguing about who cheated, capturing the other team, putting them in jail. His friend's parents seem to think it's totally fine. But it's pretty intense from my perspective. And he comes home super amped and then melts down over nothing. I feel like it's coming from the play. Like, can't like he can't come back down after all of it. Do some kids just not handle this stuff well? What do you think? Jamie, fantastic question. And uh, as you already know from my initial reaction and response to you in group coaching, um my son is in basically the exact same scenario where he's now nine. He was one-seven though, right? That's how ages work. He was one-seven with friends who he went over to their neck next door house, and they are from Jordan, and they play blasters and guns and nuking and all of the kind of all of the ways in which little kids tend to just act out their most extreme violent fantasies. These kids do that, and he definitely gets the majority of his play like that from those kids, and so uh it is totally normal to feel the way that you feel, which is like, wait, hang on, this is pretty extreme. Like, can we take this down a notch? Especially when it doesn't feel like it's coming like originating from your own child. Like, there's a big difference, and this is what we'll talk about in the next question. There's a big difference when it feels like it's coming from your child and makes you uncomfortable, versus when it feels like maybe your child's uncomfortable. And this is a conversation that I think you should be having with your son. When he comes home. I think this is important to have this conversation later, after the fact, not in the moment, but after the fact, you know, a couple hours later, hey, what did you play over there? Like, you know, tell me about that. Tell me how it makes you feel afterwards. That's all really important. But I do think it's also important for you to know, and for all parents to know, that kids come back home having experienced some degree of restraint and then experience some degree of restraint collapse, no matter what environment they're in, whether they're playing at a friend's house where maybe there was less restraint or when they were playing, when they were at school and there's more restraint. And so it may be that what you're experiencing has nothing to do with this type of play. It may be that it just is restraint collapse, that he's in these kind of high intensity situations with his friends who may be getting more and more aggravated at one another about fairness. And by the way, and this is kind of a side note, but we're since we're talking about play today, um, I think you should never interrupt kids who are arguing about the rules. I've changed my my song about this in my own life. Uh, very recently, I read a bunch on how kids learn and develop, and especially a book that I've already referenced, um, Free to Learn. And one of the key things that play researchers say is that in arguing about fairness and the rules, which is a very common thing, piece of play for kids, in that arguing about fairness and the rules, they're actually building social skills for uh debate and collaboration and cooperation. And the beautiful thing about play is anybody can just stop playing whenever they want, uh, or at least I hope they can. And if that, if they can, that means that you kind of have to work out how fairness is, right? And this happens in our house with our kid and and the siblings that come over all the time. Where, you know, I really encourage them to just kind of work it out, but they struggle to, and sometimes they want to default to going on and going next door and getting their mom to be the judge and jury for for who was right and who was wrong in this fairness debate that they're having. But if you're not, if you don't have to get involved with that, it's best that you don't, because it's actually more important that they learn not how to play blasters and cops and robbers and all that other stuff. Uh, that's a fine thing for them to play, as we've already talked about to to some extent and within reason, but but it's actually more important that they argue about the rules and that they learn how to collaborate and cooperate than it is that they learn like have fun playing this game. And by the way, arguing and and fairness and stuff, it doesn't mean it's look fun in the moment, but it actually is really rewarding neurologically to kids. It brings that high arousal state. So uh again, as we were saying, they might he might just be experiencing some degree of restraint collapse. So, totally aside from the the guns, he might just be like, you know, I kind of have to hold it all together with my friends, even though it doesn't look like I'm holding it together. I am. And then I get home and I'm just like freaking out. And so if that's the case, use one of the numerous copious hacks, brain hacks that are in the emotional regulation game guide. Again, linked below. If you want the free five games, you can get those. Uh, or you can buy the full game guide, which is nine or twenty five games, and specifically the ones that I would be using in this case with uh especially high arousal-based play, because here's okay, I I should have said that first. So I would use one of those game games, whether or not it is just restraint collapse that they're experiencing, or whether it is needing to downshift, having a mandatory downshift from high arousal play. Either way, I would be leveraging those games. And specifically, I would be leveraging games that accrue activate proprioceptive input. And if my kid was ADHD, maybe I also would do a vestibular input one, but certainly I would be playing a proprioceptive input game. And I think there's one maybe in the in the five. I tried to give a diversity of games in the five so that you could have like one that activates each one of the systems. But but if you have the full game guide, I would just cycle through proprioceptive input games because stuff like heavy work, like pushing against a wall or lifting a heavy uh uh laundry basket or something like that, or even like a tight hug, the like deep pressure can have like a proprioceptive input, especially if they kind of like struggle against it a little bit. Um, I think that's actually the one that's in the top five games is the BOA Constrictor one. It might it might not be, but I think I think the BOA Constrictor is the one that's in that one that's proprioceptive. But whatever the game is that you're playing, it's those proprioceptive games that are gonna help them man like do the downshift, where you don't have to deal with like the huge, like oversized emotional regulation reaction, lack of emotional regulation reaction. It helps basically what their brain needs to do is it needs to complete the stress cycle. So high arousal play, as we've already determined in the first question in here, one of the reasons why kids play with these high-stakes games, and they argue about fairness and everything else. High arousal play activates the front half of the stress cycle. So the amygdala fires, their sympathetic nervous system comes online, and um their body is flooded with cortisol and epinephrine, which is adrenaline, right? And what happens is that they can get stuck in that as the play continues to spiral, they can get stuck in that, pushing it further and further. Now, that's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing for your kid to go through this the sympathetic nervous stress cycle. The problem is sometimes kids have a hard time coming out of that, activating what's called the parasympathetic, the other half of that circle, the parasympathetic nervous cycle, which releases all the hormones related to suppressing uh adrenaline and cortisol and things like that. So, uh, what what can you do? Any of the proprioceptive input hacks, really any of the emotional regulation games, but especially the proprioceptive ones when it's a high arousal state, can immediately activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which then kind of organizes their nervous system and gets them back online. Otherwise, they get stuck in like looking for stressful things out in the world. So if you've ever been in this place yourself, you have like a bad day at work or you have a bad um, you something goes really bad in your life and you or you, you know, you get cut off in traffic. I mean, this is a classic one, right? People get cut off in traffic and then they get to work and they can't come down from that kind of high cortisol state. And what happens is they just are looking for a fight. They're just going around the world looking for a fight, and anybody who gets in their way, they find a fight. Why? Because that person was looking for a fight, and a fight really only requires one person to begin, right? Which it takes one person fighting out. Now, many parents wind up going immediately from my kid is trying to fight with me. Okay, great. I'm gonna go authority mode, I'm gonna go power struggle mode, I'm gonna take back control. Okay, now you're just more threatening to your kid, which just sends them deeper into their state of dysregulation. So I would be doing the opposite. I would provide the calm home environment, which is necessary for that restraint collapse to have a place to go, but also use some of those emotional regulation games that can complete the stress cycle. What does this have to do with playing weapons and guns? Because that's what the episode's about. All of these games are by necessity high arousal games. So if you find a kid who just seems like they're just not cut out for this stuff, that they just don't handle this stuff well, absolutely there is space and time, an hour after they come home, after they're regulated, after they've had something to eat, whatever, to go, hey, do you like playing this? And teach your child to advocate for themselves if they don't. But they may come back to you and go, yeah, I do. I just have a hard time coming out of it. Okay, well then here's some of the tools that we can use together. Remember, your child is the hero of their own story. This is something that I write in my book. Um, your child is the hero of their own story. You're not the hero, you're the guide. They may say, Yeah, you know what? I really struggle with that game, but I actually want to keep playing it. That's their call. Um, they may say, Yeah, you know what, I really don't like playing guns. It just makes me really nervous and uncomfortable. I have a kid like that. Um, makes me really nervous and uncomfortable. How can I talk to them and say, I don't want to do that? And now, as their guide, again, you're not the hero, you're not gonna pick up the phone and go, hey, uh, mom next door, don't you let them do this because it bothers my son. That's not the way to handle this at a seven at seven years old. The way to handle this is to say, here's what you do, here's how you talk about that. If it doesn't work, if they pressure you of whatever, you come back to me, we come up with a new plan. You don't have to be the hero. You give them the tools, and then you go from there. Alright, let me take one more break, and then we're gonna talk about what happens when a kid is the driving force behind the guns. Question number three: Delilah emailed in a while back to say this might sound weird, but my son doesn't just play shooting. He won't stop, even when other kids don't like it or are even crying. Not in a mean way exactly, but he doesn't seem to notice when they're upset. I end up dragging him away and feeling embarrassed. My husband tells me he's just a kid, but it doesn't feel like just play when he won't stop. I'm worried that there's something wrong with him or that I messed up somewhere. Delilah, this is a great question, and how I already emailed back to you. I don't ever think there's anything wrong with taking your kid in to be assessed if there's if you feel like there's something going on. If you have a kid who is just absolutely like pathologically obsessed with weapons and guns and violence, there may be a conversation to be had, and I think people get really scared away by bringing their child to a child psychologist or something like that. But it's totally normal to bring a child in for a one-time visit or two, you know, two or three sessions and then never go back again. I think some parents think if I bring my kid to a child psychologist, they're gonna diagnose him with something this, that, and the other, and then uh they're gonna be in therapy once a week for the rest of their life for the next 80 years. Um, that's not always true. And in fact, that's probably, you know, 99% of the time not true. Uh, and if you don't like the opinion that you get from one, do you get a second opinion? That's a beauty of the system that we have. I don't always love the system that we have. One of the nice things about it is that you can always get a second opinion. There's always somebody else who's willing to see whatever medical thing or psychological thing you have going on, and you can adjust. I don't think it's horrible. If it's keeping you up at night and you're feeling like, man, I feel like there's something wrong with my kid, it's not the end of the world to bring them in and get them assessed for something like that. Because a child psychologist is going to be able to have a conversation, sit down with them again, maybe once, maybe twice, whatever. And they'll be able to put your mind at ease or tell you whether there is something going on that you may not know about. I trust parents' guts when it comes to kids. I trust your gut. Now, your gut is also oversensitive. Everybody's gut is oversensitive where it pertains to their kid. Um, we are always worried that that thing that's going on is actually something deeper. But um I what what I see time and time again in the horrible scenarios that we see played out when tragedies do happen and when a child is truly, truly struggling and then does something horrible, commits a violent act, is that the parents say, I was essentially I was not involved enough to know. And so what I'm hearing here is you're involved enough to be aware that there is something here, and I don't think it's a horrible thing to get a child assessed. Now, I don't think you have to if they're not committing actual violence. Uh again, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not the one that's gonna make that call for your child, I'm not a psychiatrist, I can't make that call for your child. But what I can tell you is that in that moment, there is going to be a desire for you to make him stop. And what I can give you is some insight into that. So if you feel like you want to get your child assessed and it's just going too far, if if you ever have a kid who is, say you have a firearm in the home, I don't recommend it, to be honest. Uh, we know that children are far more likely to uh be the victims of a firearm-related injury or death if there is a firearm in their home. Uh there is there is not a lot of data out there to support the idea that if you have a gun in your home, you're gonna be able to protect your child better than if you don't. Uh, it's actually much more likely that your child's gonna be shot by that gun in your home than that you are going to ever protect them with it. That is just the that is just the raw data there. So I just want to say that in, you know, maybe I'm giving away my bias here. Uh, we don't own any firearms. Um, we would never own firearms when we have children in the home, just because of the statistics related to that. And I'm just not, I I care too much about the data to to bypass that. Now, that said, if you are a person who has firearms in the home, or maybe in a home that your child is has frequents, and they become in obsessively interested in that firearm or want to hold that firearm beyond just you know general curiosity, but want to, you know, constantly be in contact with it or play in the same room as it or things like that. At that point, I would say there's a there's that's a different, that's a different type of escalation. And maybe at that point uh I would be seeking out help to either either assess what's going on here, I'm just unclear. And again, that's never a shameful thing to do that. It's always better to be safe than than not safe. And uh this is a place where it's okay. Your child's not gonna like be traumatized forever because you took him to a therapist. My parents took me to grief counseling and things like that when we had significant losses in our family, and I totally honestly do not even remember it. Um, my parents told me about it, you know, later in life. Oh, yeah, we did this. I don't even remember it. So I don't think it's like your child would even necessarily remember per se. But uh anyway, I think as far as managing the behavior, I think that's a separate conversation. So assuming that we don't think that it is something deeper, there's something, quote, wrong with your child, maybe you got assessed, maybe you didn't, you just decide there's not, whatever. Um, I would really go for something like improvisational play or what we call empathy mapping in the moment, rather than resorting to what I'm guessing feels like the right move here, which is some form of punishment or consequence. So next time you see your child doing this, resist the urge to intervene and say, they don't like that. You stop it right now, or we're gonna go home from the park. I'm gonna end this play date if you don't stop playing guns right now. All of those things feel punitive, which are, by the way, arousing to the stress response of the nervous system, which, as we've determined in the whole episode, is the reason why kids tend to play blasters and guns, is because it creates high arousal play, or at least semi-high arousal play. Okay, you want to give them more stakes, just punish them and threaten them. They now they're that's its own form of arousal that just gets mapped on in their brain into that experience, and like now you've created kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy here. Instead, I would be looking for some form, like I said, of empathy mapping to say, you know, hey, I see that you're having fun, but their face is telling me that they're scared. Fun is about everybody's body saying yes. And that is not only teaching in that moment empathy and perspective taking, it's also teaching consent, which is another big topic that we have not talked a huge amount about on the podcast, but something that's worthy to have a conversation about. We don't teach consent uh when a child is in their teenage years and they are beginning to be involved romantically, we teach consent from two years old on. They didn't want to be hit. That's called consent, right? They didn't like that when you did that. Perspective taking is the first lesson, empathy is the second lesson in consent. And so instead of approaching this punitively, which seeks to uh deter the bad behavior by making it undesirable by presenting them with a consequence or a threat, you're instead going to say, Hey, uh, here's what I'm seeing. You're gonna narrate descriptively and then teach them how to practice repair. What could we do right now to help their body feel safe again? Now you're presenting your child with this idea that there is something that they can do. It builds the missing skill that you're experiencing here, which is the perspective taking to not know when he's playing guns and somebody else doesn't want him to play in that way, or to be able to even know that that's the type of thing that another person may not want to play. And remember, I don't, you didn't say how old your child is, but um it's important to remember that perspective taking comes at different ages for different kids. Empathy comes at different ages for different kids. We can do a lot in being empathetic towards our kids to try and train them to be more empathetic towards other others, but um it's not it this is a difficult skill because it requires theory of mind at a level that toddlers and young younger kids, even in some cases four-year-olds, can struggle with. And so uh certainly perspective taking at five is much more challenging than perspective taking at eight or nine. And so uh you are teaching them in this moment, you're teaching them a different skill, not just that guns are dangerous or that we don't scare people, but also just that not everybody wants to play the same way that we do. And again, this is lesson one on consent. And then you're immediately pivoting to reconciliation rather than retribution. So instead of saying, I am going to do X, Y, and Z if you don't stop, we're gonna say, what can we do to make them feel better? Why I said improvisational playing here is that there may be space here, and I actually had a theology and ethics professor give this exact example when I was in seminary randomly. But she had a nephew who was playing guns, and she said that sh instead of saying, I don't like when you do that, he was shooting everybody, uh, pretend at his like family Christmas gathering or something. And this professor said, instead of saying like, I don't like when you play that way, don't play that with way with me. She improv she improved. And so he pretended to shoot her, and she said, if you had really shot me, that would have really hurt me bad, and I I could have even died. Did you ever think about that? Have you thought about like what game we're playing? And it was not in a shaming way or in a like a scary way, but just in saying, like, uh I didn't like that. What can we do differently? And he immediately, she said, snapped into doctor mode where he was like, Uh it's okay. It was an accident. I can save you. I'm gonna be a doctor now. And he was like a surgeon and he was I'm gonna get the bullet out and I'm gonna save you. And she then was like, Yeah, he was a little older, so I was like, Yeah, you know, you can't always save people. It's kind of one of those things that when you shoot somebody, it's you can't take it back. Like, that's part of part of the whole thing. But I'm really glad that your instinct was to heal and to help. And again, I I just want to point out how powerful play was in that interaction, even between adult and the child, which by the way, play between adults and children is not the same as play between children and their peers. Like that it's just functionally different. We know that their brains operate differently. When there's an adult involved in play, a child's brain is not truly in play state, they're always kind of deferring to the adult rather than taking ownership and agency. And so I I'm not saying that it was like a like a perfect example of play or anything like that, or the greatest example of play in the history of the world, but even in just such a simple example, she was able to redirect that and f into a place that was more healing and healthy. And so I basically am asking you, uh Delilah, to do the same thing, to say, okay, how can we uh take this situation be a little bit more reflective, be a little bit more vigilant, be a little bit more perspective oriented to see how everybody's playing this. You can also do this after the fact. Hey, when you were playing uh blasters with that kid at the park, did you see how their face was? Do you think that they liked the game or do you think that they didn't like the game? Like you can give them kind of those types of leading questions where they can fill in the gaps. You don't have to do all this in the moment if you don't want to interrupt the play, which I understand. Um, but you can you can interrupt the play or you can in the moment or after the fact assess and then you can talk about what we can do next time or what we can do now to repair. And this is the big big piece of this is that in these high arousal play states, your kids are going to do things that uh probably push the play to a level that's not great. And the what we can do when that happens is we can offer them an alternative of how to play in a different way. This is something that I do with my own kids, uh, where we look for ways to repair or we look for ways to reconcile rather than ways to uh act out our retribution on one another. Uh, but it's really, really healthy relationship-building stuff. And beyond the talk about playing with guns or how we play with guns or anything like that, this is just good sk skill life skills for kids. This can be the same when they don't take turns, right? Rather than intervening and say, if you don't start taking turns, we're going home from the park. You can say, Hey, let's look at how they look right now. There's they're pretty upset that they didn't get a turn. Yeah. What can we do that can help them feel better? It's a much more effective tool uh when navigating conflict. And there is conflict when there is play in this way, mo more often than not. Again, that's just high Rosal play. So that's what I have for you in this episode. I trust you to make the right decision for your family, whether you want to allow this type of play or not. Um, again, I think that there is a big uh kind of caveat here, which is that we live in a society, if you live in the United States, no matter where you live in the United States, where firearms are a clear and persistent topic of conversation, kids are going to hear about this, they are going to be exposed to it when they go to school. Like I said, they are going to be exposed to active shooters. Um it's not uh hopefully not active shooters, but active shooter drills. I should have been more careful on how I said that. Um obviously, as I already plugged at the beginning, if you'd like to go and watch a a movie about the the importance of comprehensive gun reform, all the empty rooms is streaming now, I believe, on Netflix. It's a fantastic documentary, it's 31 minutes, you should go and watch it. But I hope this episode gave you some way of processing these things and thinking about these things. And yeah, I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. 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