So That’s What That Looks Like

ktward in reply to Kazzy says:

[War toys] generally aren’t available in school but that is largely because an overreaction to the false conflation of toy violence with real violence.

An altogether intriguing comment, Kazzy. Unpacking it is perhaps worth another post altogether.

Meantime, I’ll just opine that if a school classroom has students young enough to require shelves of toys, those students are too young for toys representative of violence/war. Those same little tykes are also, imo, too young for anatomically correct dolls in school. It’s less about any misguided conflation– I don’t necessarily disagree with you on that point– and more about appropriateness and teacher training and the critical nexis between these two factors.

I actually hail from a gun family. (Father, step-dad, brother, various cousins, nephews etc … many of these folks served in the military at one point or another.) But I myself have very little appreciation for guns in the home, and so I made it a point to never provide my kids a toy gun that looked like a real gun. No pop guns or the like. Squirt guns we had aplenty, which of course eventually morphed into Super Soakers and those things are some kick-ass fun. But I digress.

At around the age of 4 or 5, my son decided to build his own guns out of Legos and other stuff. My veiled knee-jerk reaction notwithstanding [WTF?!], I was more or less fine with this because it was a playful exercise and was, really, more about him using his imagination than using firearms. I played along when he “shot” me. I suppose it’s possible that in preschool and K he might have built his own gun, but it never came up in P/T conferences. For sure, if there had been toy guns or tanks or whatever in his pre-K/K classrooms, I’d have had a huge problem with that. Obviously, it eventually became incumbent upon me to have conversations with my kids about guns and wars and violence, but not at such a tender age. I do realize that this particular mileage varies immensely for inner-city parents.

And while I can’t speak to Lawyers Guns and Money, fwiw my kids were engaged in the UU OWL program from the get-go, so I was ever decidedly less worried about the outside stuff feeding their minds in terms of sexuality than the stuff feeding their minds in terms of war and societal violence. Which is to say that I, personally, would have been okay with anatomically correct dolls in my kids’ youngest school years. But my views are in a very distinct minority, and I’m pretty sure that the parents of the other youngsters would have felt backed into an uncomfortably untenable position. There’s simply no need to put them there. (Ask me about sex-ed in grades 5-12, you’ll get an altogether different kind of response from me.)Report