"Weapons of Construction"

[Tamarah Cohen]

Dear All,

Attached (and pasted below for those wishing to avoid attachments) is a short piece written by a colleague of mine about her son's special fondness for all things weapon-like. She has given me permission to post it here in the hope that the response it generates might cast a new light on the problem.

Tamarah Cohen
Doshisha Women's College, Kyoto



"Weapons of Construction"                             

 

Denise Norton wonders why
everything in her son’s hands turns to weapons.

 

 

Lying in the
summer grass, gazing at the clouds taking shape across the sky, I ask my four-year-old
what he can see.  

‘That one is
guns’, he says pointing at the cloud directly above, ‘with fire coming out.’ 

‘And the one over
there is an axe, and lots of people with their heads chopped off,’ he
continues. Then he giggles.

It isn’t really a
surprise.

Give my son a tin
and a bunch of magnets and he’ll figure out how to make a laser gun. And when
he is done, it will look like a laser gun. In his stubby little hands, three
pieces of Meccano quickly become a sword. A few twists and six sparkly
pipe-cleaners are transformed into a multi-headed hose-pipe shooting forth streams
of freezing vapour. With Lego, of course, he can really get creative – siege
engines with sensor eyes to detect movement and nozzles that swivel, spewing
forth lava at multi-armed (in every sense) robots with fiery breath and x-ray
eyes.

At this point, I would
like to make clear that this obsession with weapons of destruction is in no way
a result of his upbringing. We don’t have toy guns in the house. We don’t allow
him to watch any television other than ABC kids (and then only selected age-appropriate
shows such as Bob the Builder and Playschool). At bedtime we read him the
adventures of Daisy Duck and Hairy Maclary and Winnie the Pooh.

He was three when
it started. I remember we’d gone to the playground. He picked up a forked stick,
aimed it at me, and started making firing noises, pch’yoo, pch’yoo. How had he
learned this? 

I told him I didn’t
like guns. He explained that it wasn’t a real gun. I said I didn’t even like
pretend guns. He replied that it was, in fact, a pretend water pistol. Pch’yoo,
pch’yoo.  

We tried
diversion. We bought him a dartboard set – one of those for children with
blunt-tipped darts. We imagined it was a learning tool for hand-eye
coordination. He imagined the darts were poisoned arrows and the target was the
head of a monster. 

Perhaps this
fascination with weaponry was a result of too much time spent indoors? We went
back to the toy store and bought a Frisbee and a kite. The kite didn’t last
long. The central strut was destroyed when a routine bombing mission went bad.
But Henry became quite proficient with the Frisbee. He uses it to decapitate enemy
roses. 

Three months ago,
we were in the kitchen making dinner and Henry was showing us what he had made
at kinder from pieces of scrap wood and PVA glue (Humpty Dumpty sitting on a
wall facing cannon). His father turned to me and said sadly, ‘Well I suppose
somebody has to make the weapons. We’ll love him anyway’. 

I realized it was
time to seek advice. I talked to friends – friends who have already raised boys.
They said that most boys go through it. They said, ‘it’s just a phase.’ They
said they’d seen the most rabidly weapon-toting four-year-olds grow up to be pacifists.
They said resistance is useless - worse than useless – that it will only make
him more obsessed. 

So we’ve stopped
being resistant. We still don’t have toy guns, but we’ve given in on the water
pistol. And we’re taking an interest in his creative projects. I helped him tie
some string to a piece of olive wood I’d pruned from our tree. Olive wood is
flexible and makes a good bow. He made the arrows himself out of Tinker Toys. They
fly very well really and offer more precision than his catapult.

Last weekend, following
instructions from a book Henry found in the library, he and his father made a
balsa-wood crossbow that shoots straw arrows. But we’ve had to put the
dartboard set away.  Henry realized that his
darts fit neatly into the groove of the crossbow, and even blunt-tipped darts
can do serious damage when fired from a crossbow.  

I think we’re making
progress. While I write this, Henry is playing happily with a Meccano dog he
made with his Dad this morning. It has a long body and stubby little legs. I
tell him it looks like Schnitzel von Krumm. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s a robot dog.
See – the tail can twist around and shoot out lava. And see his eyes? They’re
laser eyes.’



 		 	   		  
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