I recently purchased a toy gun that came packaged with a John Wayne ensemble of holster , bullet belt , and bandana . My 4 year old son coerced me into buying it for him putting forth the argument that since it was a “ toy gun , from a 2 dollar shop in the mall “ it was not dangerous . I succumbed to that flawless point and he walked out of the shop bandy legged and ready to shoot the next bad ‘un that crossed his path.
On reaching home he entered the house and proudly brandishing the toy , announced to all at home , “ I am going to shoot all of you and then shoot myself”. You could have heard a bullet casing fall to the floor as everyone stopped in their tracks and stared at him , shocked. Then I laughed out loud and reminded him that the gun was not real. He laughed too , and ran out of the house on some other mission .
However the words he used still hung in the air and I wondered at the starkness of such a thought from a four year old boy. Now don’t get me wrong , I ‘ve had my share of toy guns in my own childhood , but I don’t for once remember wanting to shoot myself . I was always wanting to shoot everyone else as I thought guns were meant to kill bad people ( from my observation of the policemen who roamed our streets ) . But where did this notion of killing innocent people and then killing himself come from . Did he pick it from the news , considering the number of shooting sprees we’ve been hearing about and how was he able to understand the complexity of the idea that if you killed innocent people then you had to kill yourself as well. Did this awareness originate from an innate chemical reaction that modern children are born with or did somebody actually teach him this . While this worried me a bit as I had a sudden morbid picture of us , ten or fifteen years later, lying on our lounge room floor shot to death , which I shook off with a nervous shudder , I put it off to childhood awareness of current affairs albeit without the ability to disseminate the intricacies .
We parents therefore need to be extra vigilant that whatever kids are being exposed to in this age , the import and meaning is explained as best as possible . Our responsibilities are therefore multiplied . Its no longer a case of the birds and the bees at the start of their teenage years , but the whole gamut of fauna right from the time they say “mum”.
