Deep Dive: How Do We Respond to a Child’s Pretend Weapon Play?

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1:07 i'm a clinical psychologist and mom of three on a mission to rethink the way we raise our children [Music] i love translating deep thoughts about parenting into practical actionable strategies that you can use in your home right away one of my core beliefs is that we are all doing the best we can with the resources we have available to us in that moment so even as we struggle and even as we are having a hard time on

1:38 the outside we remain good inside [Music] this week i'm going to do a deep dive about a frequently asked about topic what do we do when our child engages in pretend gun play nina who you may know from her lifestyle and motherhood instagram page balkanina and her husband tom come to me with this exact concern their nearly

2:10 three-year-old son dom loves to play pretend with his parents and recently pointed his fingers at his parents and said pish-pish nina and tom didn't know what to do is this normal is this okay should a parent shut this down and say we don't play like that what is going on for a child in these moments and what is a parent to do before we jump in let me say this this is not an episode about guns

2:38 but rather about how to respond to themes of aggression and power that manifest in pretend play after all pretend play is truly where kids communicate about complicated topics yes we'll be talking about how to respond to pretend gunplay but truly we'll be talking about something universal and so important how do we use play to help kids learn to

3:10 manage the entire range of feelings and thoughts and urges they have so that feelings and thoughts and urges become manageable become able to be regulated become able to be controlled so they're not acted out in behavior toward others with that in mind let's jump in [Music] hello welcome tell us a little bit about you the two of you your family and what's on your mind today hi so my name

3:42 is nina and i'm tom and we are parents of a toddler his name is dominic we call him dom and he is gonna be three and he is a wild child he loves to play outside and he's really into pretend play right now and lately probably in the last month or so he's been really into weapon play and good and evil play like good cop robbers um and it all started with

4:12 spider webs from spiderman he saw daycare kids playing um and then it went to i'm gonna piss you and uh we figured out pishu was pistol and he would randomly pick up things at home that looked like so i have a massage gun he would pick that up and say i'm going to piss you and then it escalated into him saying i'm going to shoot you this was probably about two weeks ago at the dinner table so it went from

4:44 um i'm gonna piss you to i'm gonna shoot you and we are pretty concerned about him saying that to us and to people we don't know is that normal what do we do how do we respond so that's where we're kind of at great so let's jump in and you asked a question in there that i think is probably the best one to start with which is is this normal right because i think we're often looking at our kids

5:12 asking that question and when we worry something's outside of the range then we often respond to our kids mostly from our own anxiety and less so from anything that might actually be happening for our kids so let's start there gun play good and evil play gun play meaning oh i am putting my fingers like a gun or i'm saying the word shoot really really normal for young kids and one of the things you're really on

5:45 to is that he's really thinking about themes of good and bad in these binaries right they're very kind of black and white and he's also seemingly involved with themes of power like who has power right and those themes are really popular themes to kind of come up in play for young kids so i think that's a really important starting point this is normal and to me the next question is

6:17 what's really going on for dom in these moments right we see this snippet in the surface in our kids play so he might say oh boom i shoot you or some kids even say ooh daddy you're dead right they say something like that you're like whoa okay what's going on here and to me in general moving from the question is this normal to what is happening for my child and what does my child need in this moment

6:43 is always a good pathway whatever it is the type of play they're doing they're hitting someone they're struggling to read when they're older they're having trouble making friends to me one of the best things we can do as a parent is move from is this normal to huh what's going on for my child and what does my child need and so i think one of the things you're saying with dom is he's trying to explore themes of

7:13 who's in charge who has power who has control who can influence someone else what is right what is wrong what is good what is bad and i actually think it's very heartening that these themes are on his mind because it shows that he's he's trying to figure them out right and when kids are trying to figure things out they don't talk about it with their parents they don't say hey mom hey dad um i'm kind of curious how power and control

7:42 work no they they talk about it in play and so i think that's almost like the first step is to look at his play as a communication of what's on his mind and what he's trying to figure out rather than only seeing his play through the spectrum of oh my goodness he is violent or aggressive does that make sense so far yeah totally the other thing i'll say right off the bat that i always think about is

8:12 as kids they often explore themes and extremes before they figure out nuance right so a lot of kids they do this in power they do this with gender right they're saying that's a girl thing that's a boy thing and one of the things i think as we get older is we kind of can reclaim things that you know are neither boy nor girl they're just us right or what's good and what's bad and i think a lot of us

8:37 adults often think well good and bad are like pretty extreme words and there's actually a lot of nuance right in between three-year-olds don't have that capacity so they're exploring things on a kind of extreme as a way of trying to figure out something that's in the middle and definitely with power and control that's the case so maybe we can jump into like a little more specific tell me a little bit more about when this comes up and play with

9:08 you how this actually might surface whether it has you think oh for all i know it's going to come out you know as soon as we're with him you know playing in our basement or wherever you are and then we can get into more of the specifics around how to respond in a way that actually speaks to these themes of power and kind of good bad that that are on his mind it's only happened like he's only said

9:33 i'm going to shoot you a couple times and both times felt very innocent it didn't feel um we were just playing like i did for him and tom they were just at the dinner table and he just was giggling and laughing and speaking of power struggles at dinner we do have a lot of issues of sit in your chair um don't stand up so i don't i don't know if that has anything to do with it

10:01 i'm not sure and then with me when he said it to me it was very playful while we were playing he has a lego set that's a police officer and a robber and he always likes to play with that so he knows that a robber is a bad guy he knows that the police officer has guns so he said it to me then i'm gonna shoot you great so let me let me jump in right there because

10:29 to me knowing that we can build so many skills in play i know for me makes me excited for moments when my kid wants to engage me and play because then a part of my brain reminds me oh really good things can happen here right really really important things happen for kids in play because even that term kids are playing around with ideas right they're they're experimenting so let's say nina he's with you and he's you know playing either cops and

10:56 robbers and he says to you i'm going to shoot you right so the first thing i would do is take a deep breath and just say okay shooting is the thing i hear on the surface underneath our themes of power and control good bad right wrong all of us i think think about those themes right so here's a way after we kind of calm down our own body here's what i see myself maybe doing or saying with my

11:21 three-year-old who might say that to me oh you have you have something really really powerful huh right so just speaking to what's happening underneath in that moment slows down the moment so it's less about the pretend pistol in his hand and more about what he's actually trying to figure out right so a couple comments that that could kind of slow down that moment oh you're really powerful right now oh you seem to have that pistol and

11:52 i don't huh or oh what what should i do when you do that dom what should i do so again instead of us saying we don't play with guns or that's not nice which kind of shuts down not only the play but it shuts down whatever he was trying to figure out in the play we're just kind of putting this almost a container around it by our being willing to be curious

12:22 and not reactive around it what do you think he would say if you said to him what should i do when you when you do that what do you want me to do if you kind of whispered that to him what might he say he would whisper back something about poop probably in his current stage he might do something like that yeah he might just get really silly or or if you said am i supposed to am i supposed

12:47 to fall down am i supposed to get mad what what am i supposed to do so what you're really doing there is you're doing something he's not quite capable of yet which is actually less about the gun and more again about these themes of power right more about okay so did he do something and now you are impacted by it right three-year-olds are also often trying to figure out how much impact do i have in the world like do i matter do i get to

13:15 make decisions can i have influence over others right i happen to know also from you nina that you just had another child yes so themes of power and who's bigger and who's in charge and who gets to make decisions and who has the most attention i'm sure are on his mind more than they were six months ago right when he never had to question those things so let's keep in mind that new sibling dynamic and how

13:42 that totally shook up your family and totally shook up dom's life this is without a doubt a time when kids are looking for ways to express power in play okay let's get back to the moment when dom pretends to shoot you i guess i see a bunch of options when a kid comes to a parent and says oh i shot you or oh i'm shooting you right the first option saying look we don't say something like that that's not nice

14:08 and then what ends up happening is two things in that option number one it becomes more enticing because all of us want to do things that parents tell us not to do right there's something now oh kind of extra special about that right and it becomes that much more intriguing right the other thing that happens when we shut it down is whatever this play was really about we'll never know right when instead we a little bit play it cool about the gun

14:38 play itself and pause and kind of inquire into the themes underneath what we actually do is something really powerful we take the moment and it becomes less about him kind of looking at us as if he has you know a gun between his thumb and his pointer finger and instead we move it to what's actually going on for him which are these themes of power or control or influence or impact so by just pausing and saying to him oh

15:09 what am i supposed to do when you do that or oh even oh do you have one of those in your fingers am i supposed to do that too oh no only you oh okay so only you have one huh seems like you're in charge it seems like you have the power and i have i have no power huh right or oh i'm supposed to fall down when you do that huh what happened to me so what i'm really doing

15:35 is i'm actually getting more into dom's mind by just asking questions i'm not assuming i know what this is about and um then taking the moment away from just this pitch that he did right and i'm actually exploring these ideas that led to that moment in the first place i mean i think it makes complete sense i literally would have never thought about it like that um like you said it's scary to hear your child say that and you only think

16:06 about what's on the surface how do you react when it does happen in public and will it if we engage will it continue to be an issue or will it continue to be a thing you know maybe i'm jumping ahead here but how do we talk about guns and properly how do we talk about using them properly and being safe because he will have guns in his life and in the future with hunting and

16:38 etc so i think you just highlighted everything that's super important so when you say jumping ahead it's as if you know you had a window into my brain and these different themes one of the words that comes up for me is boundaries like is it okay to play this anywhere is it the same as you know playing soccer or is it okay to play these games someplace and with some people and not others and how do you explain that to

17:03 your kids then i think another thing i think about with play that involves themes of power and aggression is how do we help our kids understand that some kids might not want to play that and how can we prepare them for that moment in daycare where another kid might say oh i don't like that and to me it's less about whether my kid brings it up or not but that next step of i want my kid to respect someone else's not

17:27 being comfortable and then where's this line between pretend play that involves pretend guns and living in a home that in your real home has real guns right so i think those are excellent points so i think one of the things that brings us all together is that given he's bringing the idea of power into play with pretend guns you can use play to actually work on so many of these skills around consent and boundaries so here's something because i remember when

17:59 i was taken aback when my first child brought in these themes of kind of guns and shooting to our pretend play world i actually remember we were i remember the first time it happened because it was so jarring we were playing with like a farm animal scene it was like a duck and a pig and he was like the duck he's like i'm gonna shoot you pig i was like whoa like i thought we were i thought we're

18:19 having a nice day on the farm you know like what's going on um and it did take me aback right so i think there's this general theme of can i label and understand with my kid what's going on under the play that when he comes at me with a gun i come back at him with this theme of oh you're in charge you're powerful right so we can do that consent i think is a really important topic to explore in play with

18:44 kids and i think you can model for him let's say one day he again brings the theme into play either of you can say to him i don't want to play that way today right i think this is such an important thing for kids to hear sometimes especially when we know our kid is playing in a way that other kids might not want to right and i could see myself saying this i don't i don't want to play that way

19:06 today oh that's that's tricky you do when i don't what do we do i love this as a question what do we do when you want to play a certain way with someone and they don't want to play that way because if i step out of that role play in a way we're again on this theme of power and control it is an interesting thing what if you really want to play with a friend and play cops

19:31 and robbers and they don't right where in my mind and i think right i think we agree on this when someone says no kind of the no trumps the wish someone else can want to play that way but if another kid says no the no kind of wins in that situation and i think that's really important to teach kids early and i would say it in a non-shaming way because shame only would make again the themes of gun play even

19:56 that much more enticing i'd say something like this after i said i don't want to play i might say here's something really tricky when someone says no we listen to them even if our body is saying yes oh that's so hard right you say oh but i want to play and i have this idea and i i want to i want to shoot you and i say i don't like that and oh we kind of have to practice doing this

20:22 dom okay i guess i'll find someone else or do something else maybe we can practice that now let me be clear when i say to my kids let me practice this it's often them hearing me do it again they might say mom you're being annoying and not cooperate but you're modeling this for him right so to kind of put that in an arc he might say mom i shoot you and you can say i don't really want to play that

20:48 today oh that's kind of tricky what do we do if i say no and you say yes it makes me think even when you're back at daycare what if you want to play cops and robbers and someone doesn't that's kind of tricky right and when someone says no it's a no with that person you have to play something else with that person or find someone else to play with oh that's so hard right now i'm not sure what he'll do

21:14 next but to me that's really important when we have a kid who's playing in a way that we recognize other kids might not want to do that in their home they've had a little practice for those situations so that when they're in daycare it's not this totally new situation where a child saying oh no one else has ever said no to me before that's really hard to hear no for the first time right so i i

21:41 don't think you have to do that every time but i could see you know alternating here and there so sometimes i'm kind of engaging and at other times i do put up that kind of boundary i think that makes sense yeah no i like that a lot i think it'd be the best if we could alternate who was doing the playing and everything too would probably help even more say more about that tom that like in terms of it's not just one of you who

22:07 does that kind of aggressive play and one of you who doesn't yeah so that way he doesn't confuse it with okay this person always wants to play like this and this person never does and there's times when people will want to play times people won't want to play certain things yeah i think that would help us a lot and i think that's great also from just like even a gender role perspective that it's not given that he's your son it's

22:29 not just like oh this is a daddy thing and mommy doesn't like guns right she's a you know we don't i think that's like really nice to vary that and then to actually combine this to what we were talking about earlier one of the things i think that gets kids over time less obsessed with kind of shooting play is when they feel like there's other areas where they can explore those themes that's driving the shooting play

22:54 but they can do that without the guns themselves so i could see saying yeah i'm not really not really in the mood to play anything with pretend guns today but it seems like you want to be really really powerful seems like you really want to show me you're in charge right now hmm i wonder if there's anything else we can do and then i might add something with a little levity like i hope you don't tell me

23:14 that i have to i don't know crawl like a baby like to the kitchen and get you water i really hope you don't tell me that because oh that would be so annoying and then my guess is he would tell you like oh daddy crawl like a baby to the you know the kitchen and get me water and i could see myself making that bigger wow you're really in charge right now huh dom like you are really powerful you tell me to

23:37 crawl like a baby and i'm gonna crawl like a baby i don't want to crawl like a baby and because you said it and i guess i'm gonna do it so you're giving him another place to play around with themes of power and control but now it doesn't have a you know a pretend gun right so and i think that's really really what kids are looking for that our kids when you know i always think about this one time it was when my son

24:05 was three i remember putting him in a stroller and he just looks at me and he goes where am i going i was like oh my goodness that's that's like the plight of a child they're just like what's happening to me right like i don't know anything about the day and my mom just probably plopped me in the stroller and is taking me out and i think around this time when our kids are about three they understand so much more in the

24:29 world they see so much they have a capacity cognitively to understand so much they feel like bigger kids all of a sudden and i think it's not a surprise why so many of these themes come up and play that they're trying to figure out their own power and their own abilities so even weaving in comments like that right throughout the day like when you say oh what do you want for breakfast and he says i wanna i don't know i want i

24:56 want toast anything i could say wow you're dom and you really know who you are you really know you want toast for breakfast it's interesting you see mommy having yogurt you're having toast you're different from me you really know yourself you're actually kind of also speaking to these themes he's trying to figure out in play am i my own person am i separate right can i say something can it have influence and so totally separate from a

25:24 gun we're talking about making a decision for breakfast we're really highlighting that we know his sense of his own power is on his mind and we're again giving him different opportunities to explore that yeah i think that makes sense what about if i don't know i guess i'm just concerned like if we're playing guns with him at home how do we incorporate the safety and and yeah what guns are for you address like the deep roots of

25:55 what's going on in his head but then now let's get to like the actual gun like how do we talk about guns to a three-year-old in a way that he'll know that those are dangerous yeah so i think a first step knowing that you're saying we have guns in the house we have real guns that are not silly and they're not just about play right they're real and we want to make sure he he knows that so one thing you

26:27 can do right away if he brings this into play like oh daddy i i shot you right i find myself in those situations sometimes whispering to my kids like this is just pretend right like this is just pretend right this is a pretend gun i just want to make sure because oh real guns are so scary like i don't want anything to do and usually a kid will say yeah it's a pretend gun it's my finger right so again i'm just kind of

26:51 putting a label around this moment and getting on the same page as my child that this is a pretend situation now separate from that i think you're talking about gun safety for your child and how do we talk to our kid about this in the context of him being into pretend play with guns and power right so i think that you've said that you haven't talked to him about it yet no no tell me what what he sees what he knows what is his

27:23 baseline because i think that's always important to come to before we you know have any strategies i don't think he really has had any exposure from us like personally we don't watch anything that has it we don't talk about it he's never actually seen any of mine like uh he saw like a holster one time and he asked what it was said oh it's a thing for one of daddy's tools and the only times he's ever probably had any exposure is

27:52 at daycare or around any other older kids places where we haven't introduced it so we don't really know exactly how it's been brought up to him what he's seen if it's from video games if it's from like cops and robbers from cartoons we honestly don't know so one of the things that comes up around gun safety to me is there's explaining why we have them or explaining what hunting is and then there's also just concrete behavioral

28:24 steps for a kid to know early on about what to do if you see a real gun right so those are a little more straightforward so i think we can start there and then can keep going but i think about four things and to make them really simple with kids which is stop don't touch walk away find an adult and i think those four things like they give a visual and there are even things kids can practice right stop

28:51 don't touch walk away find an adult one of the things our kids naturally do when they see something interesting as they move toward it just from a pure bodily perspective right adults do too kids see you got some new food at the grocery store and that you can picture him being like oh what is that and they look in the bag so a gun one of the things we want to make sure to teach kids is we want our kids to do

29:15 the opposite of that reaction we want them to move away right so i think one of the things you can teach him when it comes to real guns is oh we're pretending with guns right we're pretending sometimes we pretend and even put your fingers how he might oh and then there's real guns and i would say real guns are for adults who have had special courses or classes and how to use them they're not for kids

29:46 right to really make a differentiation and actually one of the things kids should know and we could even practice is four things stop don't touch walk away find an adult and kids can even go through this behaviorally right where i could see with him you're like show me stop he could stop show me walk away and then you could and like i would make a big deal out of walking away because kids watching your body do this is again it

30:15 goes against their natural curiosity which is move toward right so stop walk away find an adult so pretend with his fingers is one thing yeah but what about like water guns and like we don't have any toy guns but i feel like toy guns look so real nowadays i feel like that's such a gray area do we allow toy guns he's gonna see them like he's playing outside with our neighbors right now and those boys are

30:44 playing with water guns so it's like what what do we how do we because i feel like it's important to know the safety of like okay we treat anything that looks like a gun and we don't point it at anyone's head or body and we always ask permission if they want to play but any toy gun that actually looks like a gun i don't actually see any need to have anything like that in the home i

31:07 think that they get kids in trouble right we never want our child to be mistaken for having a gun right so i think that that's okay to set as a baseline right and you can even say that if they're like well why does this kid have this toy i like that i would just say it's really fun to play and to play pretend and toys that look like real guns those are actually dangerous our main job is

31:35 to make sure you're safe and we never will buy an item for you that could end up making things less safe water guns i'll be honest i feel i feel different about than things that kind of could look like a real gun you know i'm picturing kind of those the super soakers or some people have nerf guns i don't personally have a hard and fast rule there i think that that's really for the two of you to look at

32:04 each other and say okay is that something we want in the house if so when do we get it in a stage when our child is obsessed with playing these things or do we actually wait till he's a little older and it seems like this isn't as big of a deal and in a way we feel better about introducing this as a toy option but it probably at that point won't be the only toy option i think also kind of

32:29 those themes of kind of consent are really important if you have even a nerf gun there might be a kid who doesn't think it's funny even if you have a kid who thinks oh it's just nerf it doesn't even hurt and those moments i think with our kids are really powerful to pause and say look your friend doesn't like playing with nerf guns and you don't find them scary your friend does and in this family we

32:54 always respect other people's feelings even if they're not the same as your own so we're not going to have the nerf gun out during this play date right and in that way i think that that allows for this really important conversation again rather than not having the conversation or avoiding it entirely there's probably something really helpful for him about having that conversation in the safety of his home with parents he feels connected to yeah that makes sense one of the things i

33:22 always try to remind myself is just i'm the parent like i can make decisions if i get a nerf gun and then i feel like oh this has kind of gotten out of control it's the only thing my kid wants to play with and i actually feel like my child's getting increasingly aggressive you know i always remember this parent who came to me and talked about how screen time in this way i feel like i've given my

33:42 kids way too much screen time and i just love like and i remember this look in her eyes when i said to her you can always make a different decision she was like oh like i guess i could like i could give less screen time or oh i've said yes to nerf guns i could always take them away right and just reminding ourselves like we are the parents i can choose one thing and then i can tell my

34:05 child it might create a tantrum or it might create unhappiness but i can tell my child i've made a different decision and as long as i'm attuned to kind of noticing my child i trust myself to figure this out and if something doesn't go the way i want it to go i can always change directions and i think reminding myself of that as apparent ugh i feel better about individual decisions i make because i realize i can

34:31 keep collecting data and see where this goes and always change course yeah makes total sense i mean i think you answered it so well and it always comes back to that you know it's a scary it's a taboo topic and it's just like how do i address this yeah and you know i it's interesting in so many different consults and with my own kids these themes come up and everyone says is it because there's older siblings why

34:57 are they talking about guns why are they talking about good bad why are they talking about nice and mean why are they talking about people who are police and people who are robbing stores i've never even talked to my kids about that these themes are are just such human themes right and i remember when my son was in a group of friends where they were all first kids and the parents we were all wondering well where did they

35:23 hear this we're not watching these things on tv and i remember a different mom said i think this is just what kids do and it was kind of this simple i was like yeah maybe that is again what kids do because they're just trying to figure out how the world works so let me know how it goes let me know kind of what comes up nina i know you will yeah it's nice to meet you yeah

35:45 thank you thank you so much becky for all of your insight truly i'm honored to be led into what's happening in your family home thank you both of you for your openness in talking this through with me [Music] i love talking with nina and tom about this really important nuanced topic let's tie it all together with three main takeaways 1. if you have a child who plays with the ideas around shooting and guns

36:18 deep breath this doesn't mean your child is especially aggressive or cruel or wants to harm people young kids are trying to figure out how the world works whether they're powerful whether they have impact whether they matter often these themes surface in play that contains pretend guns because this is how kids can explore feeling powerful or in charge two if your child brings in pretend guns or

36:50 pretend shooting in play it's okay to go with it you don't need to shut it down remember if we shut it down you can't do that that's not nice we lose our ability to figure out what our child was trying to express or work through so pause and then ask questions ask what you're supposed to do comment on how your child is in charge and feels powerful in that moment the more we speak to the themes underneath

37:20 the gun play the less power the gun play has on its own three talk about consent and how different kids might not want to play with pretend shooting even practice situations in your home where you say no i don't want to play like that so your child has opportunities to practice stopping and figuring out other ways of engaging with peers [Music] thanks for listening to good inside let's stay connected at goodinside.com

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