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Should we allow our children to play with toy weapons?
Results so far:
| Yes | 48% | 429 votes | Total: 886 votes | |
| No | 52% | 457 votes |
Yes
by Joseph Whalen
Created on: December 17, 2008
It is disturbing how society has degraded to the point of looking everywhere else except ourselves to blame for the problems we face each day. The topic of children playing with toy weapons is another example of this mentality. We live in an ultra violent society in which we wage war no only in foreign lands but on the streets of our own cities, yet we think playing with toy weapons will make our children violent.
Parents of today need to learn what it means to truly be a parent. We as responsible adults who have an obligation to raise our children well and teach them right from wrong. If our children turn out to be violent criminals it is not because of the toys they played with as a youth it is because of our own failings as parents. This is a concept so foreign to the American mindset that it is immediately dismissed and scoffed at.
Children have played with toy weapons since the beginning of human civilization, and perhaps even before that with the predecessors of homo-sapiens. It is as natural as breathing and a fact that most people choose to ignore. Humans are a predatory species of hunters, regardless of how much we pretend to be civilized. Playing with toy weapons is part of our hunter-gatherer heritage and a carry over to the days when we had to learn at the earliest possible age how to fight, hunt and defend ourselves from predators.
If society is interested in looking for the source of the increasing rise in violent crimes it needs to be far more introspective then blaming it on our toys. Sometime in the mid to late 20th century our legal and judicial systems made a fundamental shift from protecting the innocent to coddling the guilty. No longer do we punish criminals for crimes they commit, instead we aim to reform them through education and humanitarian gestures. Society has become an enabler to the criminals. In a world where violent crimes are no longer severely punished there is very little incentive to stop committing them.
We have political leaders who engage in war profiteering to pad their own pockets. Sending thousands of young soldiers to a foreign land fighting and killing to protect the investment interests of the few powerful people who run the government is hardly the example we should be teaching our children. We pressure smaller, less powerful countries in an attempt to extort them of their natural resources in much the same way the school yard bully would pick on kids and steal their lunch money. Yet the same leaders continue to be elected to public office, a clear statement by the people of acceptance of questionable morals.
There is little doubt that society is spiraling ever more rapidly into an abyss of violence and crime. In order to stop this decay of our civilization it is imperative that we focus on the true cause of the problem. We need to stop looking for other things to place blame on, justifiably accept responsibility for the issues we ourselves caused and work together to resolve them. If we fail to do this very basic things we are far more guilty than the accused toy manufactures this witch hunt is targeting.
Learn more about this author, Joseph Whalen.
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No
by Priya Kamath
Created on: March 01, 2009 Last Updated: February 16, 2012
I strongly feel that it is inappropriate to allow children to play with toy weapons of any kind because of the message we send to our children when we permit it. I am a mother of two boys; as a parent I have realized that kids, as impressionable as they are, pick up values form the rules and boundaries we set for them. As children, their views are largely influenced by our responses to issues and the implications of our decisions. This influence cannot be underestimated.
It is hard to pretend to use weapons for anything other than to hurt and harm. As such, allowing children to play with weapons, albeit toys, could possibly promote a nonchalant attitude towards violence. It could make children less sensitive to the pain inflicted by violence, and eventually desensitize them to it. Allowing children to play with toy weapons need not necessarily encourage violence or criminal attitude. However, it could be perceived by children as approval by parents. This in turn would make violence acceptable in their innocent, young minds.
Some studies have shown that playing with toy weapons actually encourages aggressive behavior in children. Along the same line of thought, for well adjusted, stable children, playing with toy weapons might not be an issue. However, for disturbed children who are unable to differentiate between the real and imaginary worlds, fascination for toy weapons could easily be passed on to real weapons. They might be unable to understand the difference between real violence and game playing, and see violent solutions as an alternative to their problems. Something as innocent as playing with toy weapons could perpetuate and encourage undesirable tendencies and behavior in the child.
Toy weapons of every kind are propagating in the market every day. However, there is also a wide spectrum of toys available that encourage creativity and imagination, and offer hours of enjoyment. Since weapons symbolize aggression, any kind of thematic play with toy weapons, although on occasions seemingly constructive, does involve violence. Toy weapons, thus, in a sense limit a child's imagination.
There has been an indisputable escalation of violence in recent times, and in several cases it is children who go on bloody rampages causing unimaginable carnage. Children learn from their observations of the world around them. Everything nowadays, from news to movies to video games sadly has an element of violence in it. Some even communicate that violence is power. While this may all be true, it is also true that for children their family is a microcosm of the world around them. Consequently, decisions made by parents have a more significant impact in molding their childhood experiences which in turn help them navigate their adult life.
If we, as parents, could eliminate one little factor from our children's lives that could possibly influence them negatively, shouldn't we make a responsible decision about it?
Learn more about this author, Priya Kamath.
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