19 Sep Guns Of A Son

Denise Norton can find no explanation for her son’s fascination with weapons.

Lying in the summer grass, gazing at the clouds taking shape across the sky, I ask my four-year-old son 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 Play School). At bedtime we read him the adventures of Daisy Duck and Hairy Maclary and Winnie the Pooh.

He was three when it started. 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 children’s dartboard set – 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 kindy from pieces of scrap wood and PVA glue (Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall facing a cannon). His father turned to me and said sadly, “Well, I suppose somebody has to make the weapons. We’ll love him anyway”.

I realised it was time to seek advice. I talked to friends who have already raised boys. They said that most boys go through it, that 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 balsawood crossbow that shoots straw arrows. But we’ve had to put the dartboard set away. Henry realised 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.”