Children playing war...

[LittleRobinRed]

So I've two boys (3&5) and they often want to engage in boisterous play, rough and tumbling etc, we encourage and support this within appropriate boundaries.If they are play fighting with things etc they usually play with dragons, knights, goblins etc but it is all fantasy play. Friends children 2, 4, & 7 play very 'real' war - children have armies that represent turkey, russia, germany, syria etc. they blow up terrorists and terrorists blow them up (in the play way!). I have a real problem with my children playing in this way with so many conflicts going on in the world and I have a real problem with turning this into a game for sport and fun. It just sits really uncomfortably with me and makes me question what we are teaching our children about the wider world and almost mocks these horrendous issues. I want to talk to friend to say I don't want my children being encouraged to play in this way and when together can we focus on other games, but need to do it in such a way that does not cause offence?

At least they aren't playing 'drug lords' like the kids next door to my mum!

Seriously though, I agree with posters up thread - play is just kids making sense of the world. It's not going to turn them into warmongers. They will consider their ethical position on violent conflict when they are much older and I doubt playing soldiers when they were young will have any bearing on this. I'm a pretty hardcore pacifist myself (I've done lots of Campaigning for peaceful resolution / registered a statement of conscience / wear a white poppy etc) and I wouldn't stop my dd playing war / guns etc.

Kids are probably more vulnerable to having war and conflict normalised when they are a bit older. I'd keep an eye out for things like military visits to schools / cadets groups etc if you were concerned about this sort of thing.

This thread has made me unclench and consider giving in and buying him one for his birthday.

DS6 and his friends have Nerf guns. Having watched them play I think they're pretty good for teaching teamwork and strategic thinking and they also get a tonne of exercise playing. When they first get them they all just run amok and try to cap each other. Then they go on to more sophisticated "team" games, where they actually start to develop quite complex strategies for drawing out or trapping the other team, plus some good old fashioned espionage. My rules are no aiming at the face and no close range.

Keyser that sounds encouraging. We've a big back garden, and ds loves being outside, so maybe we could tell him outdoor use only to start with? Now to keep picking away at dh, who is dead against them.

When I was 12 - old enough to have grown out of pretend games really - it was the height of the weapons of mass destruction hysteria leading up to the Iraq War and the "war on terror" in Afghanistan. I remember one time I had a friend round and we set up all my wooden Jenga blocks to make a middle eastern village. We used some worry dolls as Osama Bin Laden's wives. Then we chucked random stuff at the village pretending to bomb it. I can remember it vividly - two gentle, geeky, fairly intelligent 12 year old girls playing a stupid boisterous war game in my bedroom!

Looking back it was really immature but I remember being absolutely petrified of a chemical/biological attack because it was all over the news every day and they made it sound like such a real and scary threat. I think playing that idiotic war game with my friend was a way of making light of it and turning something scary into something silly. I guess it's the childhood equivalent of immature political jokes on panel TV shows.