I wonder how many new parents realize that their dewy, innocent little bundles might someday exhibit a cheerful bloodlust worthy of Genghis Khan. Not many, I’d venture. I know that it never occurred to me that my firstborn, Ned, might harbor a warrior’s soul somewhere under his onesie.

     During my pregnancy, I was entranced by the world of Waldorf and imagined a playroom filled with an abacus, silk scarves, and fleets of trucks made of ethically-harvested wood and powered entirely by fairies. But Ned had different ideas. As a very young, precociously verbal toddler, he would hold up a cocked finger and say, “Pa-tchoo!  Pa-tchoo! That my pa-tchooer, Mama!” We were baffled by the emergence of the patchooer, especially since, from the time he could speak, we had been determined to hide from Ned that “gee-you-enn-esses” even existed.

      “Whazzat?” he’d ask, pointing to Andrew’s nail gun during a tour of the woodshop. “That’s a nailer,” we’d say. 

     “Whazzat?” at the first sight of my hot glue gun. “It’s a gluer,” we’d reply. 

     “Whazzat? Whazzat?” during a bathroom repair. “A caulker,” he was told.

      Even Santa Claus backed us up. When Ned was three, he entered his obligatory pirate phase. Santa indulged him with a Playmobil pirate set that year, but respected our wishes and delivered one without firearms. (By this time we’d come to the mystifyingly illogical decision that swords were anachronistic and therefore okay.)  A few months later, Ned caught sight of the uncensored version at Target and the jig was up:  “What are THOSE things? Mine doesn’t have those!!!”

     Three years later, Ned’s fascination with weapons and mayhem has triumphed, and our days are filled with talk of pistols, machine guns, laser guns, missiles, and the occasional disintegrate-and-make-mom-invisible ray guns. We have undoubtedly lost our symbolic battle of the words, but it remains to be seen whether we will win the war. 

      Parents have different ideas about the specifics, but we all want to protect our kids from the world’s darkness and to make clear the distinctions between child’s play and adult violence. For this reason, I still refuse to buy Ned a toy gun, despite his frequent entreaties. He’s welcome to build one for himself out of the materials at hand, whether they be Legos, Tinker Toys or carefully-bitten toast. He can also play with his creation as long as no one feels uncomfortable or scared.  But I draw the line at anything that looks like a real gun, because real guns are dangerous and can hurt people.

      As he grows older, these kinds of limits seem more important, not less, because the stakes keep escalating, taxing our ability to provide both protective intervention and thoughtful explanations about why the world harbors such peril. Thanks to his newfound reading skills and our world history book, Ned now recognizes atomic mushroom clouds and WWII fighter planes. Thanks to NPR news lead-ins and his parents’ slowing reflexes, he knows about suicide bombers in Iraq. And, God help us all, thanks to another adult’s ill-considered comments about the state-mandated lockdown drills, he knows that bad people sometimes shoot kids at schools. It is a grim and painful catalog of knowledge for anyone, but for a six-year-old, it’s particularly heartbreaking. 

      In response, we are trying very hard to help Ned begin to understand that human violence carries hefty consequences, but need not be the norm.  When I play pirates, for instance, he knows that our battles must be “catch and release” affairs, with no pretend killing allowed.  We have banished all broadcast television and maintain strict control of the movie library. The original Star Wars films can’t be undone, but they’ve been mothballed for now, and the newer installments will not be happening for a very long while. (Meanwhile, Scooby-doo is always groovy.)  Perhaps most significantly, just a few months ago, we became members of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, hoping that in a humanist community our kids would learn firsthand about people’s capacity for enlightenment and peace.

     Above all, we are scrupulously honest with Ned. When he asks about things like atomic bombs, we provide basic, moral-infused explanations tailored to his level of understanding, but we’re also entirely able to tell him if something is too much for kids to know about, so that he should ask again when he’s older. For a child who has been demanding to know “whazzat” since before he could walk, he is amazingly accepting of that response. Despite his persistent curiosity, I think that he trusts us to protect him from knowledge that is too frightening.

      Sometimes we feel hopelessly caught in the tension between our moral convictions and a desire to embrace the “whole child,” including his choices about how he wants to play.  Ultimately, though, our message of respect and tolerance would be woefully undercut if we delivered it in a way that did violence to Ned’s own free will.  In the end, the best that we can do is to try to guide him toward a compassionate understanding of humanity’s inclination to deliver misery onto itself.  Given his questioning mind and his wide-open heart, he seems likely to reach that knowledge before too long, and all on his own.  And when he does, I suspect that he will gladly and willingly lay down his patchooer.

Leslie Watson is a freelance writer in Northeast Minneapolis.  She can be found online at www.thebusypen.com.