It was meant to be a six year old boy’s quiet birthday party at the beach, but before you knew it, driftwood became guns, shells became, well, ‘ammo’ shells, boys built ‘cannonball’ piles from stones (thankfully not firing any) and hid behind them in an act of stealth to avoid the onslaught from the driftwood army. Without the aid of an expensive trip to the toy store, nature had lent itself to become army toys: an eclectic mix spanning decades of development in weaponry hardware.
This was a shocking revelation to the mother of the birthday boy, who does not allow guns for play, only swords (yes, let’s not get started on that debate)! Within seconds, his small wooden Excalibur had been inverted and, his crossguard now the trigger, he had swapped allegiance from the Round Table and, now allied with the driftwood army, was setting siege to the cannonball crew ….
The party was a huge success, lots of tired six year olds, all equitably victorious at some point or other in the proceedings. In fact, the only grumpy face was the anti-weapons system mother. Interestingly, her biggest gripe was not that, in the event, army toys (supplied by nature and at no extra cost) had formed the basis of a fun party theme, but the fact that her son had quickly shed the ‘rule’ imposed by his parents and joined the majority in firing his imagination in order to be able to fire an imaginary gun. It calls into question how successfully we can (or should) expect to impose our own preferences in such areas onto our children.
In this day and age, where most toys come to kids ‘ready made’, be it army toys, technological games systems, dolls and toy animals that “communicate” their needs, the need for the child to imagine is diminished by what is already given.
For the birthday boy, his previous learning had been that “guns are bad and not allowed”. On his birthday he learned to use his imagination (small step from here to major development of problem solving skills); to work co-operatively with others, to use stealth and planning and to test his own skills as commander or commanded – all valuable lessons for life, balancing anything he may have learned about the aggression or violence, that his mum was hoping to avoid by not buying army toys. There comes a point surely, where it is the child’s imagination that has to take precedence over the parents ideals – isn’t this what J.M. Barrie had in mind?
