BrainStuff Classics: Does Playing with Toy Guns Lead to Violent Behavior?

Some parents and advocacy groups recommend against allowing children to play with toys that resemble weapons. But is there any science to back that up? Learn about play, parenting, and aggression in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/behavior/playing-with-toy-guns-lead-to-actual-gun-violence.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog obam here, but another classic
episode from our archive. This one deals with the sticky
psychological science of playtime. Kids use play to explore their
world and themselves. So is there danger in letting kids

(00:22):
play with toy versions of violent weapons like guns? Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren voge obam here. A question that's been
troubling parents more and more in an age when mass
shooting seem to occur with horrifying frequency, is should young
children be allowed to play with toy versions of the
weapons that are killing other kids and adults. In an

(00:44):
article for Vogue, writer Michelle Rui's described a conversation she
had with a fellow mother who asked, what are we
feeding our children in the metaphorical sense when we hand
them guns to play with? After a recent school shooting
in Indiana, a reader's letter to the Indianapolis Star voy
a similar sentiment. He wrote, children should not have even
cap pistols or toy guns to play with because it

(01:06):
teaches the wrong lesson. And here's a quote from a
Huffington's Post article by Wendy Kannar, a former teacher who
explains why our family doesn't allow toy guns, she said.
At least one retailer has already stopped selling some types
of toy guns. In February, when Walmart announced it would
raise the purchase age for firearms at its stores to

(01:26):
twenty one. The company also said that it would remove
from its website items resembling assault style rifles, including toys.
Walmart stopped selling actual modern sporting rifles, including the a
R fifteen back in. For all the anxiety and outrage
it stimulates, there's relatively little scientific research on the effect
that playing with toy guns has upon children, and although

(01:49):
some studies suggest it may be linked to aggressive behavior
in childhood, no clear connection has been established between childhood
play with toy guns and adult attitudes toward or propensity
for violence. Some psychologists who have done research on children
and toy guns think that parenting is a much more
important indicator of aggressive behavior. We spoke with Charles W. Turner,

(02:11):
a psychologist on the staff of the Organ Research Institute
who has more than forty years of experience conducting treatment
and prevention research on children, adolescents, and young adults with
behavior problems. Back in the mid nineteen seventies, he and
colleague Diane Goldsmith published one of the earliest papers on
the subject, in which they compared a group of children
who played with toy guns to another group who played

(02:33):
with toy airplanes and kids who played with other toys.
All were observed for signs of antisocial behavior, such as
aggression or rule breaking. Why the airplanes, Turner explains, the
purpose of the airplanes was to control for the fact
that you are introducing a novel toy. Is it the
novelty of the toy leading to the acting out, or
whether it's something specific about the gun. Turner and Goldsmith

(02:56):
found that the toy guns produced a reliably higher rate
of anti social behavior than the average of the toy
airplanes and the other toys, though the toy airplanes also
increased the rate of kids misbehaving as well. But today, Turner,
who moved on from what he calls hypothetical studies to
studying actual young offenders, cautions against reading too much into

(03:16):
his early work from a practical standpoint. He says it
would be hard to look at whether playing with guns
as a child affected attitudes as an adult. Based on
his own work as well as that of other researchers.
He suspects that playing with guns as a child is
one small part of a bigger picture of what leads
to adult aggressive behavior. It's a small, nearly trivial part.

(03:39):
He puts more weight on other influences, such as how
a family relates to a child and their pattern of interactions.
In a study published in the journal Early Education and
Development in researchers Malcolm W. Watson and Ying Peng observed
thirty six three to five year old children in free
play in a daycare center and coded their behavior for
the amount of reallygression, pretend aggression, ref and tumble play,

(04:03):
and non aggressive pretend play. They also had parents fill
out a questionnaire to gather data such as whether kids
played with toy guns at home mostly boys did, as
well as whether they watched TV programs with aggression and
the amount of physical punishment that parents used for discipline.
The researchers found that toy gun play, along with parental

(04:23):
punishment were associated with a higher level of real aggression,
though not with pretend aggression. We spoke via email with Watson,
who is the George and Francis Levin Professor of Psychology
at Brandeis University He said, there are so many factors
that act as antecedents to real aggression that this one
study could not evaluate the entire story. Various factors may

(04:45):
interact to increase the likelihood of aggression in children and
children developing long term aggressive tendencies. Watson explains the study
was designed to pit the cathartic theory of aggression, in
which aggressive fantasy play might reduce act will, frustration, and aggression,
with the queuing theory, in which toy guns and aggressive
play would act as cues and practice for real aggression.

(05:09):
He said, the more toy gun play that was used,
the more real aggression boys showed. In their preschool boys
showed much more toy gun play than did girls, and
probably because of this, there was no relation found between
toy gun play and real aggression in girls. Interestingly, we
also found that the more toy gun play that was used,
the less non aggressive pretend play, including pretend aggression, children showed,

(05:33):
and not aggressive pretend play is seen as a good
thing for children, he continued, So, in effect, there was
no evidence for a cathartic effect, but there was evidence
for a probable queuing effect playing with toy guns. Maybe
increased when some children already show more aggression, or reciprocally,
real aggression may be cued and increased when children play
more with toy guns. It just didn't seem that anything

(05:56):
good came from playing with toy guns. But Watson also
notes that the strongest factor that predicted real aggression in
preschoolers more than toy guns or watching violent TV, was
the amount and frequency of parents spanking their kids or
using other corporal punishment. Watson said, we have done subsequent
studies that showed the children who were more aggressive led

(06:19):
to parents using more corporal punishment over time, but that
the use of more corporal punishment led to even more
aggression in the children. Parental use of corporal punishment was
part of an ongoing negative spiral. He continued, I think
pretend play overall has a great influence on children's development
and thinking, and so I suspect that toy gun play

(06:40):
may have long term consequences. But I also suspect that
parental attitudes towards guns and also parents modeling of aggression
will have even stronger influences. Today's episode is based on
the article does playing with toy guns lead to later

(07:01):
acts of gun violence on how stuff works dot Com
written by Patrick J. Keiger. Rain Stuff is production of
I Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff Works dot Com,
and it's produced by Tyler Clang. For more podcasts my
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