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, like toy guns. But is there any science to back that up? Learn about play, parenting, and aggression in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here a question that's been troubling parents more
and more in an age when mass shooting seemed 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 article for Vogue,

(00:22):
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 voiced a similar sentiment.
He wrote, children should not have even cap pistols or
toy guns to play with because it teaches the wrong lesson.

(00:45):
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 twenty one. The company also

(01:05):
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 some studies suggest it may

(01:28):
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, a psychologist on the

(01:50):
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 midnighteteen 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

(02:10):
who played 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're 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

(02:33):
Goldsmith found that the toy guns produced a reliably higher
rate of antisocial 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

(02:54):
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.

(03:17):
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 real aggression, pretend aggression, ref and tumble play,

(03:41):
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

(04:01):
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

(04:23):
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 actual frustration and aggression,
with the queuing theory, in which toy guns and aggressive
play would act as cues and practice for real aggression.

(04:47):
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 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,

(05:11):
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 maybe cued and increased when children play more

(05:32):
with toy guns. It just didn't seem that anything 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

(05:55):
that showed the children who were more aggressive led to
parents using more corporal punishment over time 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

(06:15):
and thinking, and so I suspect that toy gun play
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 was written by
Patrick Jake Tiger and produced by Tyler Clang. If you

(06:37):
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