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Knimrod
12-10-2005, 05:48 PM
Discouraging a behavior may have opposite effect
By GREGORY RAMEY
Cox News Service
Monday, December 05, 2005

DAYTON, Ohio — The mother of 5-year-old Drew recently asked me how to discourage her son's "preoccupation with violence." Upon further questioning, she reported that Drew gets along well with his brother, is doing great in school and has lots of friends.

Her concern focused on the fact that since he was 3 years old, Drew has been fascinated with guns. When he first asked for a toy squirt gun, Mom informed her son that guns were not allowed in their house. She told him how bad and dangerous they were, and cautioned him to never play with them.

After listening numerous times to his mom's lectures, this little guy did what any typical 5-year-old boy would do. He made a gun out of his Lego blocks. After many reprimands, his mom took his Legos away. This was but a minor inconvenience, as Drew simply walked around his yard until he found the perfect wooden branch that looked like a gun.

After more lectures and punishment, Drew finally learned to stop using things as guns. When playing cops and robbers, he simply held his hand in the shape of a gun and shot the bad guys. This boy's "preoccupation with violence" was really caused by a well-meaning mom who was unintentionally encouraging the behavior she wanted to stop.

Mom felt that playing aggressive games with toy guns would lead to violence with real guns. She was wrong. There is absolutely no connection between playing with a water pistol at age 5 and later aggression. My advice to this mom was to buy Drew a toy gun, and then patiently tolerate hours of fantasy play about the good guys shooting the bad guys.

Fantasy play among young children is normal and developmentally appropriate. This is a time when children imitate superheroes and take on magical powers. They fly around the room with a cape, dress up in Spider-Man clothes and lift heavy objects with no effort. It's called fantasy and is perfectly normal.

Teen violence is a serious issue, but using a toy gun as a child does not cause such problems. Adolescent violence is more related to teens who have poor impulse control, low frustration tolerance and minimal problem-solving skills. Spend more time teaching your child how to deal with real-life problems in a peaceful way rather than being concerned about the toys in the closet.

I've found that a balanced and moderate approach is usually successful in dealing with most common childhood problems. Parents seem to get into difficulty when they adopt an extreme approach that overemphasizes the behavior they want to discourage. Parents who want to minimize their children playing video games or watching TV may only inadvertently stimulate such interest if they completely prohibit such activities.

Our influence over our children begins to wane when they first leave home to visit a friend or spend time with a baby sitter. Our job is to prepare them for when we are not there to correct and supervise their behavior. Exposing them to things at home helps them better deal with situations when we are not around.

Be careful of adopting extreme positions — more often than not, they have the opposite effect of what you intended.


Gregory Ramey is a child psychologist and vice president for outpatient services at Children's Medical Center of Dayton. To ask questions, go to the Ask an Expert link at www.childrensdayton.org.

Link to article (http://www.journal-news.com/featr/content/shared/living/stories/FAMILY_WISE_1205_COX.html)