Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne, in this three-part series on gunplay and boys. You know, one of the other pieces to understanding what's happening with this high velocity type of gunplay that boys tend to seek out is that of connecting to friends, that of desperately wanting to have friends and connections. It's normal, of course, and it's really natural that boys and girls, of course, are looking for friendship and looking to connect.
But what happens very often these days, because children are tending to live more and more isolated lives, we tend to live in more suburban settings where we live apart from each other, we tend to not have neighborhood games anymore, we tend to have fairly carefully controlled playdates. We also are becoming isolated from our extended family and the children's cousins and so on. All these things just are.
They're not seeking to portion blame. It's just such a part of modern life that children spend more and more time, in a sense, away from each other and not in an unstructured way, just simply being together. And this is happening at school as well, with more and more structured activity.
And as I mentioned in previous parts of this series, recess is becoming less and much more highly structured as well. So even at school, there isn't the kinds of connections as more and more schoolwork becomes pressured and becomes about high-stakes testing and regular testing. And the push is on, and then large amounts of time, even for young children, given for homework.
And so the time, not only the time that they have available to them is becoming less, but that of its very nature means they're connecting less. The actual being able to be with someone, know someone, have a really good friend, just simply be together, that is becoming more and more difficult for boys in this day and age. And added to that, again, is the amount of time given to screens.
Because screens are virtual connections. Even if they're on social networking or they're gaming with other kids online, it's not a real connection. It's not looking someone right in the face.
It's not rolling, tumbling, playing, building, and really building. As we know, it's a virtual thing that is not real. So what happens when kids come together is that they look for this intensity of connection.
And right into that sweet spot, right into the answer of that, the answer to all that, is gunplay. Because of the intensity of the interchange that happens in gunplay. There's no mistaking it.
Gunplay brings kids into a very dynamic relationship with each other. There's the shouting, the tumbling, the screaming, the getting up, the arguing, the goofiness, the laughter. When you see it going on, it's kids getting a little bit out of themselves, for sure.
But it's also an intensity of connection. Their faces are flushed. They're sweaty.
They are out of breath. And there's just this intensity, almost a desperation, that I see in boys when they gunplay. Because they're seeking something that is very understandable and very normal and healthy.
But they're seeking it in a way that spills over into having very little space in it. When I watch kids trying to connect in this way, they're connecting to a part of themselves that is more the hyper part or the aggressive part. Even though they do connect, there's so much more to a little boy than all that aspect of themselves.
There's the creative self. There's the gentle boy. There's the helpful boy.
There's the boy who loves nature and all the things that he notices. All these things are a part of boyhood and a part of friendships and learning how to... There's one little boy who has this amazing connection to nature. He can show another boy how to do that, how to sit very still and watch those dragonflies or how to do myriad things within nature.
But that is much more low-velocity play. And low-velocity, gentle play is very difficult if there's not that kind of... if there's a desperation to connect. And it worries me that boys are starting to see only that side of each other when this aggressive high-velocity play, which gunplay is certainly central to, becomes habitual, becomes a habit.
That's what kids do when they get together. Rather than boys really seeing a much more nuanced and more balanced side to each other. So you imagine these boys growing up as the years roll on.
How do they see each other then as older boys, then as teens, and as men? Do they see manhood and men as being nuanced, multilayered, subtle? Or if we don't allow them to develop these kinds of more subtle connections, will they see each other as harsh and ultimately someone to be competitive and aggressive towards? The whole picture of manhood for me is on the line here. So again, allowing children more time, allowing them more connection, just time to connect. Pulling back on the amount of screen time they spend, because screens are just time bandits.
How many of us have disappeared into the land of screens and computers and phones only to emerge an hour or two later saying, wow, where did that time go? Well, it's precious, and it's really especially precious for little boys to be able to have that time to connect with each other in a gentler or full-on creative. It might not be gentle. It might be really creative, full-on construction of forts or tree houses or whatever it is, but that kind of connection is what our children crave.
And when we give them space to do that, to truly connect, then the gunplay likewise begins to fade because the need for it is no longer as urgent. Okay, I hope that's more good food for thought and another solution. Okay, bye-bye now.
