Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This, these coming weeks, we're going to do something a little more unusual in that we're going to take a big question and break it down into three or four parts. And the big question that I think warrants this amount of time and focus is gunplay for boys.
Girls too can get involved in gunplay, of course, but typically gunplay is something that many parents have been concerned about over the years and have asked about. And I've, I've watched it carefully and I'd like to just roll out my thoughts about gunplay and boys and also what obviously what we can do about it. But one of the first things to do is, is to understand what's, what might be at the, at the root of all this.
In this first of four parts, I wanted to look at gunplay in terms of the imitative gesture that might be behind this. Now, what I mean by this is that when life is coming at kids fast, when there's a lot of hard stuff going on, when there's, when there's a lot of arrhythmical life, when, when, you know, kids find themselves, you know, here one day, there the next day, there's not much predictability to their lives. There is not much rhythm in terms of wake up times, bedtimes.
And then added to that, if they're going to play groups, kindergartens, schools, the pace of life often at school is fast. You know, there's a lot of transitions, there's a lot of kids in a relatively small, small amount of space. And things are really moving along in a way that many kids can't really, they can't sort of digest it.
And so there's a, there's a lot of spillage, there's a lot of spillover, because they just, there's, there's too much going on and the velocity of what's happening is too much for them to actually be able to assimilate. Now gunplay, if you, if you look at what it is, it's not, it's very, very seldom quiet. It's, it is also high velocity.
And that metaphor is, is perhaps close to being accurate in terms of velocity. It's fast, it's, it's, it's moving around, it's running, it's going for it, it's diving, it's shooting, it's yelling, it's shouting. And in one way, when I watch kids and boys with gunplay, it's usually of a same velocity or vibration or however we like to look at it.
What they're doing is just continuing on. Sometimes they're continuing on with a kind of pace and a volume of play that is just kind of walking right off and matching the day and what's going on inside them. Do you see that inside them emotionally is, is a lot of pace, is a lot of fastness, is a lot of stuff going on that is really moving, usually faster than what they can absorb.
Now, if something is going on inside a little boy that he can't assimilate, where does he send it? What does he do with it? Well, we know the answer to that. He'll play it out. He'll take it into play in order to be able to assimilate it, digest it.
That's so much of what play does. We all know that. We only have to think about difficult situations in kids' lives or funny little situations in kids' lives.
But if it's a difficult one and they go to the doctors and get a shot of some sort, they'll play that out for days, won't they? If they see an accident on the side of the road and it's disturbing and they saw a little too much and just couldn't be helped, but they did, they'll often play that out, won't they, for days? Well, the same is true on a deeper level, I think, with gunplay. When they're playing high-velocity games, they're playing out a high-velocity life and they're trying to make sense of it. And that's the first thing to understand, because when we do, there is an answer to what we can do about it.
Now, I'm not suggesting that all gunplay is bad, is something to be avoided at all costs, but there's aspects of it that are disturbing. And so one of the first things to do in terms of being able to handle gunplay and quieten it down is, of course, to quieten down their lives, is to look at adding more rhythm, having situations at home that are more predictable, quietening down schedules, not so many playdates, not so many shopping outings, not so much stuff going on, not so many sports clubs, whatever it is, but quietening that down. And also quietening down the information overwhelm, not so much screen media, not so much adult conversation, just giving them more decompression time.
Because all those things combined mean that the kids are being able to let off steam, they're coming back to a quiet place, to that place of decompression. And if we allow kids to decompress, it means that inwardly they'll settle down, of course, which means that outwardly their play settles down as well. There have been more parents than I can remember that have come back to me after this first little piece of advice of things need to be inwardly calmer if parents want their play, the children's play, to be outwardly calmer, that have come back and reported, well, that only took like a week or two, and this gun play that had become habitual had stopped.
And we didn't have to get out there and try and tell kids, well, we don't do that, because gun play often is disturbing to us, and it ramps up, and it's not just the gun play itself, is it? It's that it ramps up, and it ramps up, and have you noticed how often it ends in tears or arguments? It's because the boys are getting out of themselves, and it doesn't go anywhere good. And I find that that's just as worrisome to parents, because we know where this is going, when you hear that kind of voice, particularly around gun play. So, the key to this, initially, the deeper aspect of this, is to quieten down life in general for kids.
Then they won't need to actually play out something in such high velocity. Okay, more to come on this theme, but I hope we're off to a good start. Alright, bye bye.
Thanks for watching!
