Buzz Lightyear & Human Nature

My kids love Buzz Lightyear.

I have two boys (3 & 4) and they know Toy Story & Toy Story 2 backwards. They also love "shooting" each other and "putting fire on" each other; that is, they pretend...obviously. There's definitely potential there for them to become homocidal, pyromaniacal psychopaths, if their imagination is anything to go on. But how did they get like that?

I have my fair share of violent video games (Xbox: Fable, Halo 2, Splinter Cell, Dark Alliance 2, etc.; PC: Battle for Middle Earth, Call of Duty, Enemy Territory, etc.) but I never play those games in front of my boys. In fact I rarely play them at all these days (work, family & a crappy public rail system leaves little time for playing games; and now I've started blogging - what's wrong with me?). They love playing Midtown Madness on Xbox but that's not violent (that's the only Xbox game simple enough for them to play that I'll let them play). They've seen all the standard Pixar kids DVDs - Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Ice Age, Dinosaurs, etc. and my wife & I have taken them to the movies to see a couple kids movies (Finding Nemo & Robots from memory). I guess some of those can be a bit rough in places, but they're not exactly the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Towering Inferno.

They also both go to daycare a couple days a week. They do the whole role play "I'll be Buzz, you be Woody" thing, although recently it's been "I'm mean Buzz [the 2nd Buzz from Toy Story 2], you're Spiderman". They've never even seen spiderman! Ah...the power of merchandising. I used to think that perhaps all the kids at daycare (well, the boys at least) run around shooting each other with invisible guns and that's where they got it from. Perhaps.

But my latest theory is physiological - that God preprogrammed that behaviour into our brain chemistry. There's no denying that there are substantial neurological differences between men & women. What and how we think is not entirely influenced by society & the experiencial data we absorb. People have, in greater or lesser degrees, a predefined disposition that directs our thoughts. (This, in essence, has been the subject of many an in-depth philosophical debate of greats such as Descartes, Kant, Hume, Plato...)

Obviously the friends our children come into contact with and interact with influence their behaviour but I think it's inevitable that little boys will shoot each other with imaginary guns. That doesn't mean that they're going to become serial killers when they get older, just that they're little boys. I'm not so naive as to think that passively experienced glorified violence has no affect on children. I'm in no way endorsing exposing children to violence in movies or games. I'm just saying I think there's more to it than that and a certain acceptance of human nature has to be arrived at before we can manage those tendancies in our kids and cultivate the qualities we want them to exhibit (kindness, gentlenss, sharing, confidence, self-control, patience, etc.).

Anyway, enough psycho theory babble for now. I'm sure my kids will be the subject of future blogs (especially since #3 is due in July).