Are We Teaching Our Children to Kill?

It said that by the age of 14, the average child will have seen over 41,000 simulated deaths!

I've been thinking about that and I have no idea how anyone could have come up with that figure. But, I do believe that our children are seeing far, far too many deaths, both simulated and real. So many, in fact, that death and the taking of life are becoming, to them, a very normal part of living.

Think about it. With TV, the internet, movies and computer games our children are bombarded with death and killing.

We are shocked when a kid takes a gun to school and kills other children or adults.

Why does that shock us when that's all they see all around them. How many parents bother to govern what their children watch? Does it occur to us that if we let our children play games where they kill their opponent, they might think that is the way it is in real life? Or do we just assume that they will know the difference? They can't know the difference if we don't teach them.

We need to get more in tune with our children. We need to start paying attention to them.

If a child has a problem that they just don't know how to handle and their answer for it turns out to be to get a gun and kill the source of their problem, how could it have been prevented?

When that happens, I've heard many people say that the child should not have had access to a gun. Very true. But there's more to it than that.

I grew up in the country where everyone hunted, everyone had guns and ammunition in their house. And, believe it or not, those guns and ammo were right out in the open, usually hanging on a gun rack made of deer hooves... But, none of us kids would have ever thought that taking one of those guns and killing someone was an answer to a problem. We were taught that you do not kill people. Period.

But, more than that, we were taught to respect. We were taught to respect our parents, our teachers, other people's property, each other, and life in general. We knew that death meant the end of everything. Life had a lot to offer us and being dead was not something to be desired. And killing something other than an animal for food was not even considered.

We were taught to take responsibility for our actions. If we did something bad, we were punished. In today's world, those punishments would most likely be considered child abuse, but they worked! And they worked well! Today almost every punishment is considered child abuse, and as a result, our children are growing up with the idea that bad behavior will, most likely, go unpunished.

So, now, a child takes a gun to school and shoots someone. He shouldn't have had access to the gun, everyone says. Very true. But how about.... He should have been taught that killing is not the answer.

If we, the parents, don't teach our children that killing is not the answer to a problem, how are they supposed to know it? They are young. They are inexperienced. They see killing every day on TV. They play computer games where they kill their opponent. They have access to the internet where they can be subjected to anything. The movies they watch are filled with killing. So how could they NOT think that killing is an answer?

There is an excellent article written in 1998 by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman about the ways we are allowing our children to be trained to kill.

http://www.killology.com/article_trainedtokill.htm

In the article, Lt. Col. Grossman explains how the military and police departments train people to kill and how we are allowing our children to get that same training through TV, movies and games.

One way we are training them is through "desensitization". They see so much brutality and killing in their lives that it is not a big deal for them. It becomes "normal" instead of being horrifying to them.

The "classical conditioning", he explains, is where our children learn to associate violence with pleasure through movies, TV and computer games. He states: "After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school. "They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop." He goes on to say that "Television violence by itself does not kill you. It destroys your violence immune system and conditions you to derive pleasure from violence."

This classical conditioning is also in effect with computer games. The child kills his opponent, he feels euphoric. He is happy. He is being conditioned to feel pleasure by killing.

Interactive video and computer games teach killing by the "Operant Conditioning" method, which is stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response, over and over again. Enemy pops up, fire! Enemy pops up, fire! Enemy pops up, fire! When playing a game, that doesn't seem harmful, but then we have a child who has gotten a hold of a gun and another child who has been harassing him pops up... fire! Even if he only intended to show the gun around or even scare the other child with it, his conditioning may cause him to pull the trigger.

I was horrified to find my step son, just back from his second tour in Iraq, playing a computer game of soldiers hunting and killing Iraqis. When I asked him about it, he said, "Hey, you gotta stay in practice!"

Lt. Col. Grossman also explains how children (and adults) can get sucked into the "fame" aspect of the whole thing. He says, "No matter what someone has done, if you put his picture on TV, you have made him a celebrity, and someone, somewhere, will emulate him." I, personally, find that totally scary, but I think it is true.

If a child feels "invisible", he might just decide that the way to become "visible", to show everyone around him and the world that he is somebody is to get on TV and to get on TV, he might decide to do what someone else did and shoot someone! A stretch of the imagination? Maybe, but there have been a whole lot of school shootings in the last few years and it seems that every time one happens, another one happens not too long after. Coincidence?

Are we teaching our children to kill? Children are killing a whole lot more than they did years ago, so something has changed since then.

We, as parents, need to take a closer look at our children's outside influences. We need to teach them that killing is not the answer and how to make wiser choices.

We need to get more involved in our children's lives so that we are not the parent who gets the phone call saying our child has shot someone.