During a Toytime session, I noticed a child had brought his own toy, and a gun none the less, into the room and was holding the gun to a smaller child's head, and repeatedly shooting her. This was accompanied by sound effects and went on for over a minute. The mother of the small child was on the other side of the room drinking her coffee with friends, but the mother of the child with the toy gun was right there, yet did nothing to stop this action.
I approached the mother and asked politely if she could please ask her son to put his gun away, and said that we are not allowed to bring toys from home into the Toytime session. She replied that she didn't want to upset her child by making him give up the gun, as he had had a bad morning.
All the while, her son was continuing to shoot the little girl in the head with his fake gun. I wanted to talk about the morality of the situation and the fact that there were refugee families in the room, but I had to stick to solid ground, such as not bringing toys from home and not allowing any behaviour that could harm others or was culturally insensitive.
I then said to her that it was not appropriate for her son to use that object in this context performing that action. Still no success. What could have been a simple thing became very difficult as this lady refused to cooperate.
The mother said, Oh I don't like guns either.
And yet she allowed her child to pretend to kill someone in our session.
The mother said, I am supervising.
And yet she didn't pull the child's gun away from the little girls head.
There seems to be the feeling that anything goes at preschool sessions in public libraries. But the programs have boundaries and rules just like a school, preschool or any other facility for young children. This incident prompted me to revisit my Story Corner Guidelines and update them. You can't predict every single scenario, but you can build a strong set of guidelines that support you as facilitator to prevent people from thinking their child is the exception to the rules.
I will be bringing those guidelines in hand to my session at that branch next week, giving them out to every family and putting up posters in the room. The wording took a lot of deliberation, to sound positive and fun, yet firm.
Wow, that is such a difficult situation, especially as the carer was not responding to your request to abide by the guidelines. I think you probably would have been in your rights to have brought up the fact that guns could be triggering to other families (not just refugee families, either, I'm thinking).
ReplyDeleteAnother approach could have been to appeal to the child's sense of fairness, and to perhaps make a comment about how the other children might be jealous of the fact that one person got to bring a toy from home, and the others didn't. And if all else fails... there's always the distraction technique. :)