War Toys Research Articles

Social Role Theory: Stereotyped Expectations of Gendered Toys and its Implications in a Society

Purpose: This research examined the toy’s role in the development of children’s gender and sexuality perception. In this regard, the study investigated what kind of messages toys usually present to the kids regarding their normative behavior and practices in the society.
 Methodology: Purposive sampling of six entertaining videos from three YouTube channels were qualitatively analyzed and the study is carried out to prove the stance that toys are highly gendered and deliver the sexual and gendered message to the young children. Theoretical framework of social role theory was used for drawing the results that the society associate the particular behavior with the inherent ability of man or woman.
 Findings: Girls are being trained to have domestic skills through the kitchen set toys. Doll set toys are used to provoke the nurturing duties. While action-oriented toys of the young boys are always thrilling and exciting because the boys are naturally strong and their toys such as war gun is indicator of violence which is primarily associated with the men and it shows the passive nature of girl. Wheeled vehicles and gun war toys are associated with the man because they have inherently strong muscles and are supposed to be involved in action-oriented work.
 Conclusion: Girls have inherent childbearing abilities, caring nature and high patience level that is why they are considered submissive, caretaker and beauty conscious which is shown in toys such as dolls, makeup kits and kitchen set.
 Recommendation: Future studies can be conducted to scrutinize the impact of gendered toys particularly on the brain development in young boys and girls.

Boys, weapon toys, war play and meaning-making: prohibiting play in early childhood education settings?

ABSTRACT This article aims to summarise research on this topic; analyse, reflect on and discuss earlier research on play and learning using a few empirical examples; and determine what constitutes an appropriate educational approach concerning war and weapon within an early childhood education and care (ECEC) setting. This is done by putting feminist theories on masculinity (Connell, 2005; Kimmel, 2008) beside social semiotic multimodal theories of meaning making and learning in order to try to understand the aspects in focus (Kress, 2010, Kress & Bezemer, 2016). The research question has been: How can boys’ creation and use of war toys and weapon play be understood in terms of meaning-making in an ECE setting? The boys in the two empirical examples that are presented in the article can be said to use elements of learning; they talk, discuss, explain, argue and create a play, around guns and cookery. One of the themes is acknowledged by the ECE institution, one of the themes not. How the modes are displayed can be related to the gender of the children whereas boys displaying war toys and weapon games don’t seem to fit into the context. Key words: war toys, war play, meaning making, early childhood education, multimodality, masculinity, gender

Goods for the Smallest Citizens: Consumption, Spaces, and the Material World of Toys in Early Soviet Ukraine

ABSTRACT This paper investigates toys and their consumer spaces as a part of the history of early Soviet childhood in Ukraine. Particular consideration is paid to the influence of communist ideology on determining a toy's role in children's upbringing. The study highlights the various spaces established in Ukraine for children's collective consumption and the material world of play, such as the children's branch of the central department store and the Palace of Pioneers. However, it has been shown that the low purchasing power of households and the underdevelopment of light industry made hand-made play items an inseparable element of children's material culture, as well as an important part of children's everyday consumption practices. In the 1930s, the growing tensions inside Soviet society, Europe, and around the world caused the militarization of childhood and raised the role of war toys.

Examination of toy preferences – play skills and aggression tendencies of 60–72-month-old children

The purpose of this research is the examination of toy preferences and play skills of 60–72-month-old children according to aggression tendencies. The study group of this research includes 307 people consisting of 60–72-month-old children continuing their kindergarten in Cukurova district of Adana and their parents. As data collection tools, ‘Personal Information Form’, ‘Informed Consent Form’ and ‘Toy Preference Form’ were prepared by the researchers to learn the toy preferences of the children after reviewing the relevant thesis. The ‘Aggression Tendency Scale’ and ‘Play Skill Scale’ were used. In accordance with the studies carried out, it is seen that the play skills of the participants differ according to the aggression tendency levels in all sub-dimensions of the aggression tendency scale and there is a negative interrelation. In addition to this, it is seen that the most preferred toys among the children with a high aggression tendency level in all sub-dimensions of the aggression tendency scale are the war toys. It is suggested to make attempts for the determination of the variables effective on the aggression tendency levels and play skills, realisation of more scientific researches regarding the issue of aggression that might have devastating results in social terms and the development of the play skills of the experts working with the children.
 
 Keywords: Toy preference, play skill, aggression tendency.

Ludic Geopolitics: children's play, war toys and re-enchantment with the British military – ESRC

Ludic Geopolitics: children's play, war toys and re-enchantment with the British military – ESRC

Encyclopedia of media violence

Does violence on a movie, TV, or computer screen or in a song lyric beget violence in the streets? What about aggression and violence in televised sporting events? What are the known effects of violence in the media on the developing mind of a young child? Do rating systems and warning labels help in the effort to keep overtly violent materials out of the hands of children or do they act as magnets? Where does violence in the media cross a line from legitimate entertainment and plot development to gratuitousness and even pornography? How do we define media violence, and just how much is there? What methodologies do behavioral scientists use to assess content and draw conclusions about effects, and how do we separate valid inferences from entrenched myths and assumptions? How should findings from research studies be translated into public policy? Students are able to explore these questions and more in the two-volume Encyclopedia of Media Violence. Entries examine theory, research, and debates as they relate to media violence in a manner that is accessible and jargon-free to help readers better understand questions from varied perspectives. From Aggression and Animated Cartoons to V-chips and War Toys, this work provides balanced, comprehensive coverage of this hot-button issue. Features & Benefits: 134 signed entries are available both in print and electronically; entries conclude with Cross-References and Suggestions for Further Readings to guide users to related entries and resources for further research. Although organized in A-to-Z fashion, a thematic Reader's Guide in the front matter groups related entries by topic to make it easier for users to locate related entries of interest. In the electronic version, the Reader's Guide combines with the Cross-References and a detailed Index to facilitate search-and-browse. Appendices provide student researchers with a Resource Guide (annotated lists of classic books, journals, internet resources in the field, regulations and rating schemes, etc).

Toys as discourse: children's war toys and the war on terror

War toys of different eras realize the dominant discourses of war of the time, and they do so in a way which allows children to enact these discourses and values in play. This paper examines war toys over the past 100 years before providing a detailed multimodal analysis of contemporary war toys distributed around the planet, mainly by global American corporations, which teach children about the importance of the quick decisive strike, the role of the team and the morality of technology. Through this they convey how conflicts are resolved in today's world, and why. Early on children are recruited not just into the war on terror but also the values of corporate capitalism. The paper ends by looking at some ethnographic data where children play with guns.

A GENDER PERSPECTIVE ON PEACE EDUCATION AND THE WORK FOR PEACE

This article offers a gender perspective on peace education and the work for peace. To what extent are girls and boys in our society being socialised equally or differently when it comes to learning how to care, empathise with others and engage in or endure violent behaviour? Why are women generally more likely than men to support conscientious objectors, and oppose war toys and war itself? Gender is a powerful legitimator of war and national security. As in other conflict situations around the world, gendered discourses were used in the US following 11 September 2001 in order to reinforce mutual hostilities. Our acceptance of a remasculinised society rises considerably during times of war and uncertainty. War as a masculine activity has been central to feminist investigations.

Editors' Introduction: Children's Culture and the First World War

Editors’ Introduction:Children’s Culture and the First World War Gills Stacy (bio) and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (bio) As the centenary for the First World War approaches, interest in how this conflict has been—and continues to be—articulated, represented, and interrogated has been growing steadily. Of all the wars in the twentieth century, this has been the one that has retained the strongest emotional pull on the popular consciousness. The figure of the solider-poet still remains a key part of our understanding of the conflict. One of the results of other wars—particularly the Second World War and the Holocaust—has been the widespread acknowledgment that wars are not only experienced by those on the front lines. How noncombatant and combatant (albeit often unacknowledged as such) women and children experienced the First World War has formed some discussion since the 1970s. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig's Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (1978) was one of the first projects to identify the ways in which the wartime experiences of women and children were articulated. More interest, however, has been paid to re-examining the history of women in wartime, from the essays in Margaret Higonnet et alia's seminal collection Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (1989) to Jane Potter's Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War, 1914–1918 (2005), than to the experiences of children and war. While Holocaust studies have recently foregrounded both the war experiences of children as well as writing the Holocaust for children, the First World War remains little studied by scholars of both war and children's culture.1 The essays in this special issue are concerned with how the war has been retold: how "the story of their war, in its local, particular, parochial, familial forms, can be told and retold" (Winter 40). In the telling and re-telling of the relationship between children and the First World War, it is revealed that the "construction of the narrative . . . is itself the process of remembrance" (40). In this way, these narratives produced during [End Page v] and after the war are just as much artifacts of war as are the trenches or Blackadder Goes Forth. The articles that make up this special issue are equally concerned with what occurred in children's culture during the war as with what has occurred in the century since. Andrea McKenzie's article examines the responses made by children to the war through their contributions to St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folk, a widely-circulating magazine for children in America. McKenzie argues that children's contributions forced the war, initially a subject suppressed by the editors, onto the magazine's main pages. She points out that, by the time of the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, writing by readers about the war had gained priority in the pages of St. Nicholas. In turn this caused a reversal by St Nicholas, so that by 1917, writing by readers about the war had gradually gained priority. In this case, reader autonomy suggests that the war was of direct concern to young people. Krista Cowman's piece is concerned with a reading of the foreigner in British novels written for children: Bessie Marchant's Molly Angel's Adventures (1915) and D. H. Parry's With Haig on the Somme (1917). Cowman argues that notions of Britishness are modelled in these texts, not only through the image of the British at war, but crucially through its civilians and the foreign "other." This articulation of British nationality is, for Cowman, key to reconstructing how the heroic was understood during the war. Margaret Higonnet's article focuses on French and Belgian children's picture books, drawing connections between the images therein and ways in which children were widely expected to absorb the conflict. Through investigations of several texts, she traces the ways in which war toys, specifically soldier and doll figures are "made" and "unmade" within each story. Each of these articles points to ways in which specific genres conceptualize the war as an ideological event for their child...

War Toys: Breaking and Remaking in Great War Narratives

Children's picturebooks about war explore the encounter with death through the animation, destruction, and mending of symbolic toys. To empower the child caught in the machinery of war and loss, these stories oscillate between breaking and remaking, as they articulate cycles of adventure and return, explosive victories and traumatic suffering. By layering verbal and visual narratives, as well as inversions in the relationships of power, some stories invite complexly ironic readings. Animals mediate between human and inhuman, and codes of size evoke latent vulnerabilities. Toys perform cultural work that includes the reinscription of disrupted gender roles and the naturalization of a social order that depends upon disorderly violence.

Varia: Kriegsspielzeug und aggressive Spiele. Eine Follow-up Studie an Grundschulkindern 1985 und 2002

No AccessVaria: Kriegsspielzeug und aggressive Spiele. Eine Follow-up Studie an Grundschulkindern 1985 und 2002Gisela Wegener-SpöhringGisela Wegener-SpöhringSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:Jan 2019https://doi.org/10.7788/bue.2005.58.2.221SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverVolume 58Issue 2June 2005 ISSN: eISSN: HistoryPublished online:January 2019 PDF download

George F. Kennan as Represented by Chuck Jones: Road Runner and the Cold War Policy of Containment (1949-1980)

Chapman | George F. Kennan as Represented by Chuck Jones: Road Runner and the Cold War Policy of Containment George F. Kennan as Represented by Chuck Jones: Road Runner and the Cold War Policy of Containment (1949-1980) Roger Chapman TheAmerican television cartoon series RoadRunner and Coyote (1949-1980), created by Chuck Jones, should be regarded as a Cold War cultural text. Some of the episode titles betray the Cold War connection: "Guided Muscle" (1955), "War and Pieces" (1964), "Rushing Roulette" (1965), and "Sugar and Spies" (1966). In the following analysis, I attempt to uncover the "structure offeeling"1 that permeates this cartoon animation , arguing thatitis inharmony withwhatwas the viewpointofGeorgeF . Kennan, one oftheleading architects oftheUS ColdWarpolicy ofcontainment. This structure offeeling is related to ideology, in the sense thatit is about "a system of fundamental, value-laden beliefs thatexplain andjustify apreferred domestic political order (and often, by extension, an international order)."2 The interpretation I offer aboutthis workis thatit served as a "manic moral fable"3 to explain andjustify America's aim to "contain" the Soviet Union. Cartoon animation has too often been neglected in film studies ,4 and virtually ignored by historians. There is perhaps the tendency to equate cartoon shows with child's play, even though it is quite obvious that such programming is laden with ideas and messages that are above the understanding of the average young person . In his analysis of war toys, James Combs perceptively notes that "popular play with war toys is an aesthetic experience that includes the potential for politically-relevant learning."5 Certainly the same could be said forchildren viewing certain animation films. But regardless of the young viewers' aesthetic experience, cartoon productions are created not by children but by adults. Consciously orunconsciously, producers ofanimationfilms infuse their works with adult meanings that are ideological. According to Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, all films are political in nature because they are determined by the ideology in which they areproduced.6 Iffilmmaking, based on the "reality" wrought by a camera, is considered by its very nature ideological, then it stands to reason that an animation film, based on drawings, should also have political overtones. Indeed, years prior to the debut of RoadRunnerand Coyote there were times when cartoon programs proved to be highly politicized. Thepoliticizing ofAmerican cartoon animation dates back to at leastWorldWar ?, when the character Bugs Bunny served as a type ofnational mascot. In "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips" (1944) and "Herr Meets Hare" (1945), the rabbit figure fought against the Japanese and the Germans, respectively.7 Prior to America's involvement in that conflict, an episode of the Porky Pig Show satirized the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union by characterizing the two countries as feuding hillbillies. In that episode, "NaughtyNeighbors" (1939), PetuniaPigMartinand Porky (the Real McCoy) were depicted as making a less thanconvincing peace.8 Such earlier works established a precedent for how some American animators would respond to the ColdWar. One lingering trend that had been developed by Warner Bros, was the chase cartoon, which Joe Adamson describes as a "series of two character battles in a milieu in which passersby are conspicuously absent."9 Examples of such conflict duos inelude Sylvesterthe Catversus TweetyBird, Foghorn Leghorn versus Henry Hawk, Elmer versus Daffy Duck, and Elmer versus Sylvester. Beginning in 1948, coinciding with the early ColdWar years, there was the debut of Marvin the Martian, a space alien who was determined to blow up planet Earth on a whim, but fortunately there was Bugs Bunny to stop him.10 (This was a popular approach to the Cold War, depicting thecommunistthreatas onparwith an alieninvasion.11 ) In such cartoon dramas the world is a stage where two characters are at conflict, but the moral of each episode is that the aggressor always loses. Bugs Bunny, an animation character that reached its height of development under Chuck Jones, was cast as a lover of peace who, through no fault ofhis own, sometimes had to fight. In other words, Bugs Bunny was the "good guy," presumably like Uncle Sam, who never starts conflicts but sometimes has to finish them. Chuck Jones had precise ideas about his Bugs Bunny, which were quite ideological: My...

War Toy Play and Aggression in Dutch Kindergarten Children

AbstractThe play behavior of 54 four to seven‐year‐old Dutch children in the presence of a standard set of war toys and neutral toys was related to five groups of variables, i.e., parental attitude, possession of war toys at home, the habitual aggressiveness of the child in daily life, the characteristics of the toys themselves, and the play situation. Real object‐ or person‐oriented aggression was rare and was not related to play with the war toys. Suppression of aggression by the experimental situation seemed unlikely. During play, the levels of involvement and fantasy were generally high. Regularly, playful fighting was observed, differentiated as Make‐Believe‐Aggression and Rough‐and‐Tumble. These two Play ‘Aggression’ factors, and Real Aggression, could be predicted from other variables, principally from gender, the influence of session partners, play involvement, type of war toy used and parental attitude.

War: some psychological causes and consequences

Acts of individual aggression can not be ascribed simply to aggressive motivation: to understand their aetiology it is necessary to come to terms with ontogenetic factors acting early in life, predisposing factors, and eliciting factors, and the relations between them. Intergroup aggression involves also further principles of group dynamics. The term 'war' includes a broad spectrum from large scale intergroup conflict to international war. It is best seen as an institution, with a large number of constituent roles: the incumbents of each role are motivated primarily by the duties and rights associated with it. Thus war is not caused by individual aggressiveness, but may cause individuals to be aggressive. Group dynamics are important at several levels of complexity. In spite of its horrors, war is still sometimes seen as an acceptable means for resolving disputes. Factors that contribute to this include everyday issues (e.g. war literature, war toys), pervasive cultural factors (e.g. some uses of religion, nationalism), and the military–industrial–scientific complex. The consequences of war can not be fully indicated by figures for killed and wounded, for the psychological consequences may be severe and longlasting.

Cold War Toys at the Strong Museum

Cold War Toys at the Strong Museum

War Toys, War Movies, and the Militarization of the United States, 1900-85

Various themes in the scholarly literature have argued that an entrenched military is able to maintain its level of influence through the manipulation of perceptions of a hostile environment. While I argue that any alleged manipulation is generally not carried out under the guise of conscious `security policy', there is some evidence that the perception of an international threat can be and is maintained through the use of the media and entertainment outlets. Using the prevalence of war toys and war movies as indicators of societal symbols, I find that there is a consistent pattern between: (a) the trends of militarization in the USA, (b) public attitudes toward military spending and the expectation of a future war, (c) the popularity of war toys and movies, and (d) press reporting with pro-military themes. The correlation between war movies and societal militarization is 0.83; war toys and militarization 0.74; and press reporting with pro-military themes and militarization 0.44. These patterns appear to hold in the USA over the first 85 years of the 20th century, and not only lend credence to those arguments that suggest that a threat need not be existential for the military to remain `well prepared', but also point to areas that could help facilitate long-term demilitarization efforts.

Attitudes of Parents Toward War Play in Young Children

A questionnaire on attitudes toward war play was given to 316 Italian parents and 84 English parents of children aged 2 to 6 years. In both cultures, boys were significantly more likely to engage in war play, either social or solitary—most commonly weapon play, but also play with combat figures and acting out a combat role. Parental attitudes, television, and peers (including older siblings), appeared as common sources of influence. Parents expressed a range of views about how to respond to war play, varying from discouraging it (more common if their children did not engage in war play), to allowing it with limits, to allowing it unconditionally. There was more of a consensus that war toys should not be allowed in school and that playgroup supervisors and teachers should try to turn war play toward more constructive ends. Analysis of a range of attitudinal scales confirmed a general dimension of restrictiveness-permissiveness with regard to war play activities, linked to attitudes about rough-and-tumble play (R & T) and pretend play in the Italian sample but not in the English sample.

Review of Who's Calling the Shots? How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys.

Review of Who's Calling the Shots? How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys.

Fallen soldiers: reshaping the memory of the World Wars

Millions were killed and maimed in the senseless brutality of the First World War, but once the armistice was signed the realities were cleansed of their horror by the nature of the burial and commemoration of the dead. In the interwar period, war monuments and cemeteries provided the public with places of worship and martyrs for the civic religion of nationalism. The cult of the fallen soldier blossomed in Germany and other European countries, and people seemed to build war into their lives as a necessary and glorious event - a proof of manhood and loyalty to the flag. Ultimately there was even a process of trivialization, with light comedies, war toys, and battlefield tourism becoming popular. Tracing wartime experience from the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam, Professor Mosse's chilling study explores why mankind has drawn the sting of death from modern war and transformed it into an acceptable, even sacred, event.

What to do about war toys: The Swedish experience

What to do about war toys: The Swedish experience