Parenting dilemma: when is a toy a toy?

For Christmas this year, Anna asked for a set of Nerf Phoenix Lazer Taggers. As described by the manufacturer Hasbro: "Tag or be tagged in this intense, real-life lazer combat game!" I have no idea what it means to be in "real-life" lazer combat, but it involves these things called "taggers" which, to the untrained eye, look like toy guns.

Lazer tag works like this: each player gets a lazer gun which has settings for the "strength" of the lazer (10 or 25), the level of "ammunition" (up to five bars, like a cell phone signal), a "shield" which protects you from the other player's shots (but saps your own shield strength and ammunition) and a reload button.

Every time you hit the sensor on the other player's lazer gun, you diminish her strength and ammunition until, finally (well, actually kind of quickly when we play), they are out. Point. Aim. Shoot.

So, the dilemma comes to this.  In this sensitive time about gun violence, are toy guns -- lazer taggers, for example -- appropriate for children? Should we worry about Tamir Rice scenarios? Will we be judged as bad parents? Will our children be warped by holding the cold plastic in their hands?

I remember a similar dilemma in the girls' earlier years when they were eaten by the Disney Princesses. To feed the bedazzled, glass-slippered beasts or not? The girls loved those princesses. They loved the gowns. They loved the movies and the music. They loved the dolls and all the attendant merchandise. And, yes, for a period of two or three years, we totally indulged them.

Here's the thing: the danger of the princess storyline is that the girls grow up thinking that they are disempowered, waiting for a fairy godmother or a prince to save them or complete their lives, reaching for that golden ring of marriage and happily ever after. That is -- as every post-feminist mother will tell you -- a set up for disemboweling a girl's self esteem and years of therapy.

But that's not the game our girls were playing. When they played princess, they were the Center of the Universe. They commanded. They were Chief Executives with a tiara and they were not waiting around for anyone. The princess world is what you bring to it.

The same may be true for our daughters and lazer taggers. The girls aren't imagining that they are holding real guns or shooting to harm anyone, much less maim or kill. The toys are just that -- toys with which they are running around on the beach and in the park and around the house (okay, that's dangerous, but only because Grandma has some fragile antiques). This is a game with the emotional resonance and adrenalin rush of an old-fashioned game of tag or chase, but played with plastic guns rather than slapping your friend silly.

So, Anna got the lazer taggers, and we've been playing with them, and we've been having the conversation about what they mean or don't mean. For example, we don't let our littlest cousins play because they aren't really old enough to understand the difference between "pretend" and "real" yet. And in Santa Barbara, we thought it best to play with them discretely since (as you may recall) that city recently had a tragic mass shooting by a crazy person. Indeed, it seemed both insensitive and possibly imprudent to play in public spaces, even with the obviously toy-like bright gold and turquoise plastic guns. (Instead, we played near the abandoned tannery pit ruins of the old mission).

We know -- and are rather saddened -- that this kind of play isn't for everyone. We are thankful that for our family playing is just playing.