Evolve Education to launch gun safety kits for preschoolers

A child playing with a fake gun. Evolve Education says the gun safety kit has been developed particularly for about 40 rural preschool centres in areas where hunting is common.Photo: Getty Images

One of New Zealand's biggest child-care chains is launching cardboard-cutout guns and targets to teach gun safety rules to preschoolers.

Evolve Education, which runs 130 child care centres, including Little Wonders, plus the Porse and Au Pair Link home-based companies, says the gun safety kit has been developed particularly for about 40 rural preschool centres in areas where hunting is common.

"This is very much around communities where little boys will go hunting with dad in the hunting season and it's part of life,'' chief operating officer Fay Amaral said.

But Dr Sarah Alexander, of the early childhood advisory group Child Forum, said she was shocked by the kit, which will be available to download free online internationally.

"For the first time in New Zealand we'll have a large early childhood organisation that has declared itself to be pro-gun,'' she said.

Evolve's gun safety kit, which will be available online at gunsafeforkids.com, includes:

• Shooting targets for children to cut out, colour in and shoot at.

• Colourful drawings of guns for children to cut out and play with.

• Toy gun licences with space for a child's name and signature.

• A cartoon book on gun safety rules in child-friendly language.

All the materials include three rules:

• "We never point toy guns at people, pets or ourselves''.

• "We only point toy guns at targets''.

• "Only grown-ups can open the gun safe''.

Ms Amaral, who immigrated in 2016 from South Africa where she ran an entertainment business before moving into education, said Evolve was asked to develop the kit by its Little Wonders child care centres in South Canterbury and Otago.

"In those communities in particular there is quite a lot of deer hunting and duck hunting,'' she said.

"And secondly, a lot of young children do make-believe gun play all the time.''

She said the online kit was actually developed by the local branch of the New York-based public relations firm Y&R, formerly Young & Rubicam, and Evolve did not pay for it.

"Y&R have developed the materials. They have worked alongside, as we have, some pretty prestigious and influential figures such as Nathan Wallis and Nigel Latta,'' she said.

Wallis, a former early childhood lecturer at Canterbury University who now runs his own company X-Factor Education, said he was not paid to endorse the kit but he thought it was "a great idea''.

"I know someone personally who shot their brother as a child and killed him,'' he said.

Latta was not available to comment but Evolve said he described the kit as "a great initiative which will teach kids important safety tips and good behaviours in a really fun way''.

Dr Annette Henderson, an Auckland University psychologist specialising in preschoolers who was asked to review the kit, said the approach was age-appropriate.