I can picture it now. I’ve stuffed the dudes into their car seats and driven home while answering forty-seven questions about why the moon is big when it was small last week. We pull into the driveway, I sit in the car for a moment and take a breath before checking my phone and loading everybody out. I remind them in a stern but loving voice that if they don’t take off their boots and hang up their coats that the hex I put on them will cause them to lose all of their hair slowly, but surely. Then I laugh it off hoping I don’t have to cover therapy bills in the near future.
Once we’re finally all inside they shed their gear and drop it in the hallway as they scatter off towards the living room. I glance down my war-torn hallway walls and sigh as I pick up the coats and toss them on the closet floor, reminding myself to hang them up properly later.
A bunch of boxes and baskets line one wall of our living room. A play kitchen stacked with shiny wooden fancy play food of ONLY the healthiest quality sits ignored. A sad looking naked doll sits in a shelf cubby atop a toy phone, race track and a few books. The kids head straight for the couch and begin jumping up and down like they’re trying to break the damn thing!
I tell them to go play with their toys and stop jumping on the couch.
My kids don’t know how to play with toys. They throw them at each other. They smash them into things. Occasionally they will pay attention to one single item for longer than twenty-four seconds. Cribs and beds have become the equivalent of a Gladiator Gauntlet. I don’t know if its just the fact that “boys will be boys” but my kids just don’t play with their toys.
I sit down with them, show them how to use the toys. We play together but even that doesn’t last. I can’t keep their attention as they pull more and more items out of the boxes, creating a beautiful mess of chaos on our floors that I will inevitably have to pick up later.
I have a theory. Stay with me, here.
Kids have too many toys. Toys for learning. Toys for imagination. Toys for puzzles and driving and riding. Toys for playing outside, toys for playing inside. My kids alone have at least 4 ride-on toys. Every birthday and visit we seem to get another toy added to the pile. At first, it was me. I will totally and wholly admit that. I bought any toy I thought my kid may want to play with for an extended period of time. Did they show exceptional interest in it at the store? In the cart it goes! I wanted to give my kids the best start and with millions of toys being marketed to me every day as the “one thing that could make my kid a genius” I couldn’t help but cave every once in a while!
When it comes to childhoods mine was fairly chaotic, but what I lacked in normalcy I made up for in gadgetry and toys. [Some] Very poor people have this weird habit of showering their children with gifts and things whenever they can to make up for the fact that for the most-part they don’t have much. Even kids in the worst of conditions (I’m not talking developing countries, here, just generic North American poor) seem to have plenty of things to tide them over.
I’m not saying it’s wrong — a bit misguided maybe, mostly on a societal level — but I do think it’s not a great place to be. I loved my toys as a kid, yeah, but I wouldn’t have missed them if they were gone.
I don’t want my kids growing up disrespecting their stuff, but they have so much of it I can see where it can start to seem… replaceable. We live in a very disposable society, some of that has to trickle down to our children and I think this is the first thing that does. Years ago kids only had a handful of toys and they cherished and loved those toys because they knew they were the only ones they’d get. Even at the time I was a kid a lot of families were much better at keeping a limit on all of the stuff.
I know it was bad when I was a kid, but now? It’s so so much worse. Kids who have Xboxes get Xbox Ones the next holiday because it’s the latest thing. Kid shows an interest in a Disney Franchise? Buy ALL the merchandise! Character shoes. Character backpacks. Character Jammies. Character mullet trimmer. When will it end?
Well… it ends with me! My kids are being scaled back to the bare minimum before they’re old enough to realize it. I’m going to start purging things they don’t use, things they break, putting away books and toys until they’re older and most importantly: I’m not going to buy my children another toy for a long long time. We are going to bring toys to kids who want them. We are going to bring them to donation centers. We are going to cash them in at consignment and see how much they’re worth. We are going to keep the few toys that can help my children’s imaginations grow and develop without them having to treat their brains like little toy slot machines to see what they want to play with for that split second.
Do you think kids have too many toys? Should parents limit their kid’s options for toys when they’re little? At what point should kids start buying their own gadgets/toys?
What is your “toy philosophy”?
3 Comments
I love this and am totally on your side! And not only because I don’t want you to put a hex on me that’ll make my hair fall out.
The toy thing has always been a HUGE argument with my wife and I. She came from a low income upbringing and now that we have kids, she wants to ensure that they have tons of crap for birthdays and Christmas. I came from an upper middle class household, and never got a ton of stuff. It was like one big thing and some small stuff, but I always appreciated everything I got. You are so right that the more kids get, the less they play with it. I want my kids to learn to appreciate what they get, not go into a toy coma because there’s so much crap that there’s no possible way for them to play with all of it anyway. This year, I’m suggesting that whatever extra toys we’re thinking about getting, we should still do it, just donate them to kids that don’t have any. Believe it or not, my little ones actually dig this idea.
Thanks for writing this post and validating one of my beliefs. That doesn’t happen often in my world!
Haha well thanks for appreciating my beef with toys. I think of all of the problems we have today — guns, drugs, Obama, they can all be attributed to too many toys as children. Okay, probably not. Likely not, even. But toys are evil.
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