 Toys and kids: they’re words that just seem to go together. And visiting a toy shop or the toy aisle of the local department store with our kids is one of the fun parts of being a parent. But once inside that toy store the battle begins. Which toy? How many? How often? This month Chris Howe and Jayne Kearney look at why toys sometimes turn bad and what they wish they’d done differently.
MUM SAID...
A constant theme throughout my parenting life is how far I’ve fallen from my once-lofty pre-parenting ideals. And my kids’ disgustingly overflowing toyboxes are two such examples.
I mean, who doesn’t envison a nursery filled with fabulous toys? Winsome and aesthetically pleasing. Subtly educational yet fun for the child. Created with sound moral and ethical practices. Enhancing the well-thought-out interior design of the family home. Keepsakes for generations to come.
Yeah, right. Right?
I don’t know when my kids’ toy collections took on the complete opposite appearance to that which I have wistfully tried to conjure here. Is there an army of ‘bad toy’ elves who steal into their bedrooms in the middle of the night depositing plastic eyesores?
But if I’m fair I guess I have to place the blame firmly on my own head. Before I had kids I had no idea that parenthood would open up a whole new kind of shopping experience. A second-childhood-slash-Mum-as-all-the-time-Santa kind of deal.
When my two kids were toddlers our days were spent walking, playing and visiting. Libraries and shops were our main haunts. I wasn’t working so there wasn’t a lot of money, and I think that’s when I got into the habit of picking up little trinkets for the kids. Those brightly coloured, strategically placed items in the $2 shops and supermarkets were too much for me to resist once I’d seen the joy on the face of a three-year-old who had just been handed a Made-in-China doll/teddy bear/building blocks/fingerpaint set/colouring-in book/rocket ship/truck/superhero bigger than their head.
I was a sucker.
But do I regret my wayward parenting? And, more importantly, has it affected my children?
For the former I would offer a conditional yes. Yes, I regret the fact that my kids now find it impossible to enter a store without asking for something. That’s definitely something I wish I had addressed more effectively when they were little. But the conditional part is that those memories of their smiling faces and the humble days of their toddlerhood are precious to me.
For the latter my answer is a resounding no. My kids - despite their ‘unhealthy’ and possibly ethically unsound toy collections - are fabulous. My son has the most wonderful and quirky imagination - definitely not stifled by too many toys. My daughter, on the other hand, proudly eschews the frightening sterotypes of femininity presented by some of the toys marketed at her gender (with only a little prompting from me).
She is an almost exclusively pink-free girl. I’d like to think that my too-many-toys kids are all right.
DAD SAID...
Ten minutes. That’s the average time any toy in my house has been played with. Yes, true; my eldest plays with her Barbies incessantly and draws and draws and draws, and my youngest constantly gnaws on a large plastic noisy ‘activity cube’ thing and drags a doll around behind her. However, for every toy my daughters love there are 19 toys that haven’t been used from the moment they entered the house. That’s 95% toy wastage, people!
I’ve seen my daughter open a new toy, swear everlasting love for it, played with the thing for a whole three minutes and then discard it for an adventure in a spaceship made from a large plastic bucket, an old sheet and some pegs. The other toy is eventually placed in a large toy chest. The only time it will see the light again is when it is thrown to the floor while a distraught child (or parent) hunts for the actual toy they always play with. Which is lost because it is hidden among a thousand bright, shiny, unused toys.
So, in hindsight, let me establish what toys and toy-like-items I’d have given my daughters if I had a second chance.
At birth: A teddy bear. A cheap ukulele. An empty plastic coke bottle half filled with rice. Several soft, bright, noisy, grabby things.
From one: Large plastic building blocks. Backyard full of sticks. A laptop (more on this later). A broom. A couple of indestructible books. Large soft balls. A baby doll and pram.
From two: Cardboard boxes. Egg cartons. A large plastic bucket. Paint, crayons and art supplies. A couple of DVDs.
From three: A Barbie doll. A bike. Pegs. Old sheets. A recipe for homemade playdough. More books than you can poke a stick from the backyard at.
From four: A very, very sharp kitchen knife. Scissors.
The laptop is mine. I let my daughter go online because most kids’ websites are better than those dodgy plastic toy computers. A sharp knife because blunt knives seem to cause more accidents. Kids know and respect sharp.
So where did the other toys come from? Because instead of one teddy bear we have about fifteen soft toys. Twenty Barbies and Barbie lookalikes. A hundred ‘educational’ toys. A million toys-with-one-piece-missing. They all came from our early enthusiastic educational parenting days or were gifts from well-wishers and birthday attendees.
So if I’m lucky enough to have a third child, the rule will be: “Crucial toys not lots of toys”. Some might say that’ll go as well as my: “TV for my child? Never!” promise, and my “Takeaway for dinner? Not while I draw breath!” campaign. But I say to the doubters: I just need my wife, parents, in-laws and other family plus all our friends and most of all, the child on board with this one. It other words, it’s a flawless, rock solid plan.
EXPERT OPINION:
In 2007 Liz Hollis wrote in The Guardian, “My mother, 67, remembers every toy she owned in her postwar childhood. She had just one bear (so cherished that she has him still, albeit moth-eaten), one doll and a wheelbarrow. Growing up in the early 70s, I had more: a couple of Mary Quant dolls, six or seven soft toys (some hand-knitted in lurid colours), and an assortment of puzzles and games.
However, both collections are dwarfed in quantity and scope by the toys my daughters, aged just two and eight, already possess. They have lots of toys. Lots and lots and lots of toys. Toys that light up. Toys that talk. Happy Meal toys. Magazine covermount toys. Party-bag toys. Toys that beep, flash, spin, come apart into a hundred tiny pieces. Even some of their toys have toys (no, really).” Hollis asked what effect this surfeit of toys was having on modern children – after all, if toys and play are good for kids wouldn’t more toys simply be better?
Not so says Clare Lerner, who completed a study into the effect of inundating children with toys. Lerner discovered that when kids have too many toys, “They get overwhelmed and over-stimulated and cannot concentrate on any one thing long enough to learn from it so they just shut down. Too many toys means they are not learning to play imaginatively either.”
The Waldorf-Steiner educational approach advocates a less is more approach when it comes to toys in order to allow a child’s imagination and creativity to flourish. Toys are generally of a simple nature and crafted from natural materials. Bernadette Duffy, head of Thomas Coram Early Childhood Centre, in London, concurs and suggests that parents avoid electronic toys and instead look for simpler toys such as bricks, farm animals, simple dolls and good books.
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