To despair at the garish, noisy, plastic tat

[Plateofcrumbs]

First Christmas with PFB and until now have managed to keep our toy collection small and free from plastic eyesores. PILs have gone to town on presents and we are now the 'proud' owners of all kinds of light-up, flashing, beeping, singing plastic monstrosities.

AIBU to want to bin the vtech and its ilk before DS gets near them?

We don't have any in our house. We made the mistake of but a fee when pfb was little because we thought they 'needed' stuff like that.

I quickly decided that my sanity needs not to have stuff like that around so it all 'broke' quickly. Dd wasn't bothered.

She plays with vtech type stuff at playgroups etc and I've nothing against them (except I think they limit imaginative play) but isn't really too bothered.

She's now very good at imaginative play with happy land, playmobil and play food etc.

I have no problem with plastic. Playmobil, lego, mobilo... all bright plastic, all great. Tonnes of great toys are made of garish plastic.

What I did have a problem with when DS was little was the lights and sounds. Drove me crazy and I don't think they had any value to DS. I agree that they create passive play. I hate the way they draw attention to themselves if you forget to switch them completely off. Baby will have chosen something else to do and the bloody vtech thing will shout 'come and play' from the bottom of the box.

Ds because of his asd loves toys with predictable outcomes. A tasteful wooden toy is just an object to him.

Plateofcrumbs you forgot to put in the title. :o

But then you would have got lots of sarky comments about the need for , we can tell! (No we can't).

I used to hanker after lovely hand carved wooden stuff. Found out it hurts more when hurled across the room. I'd much rather a Toot Toot Driver to the temple than a piece of a Melissa & Doug train!

Yeah panzee I have that concern - I bought some lovely looking wooden stacking blocks which turn out to have corners so sharp they'd have your eye out. Genuinely a bit worried about giving them to DS!

Regarding 'open ended play'. You dont to spend a fortune on special expensive toys for that.
Everything in the house and in the garden is an opportunity for so called 'open ended play', wooden spoons, empty boxes, plastic bottles.Combine that with the 'plastic tut' .

And, again, it is not something original . Our mums gave us the above to play and keep busy.

Oh Laquitar I get it now. So when I used to let toddler DS empty the tupperware cupboard in the kitchen and play with all the tubs that was actually 'open ended play' ?

Sparklingbrook you could call it "heuristic play" for ultimate wankery.

Fab Panzee. i actually did 'heuristic play' then. I only found out since being on MN that I did BLW. But in 1999 it was called 'bung all the baby's food on the high chair tray and let him get in with it' so not as catchy.

I used to think vetch was pretty good. That's me outed as a cultural desert .

I do think it's sad to keep seeing children's toys described on Mn as tat though Children enjoy a few years of certain types of toys. They don't think of them as tat. With 3 dc we had a phase of the house being full of them, but it was ok.

My not-quite-2 year old is currently exploring the Toot Toot Driver garage by pretending to be a car and sitting on it, putting his foot down the ramp, etc.

Limits imagination my foot. :o

Yes Sparkling

Mine had wooden toys, plastic 'tat' , saucepans, cardboard boxes etc - they played in the way they wanted - sad when adults get dismissive because it offends their eye.

YANBU. I myself like to have a pristine white house with no toys visible.

Whilst we are at it can we please ban/discourage the gifting of

Beads - especially Hama beads in their thousands
Sylvanian Families - "over 100 pieces" of teeny tiny proportions
China tea sets to the under sixes
Enormous plastic or wooden toys which people cannot really fit in their homes

Thanks

wooden toys are wasted here - my youngest seems to regardt hem as a snack! they don't last long until they're splintered at the edges and I have to bin them.

plastic stuff lasts better. And I don't care if others think it's ugly. Bewtter ugly and played with than beautiful and ruined

^better

For us, not wanting lots of "plastic tat" is more about limited space, DS is only 2 so is just as happy with random household objects, and reluctance to get stuff that'll be played with for five minutes, and landfill for five generations...

Any one of those is reason enough IMO. To be fair, family has been pretty good about not buying too much for DS - they've tended to buy cute clothes to fulfill the shopping for baby urge.

DS has spent the last two days playing with one toy obsessively (train set), so a mountain of toys would just have been waste.

Shame the batteries will run out very very soon! ;)

We have spent years with 2 boys chucking broken plastic crap in the bin approx 2-3 days after Xmas. My environmentally friendly stance of asking for a smaller better quality plastic gift ( a small Lego something) or wooden toys/books etc is always ignored by relatives who know better. We always say the bigger the piece of plastic crap the quicker it will break. Last years remote control car used 8 huge batteries and conked out when driven in to a puddle (because that's what boys do). The wooden Bizzie Bee we bought 9 years is still going strong with the 2nd toddler. I find now the best thing to do is vet the presents before the kids get them and if you think it will last no more than ten minutes then donate it to a charity shop whilst its still new - kids get so many presents at Xmas they don't notice a few going missing. xx

At least you didn't get a 'baby's first tablet' that doesn't have an off button. On and on the bastarding thing goes. It shuts up 5 minutes after the last key press. The V Tech Alfie Bear may make me want to stab myself in the ear, but it has an off switch AND it stops the baby crying in the car seat.