to think 7 years old is still too young to stop playing with toys?

[SoggySocksAgain]

Something my relative said that surprised me. They said that at 7 years old, they can't imagine their LO will be playing with toys for much longer. Really? Surely they'll be playing with toys until at least 10-11? We were discussing their birthday and it made me realise how we expect our children to grow up far too quickly.

My dd stopped playing with toys aged about 5-6.

After that it was books, games, craft sets, stationery etc.

She's 23 now.

I played with Sindy dolls into my early teens. My best friend was a year younger than me, and she also liked playing with dolls. We expanded our play to cover more mature themes (boyfriends, jobs etc) but still got pleasure from it. I don't know if we were particularly unusual?

I was the same.

@noneforgretchenweiners rediscovering my Sindy at 43! Still had it all and my dd age 7 plays with it. We play together (well I take trips down memory lane and try to persuade dd to set it up how I want it!). Developing a new restoration hobby around it, joined online groups and spend HOURS looking for new outfits etc

I just cant imagine a 7 year old showing no interest in any toys. I used to teach reception and often we had year 6 children come and help for one reason or another. Even the most streetwise 11 year old who was too cool for school enjoyed playing with things like the train track, lego, role play area, playdough etc.

Kids naturally gradually grow out of some types of toy and into others, at various ages. I can't remember when DD stopped playing with her soft toys (she preferred her imaginative games populated by dogs rather than dolls) but then there was Lego, k'nex, magnetix etc etc, moving on to electronics kits. And lots of outside toys - when does a 'toy' become a 'game'?

Maybe some people with weirdly low cutoff ages are defining 'toy' just to mean dolls/soft toys and the like?

she is more interested in dressing them up and creating nurseries for them etc than actually playing with them.

How is that not playing with them? Is the distinction you're making about the 'let's pretend' element? I guess 'pretend play' morphs into 'doing real stuff' as kids develop, but the older child is still using their imagination and creativity in designing the nurseries etc.

My husband still plays with toys. They have just got bigger and more expensive.

My y5 10 year old hasnt played with toys in ages. Less she playing with her sister it's all about tiktok and roblox and trampoline and bike. 5 ye old loves dolls and teadies. I wanna get rid of wooden kitchen and get a moses basket but havent done this yet. Shes very crafty and likes to paint and make cat boxes etc

Dc7 still plays with toys. A couple of mums I know are always commenting that their dc don't play with toys anymore- from about 6/7 onwards. Mainly around Christmas and birthdays this seems to come up. I find this quite sad too but it seems to coincide with having a lot of different screens and consoles.

I'm not bashing screens, my dc have them, but the more consoles etc kids have and the more they are allowed to play them the quicker and less often they seem to play with other toys.

My DD9 doesn't play with toys- she hasn't for a couple of years. She just doesn't enjoy them! She is quite happy doing gymnastics 24/7 or making tik tok videos. She also enjoys doing art. She never played with Barbies and didn't play with dolls past the age of 3. Every child is different.

Sounds like you relative is the classic ‘oh my child is so advanced and grown up’ ... why do some people seem to want to rush their children into growing up?
My 8yo plays with her barbie and dolls every day. And I can’t see that changing any time soon. Nor do I want it to change.

I think there is a “cultural” element to this. When I was 9 (many years ago) we moved house around 300 miles. My friends and I at my old house were still playing with dolls etc. I got a shock when I went to my new school- no dolls, “pretend” games...I felt under pressure to remove my dolls house and toys from my bedroom before I had a first new friend over to visit. I was so sad- I missed that play.
Its so interesting that there was such a massive difference between 2 areas, 2 schools etc ...so did that relative grow up in a different area/school to you? I agree that play is so important to brain development so don’t stop till the child wants to or they have there own peer pressure

@GrumpyHoonMain that’s one of the saddest things I’ve read on MN.

I must admit my boys 8 (9 soon) and 7 don't really play with toys they'd rather draw, kick a ball about or play on their consoles.

My best pal and I played with our Barbie dolls well into our teens 🥰 we loved to dress them up and would often host swap shops to trade accessories. It was our secret 😂 All our peers in our year group were getting drunk and doing poppers in The Only Place To Be On a Saturday. It took us many years to grow up a bit.

Your relative is strange. what does she expect the child to be doing instead of playing with toys?

I was still playing with Barbie at 12. In fairness it became more turning Barbie into a model and going through lots of loo roll designing wedding dresses by then but I still used her. Oh and she was also a Police Inspector a la Juliet Bravo too.

Play is hugely undervalued. I played with sylvainian families with my friends until I was 11 at least and loved playing 'horses' with my little cousins until probably older. I still love to play as an adult, playgrounds, bikes, waterslides, soft play etc and I work with children so get to play as part of my job.

I can see a big difference in some of the children we see in my job (and outside my job.) Often very young children who just want to play with thier parents phone watching kinder egg videos one after another. Some parents don't know how to play. They didn't have toys or have their parents play with them and so they often won't see the benefit. Not to mention poverty, opportunity and safe, loving parents. We spend time trying to role model playing with children and their parents.

This is not meant to be a smug post. My kids have way too screen time and I can see how zombified that makes them, but it's a balance between getting dinner made or not...

I remember really distinctly when my friends and I forgot how to play. We'd always spent breaktimes playing variants of Mother May I and What's the Time Mr Wolf etc. We came back to school at the beginning of Y8 and we just...couldn't do it. We tried half-heartedly a few times and then gave up. It was weird, like someone had flicked a switch and turned off our game-playing ability.

O still played with my son's lightsabres while I was nearly 40. Until I broke the television....

Someone wrote a few years ago that the average age that children stop regularly playing with toys has reduced by about six months every decade. I'm not sure what that makes the current average, but with screen time and the virtual world, seven may feel too young but could be average.

I get that for the OP and many others, ending parts of their children's childhood may be a sad thing to see.

My 7 yr old doesn't play with role play type toys like dolls, tools, cars etc. He plays board games, stem toys and building thinngs though. I imagine that is what they mean.

Every child is different. My nearly 7yo spends an innordinate time on tv/tablet(pls try not to judge) since lockdown, but also still randomly plays with some toys, all toys, depending on how the mood strikes him. Some of them are from when he was a 3-4yo, but he won't let go of them and still plays with them occasionally. CAlso there are toys for diff ages. I got my 13yo nephew these laser guns for his bday, as my sis said that's what he wanted.

Playing is invaluable. It builds our brain. It makes us cleverer. Play has a purpose in human development. Being allowed to, and knowing how to play is extremely important.

Indeed. I'm in my 60s, but I still play. I mess around with acrylics, I make sculptures out of empty bottles and plaster of paris, and I play with my cat.

Don't listen to misery-guts!

I think there's two things here, first you get the children who use their imagination differently - instead of devising long narrative tales with dolls or figures, or building lego, they'd rather spend hours on craft sets and art. No big deal, it's still playing, but it's the child version of the difference between storytelling, theatre, sculpture or painting.

Then you get the children who are on screens all day and who never really learn how to play properly in the first place, and I'm sorry, I know MN likes to cool wife about children on tablets, but bloody hell. I work with children, I have a toddler and a teen, and the amount of kids I'm seeing who are just glued to a tablet to the exclusion of all else is pretty awful. When my eldest was small it was hard enough to balance TV time, but in my experience, most kids will get bored of the TV eventually and want to do something else, but with tablets it's like they have no off switch.

I met the mother of a 7/8 year old at a party back at Christmas. She said she had gotten rid of all- and I mean all - of her daughter's toys around age 5, as all she was interested in was her tablet. The child had then asked for a more "grown up" type doll for Christmas, design a friend or something, plus accessories. The mother said she had no intention of getting it and cluttering up her nice clean house again, the child was bought a Switch instead