do modern kids have too many toys (saturday guardian article)?

[Fillyjonk]

here

was it really better back in't day when all they had was an apple core and a chair leg?

I dunno, am thinking hmmm

I thought the thing about tables, chairs and blankets was funny too. DS would much rather climb all over the tables and chairs at home than play with toys. This is why he is so covered with bruises and scratches from falling over and tripping up. another disadvantage is that we only have so much furniture and space, and it is nice to have a house where the chairs are the right way up occassionally

health and safety dont come round the house though do they?
My 11 month old played with a roll of kitchen towel and a piece of tin foil all morning and seemed darned pleased with himself!
I dont buy toys that make noise or have lights
My four year old plays out most days with - nothing - just marches around wittering
I agree wholeheartedly with the article.

peanutbtterkid - will you seriously not let your kids have a marble run - or nor not play with a skipping rope because you can't skip?

was talking to a friend about this yestreday.

we both felt uneasy about the article but were not sure why.

It kind of came down to...this sense that kids must be grateful for everything they have and must not be spoilt.

Its also relative. I think my kids have lots of toys but I dunno, most of my RL friends are of the "shiny twig and a length of string" approach

oh and you can make home made marble runs btw, they are much better. Theres a recipe somewhere...

here

the rest of the site is also great too, if you don't know it

My kids do have too many toys, most bought by grandparents! But, at the beginning we had a bit of an 'embargo' on plastic toys, so actually they have REALLY nice toys - loads of wooden toys, and very little plastic crap. The exception is playmobil which is fab anyway, and played with loads. Every so often I look around the playroom and think 'what can I put away' but actually everything is played with, and although they have lots of toys, they are all part of just a few 'sets' (i.e. train set, dolls house etc).

We have also had a policy (if that's possible with toys) of only having toys that encourage imaginative play rather than suppressing it. So ds1 has a wooden farm which has been all sorts of things - it's been a farm, a fire station (manned by dinosaurs with blu tack helmets), a space station - I love seeing what they do with the toys.

I always thought I didn't have many, until I did a search on ebay and found LOADS that I used to have! Spoilt child of the 70s me!

Have read the article now - hmm, 32 barbies and 28 baby dolls - not typical surely!

Feel quite smug now - looking at the end of the article, things my children have are largely - trains, cars, books, lego and wooden dolls. Ha, good mother!

but I mean, feck it

I just don't get whats wrong with having a lot of toys

its like we're all meant to be massively ashamed of how many toys our kids have or something

i have a huge stash of knitting wool and crafty stuff. I would be livid if dp threw it out on the grounds that I never used it and he thought it would be a better exercise for my imagination to work with fewer materials.

DD has 5 baby dolls and no barbies. I can't see the baby doll figure changing that much. Would imagaine we would get barbies eventually. She has two disney princesses, which are in effect the same thing.

LOL at the idea of filly's DH throwing out her stuff so she can use her imagination.

I don't think it has to be a guilt issue - it's just that being surrounded by a huge excess of toys can lead to children not being able to focus very easily or develop imaginative play - if that's not the case for your children, that's good. But I see it in action with DS. The fewer toys he has access to, the more excited he is about them and the more he plays. At his friend's where there are squillions of toys, he's outfaced and doesn't know what to do.

I also read another article recently - in Junior magazine I think (ooh get me) - about construction toys and about how playing with bricks, lego, meccano etc actually affects the way children think and understand the physical world - and that these toys help them develop much more than a toy that does just one thing (eg a toy hoover). There are a lot of toys these days that involve a hell of a lot of plastic for very little playing potential.

I read that article with interest and am very interested in the views here. I have tendencies towards the "all they need is an egg box and a bit of string" way of thinking - probably goes back to my own upbringing when my parents had 4 of us very close together and even though they were (subsequently) relatively well off, there just weren't that many toys around.

Mine do get given a lot of stuff - grandparents, birthday parties etc - and also hand me downs from older friends/relatives. (We were gobsmacked recently when a friend of a friend gave DS about £200 worth of Thunderbirds things ). I do feel uncomfortable with the amount of things they have - and in fact we are renowned among their friends for being on the low side of numbers of toys).

I have two strategies. Firstly we talk about what they want and how they go about getting it - pocket money, next birthday etc. When Ds received this huge box of Thunderbirds stuff we had a chat and decided to give the (noisy!) digger that he used to love but now very rarely played with to the little boy next door who had come round the week before and loved it, as a good example of how everyone should pass on toys when they have stopped playing with them.

Secondly, we have an (Ikea) bookshelf with recesses to put plastic crates in. I think it takes either 12 or 16. My view is that that is enough toys, so if the crates or full - after Christmas and birthdays, then we have to retire some toys to make way for the new ones. Some are retired to the loft, but we talk about giving others to the charity shop. I honestly think that that number of crates is enough for them.

I probably sound desparately up myself. but this is a real thorny issue for me. We have friends who have a playroom that is better stocked than a toyshop and where the floor is ankle deep in bits and pieces, many broken. There is no respect for anything, nothing is put together in the same place and as someone said the children love it when we go there, but after a while can't really deal with it properly.

well put anchovy

Ach, I think it is just fashionable trite.

I don't think it is the amount of toys a child has that makes a difference, but the time we spend with our children (esp when they are young!). My DD has a playroom stuffed full of toys, but we still play hiding from the big bad wolf under the duvet, shopping, doctors and nurses, mums and dads, we play in cardboard boxes and all sorts of silly stuff. The fact is, that despite her mountain of toys, I encourage her to engage in a whole range of activities and different games. However, other children may have less toys than her, but also may do less imaginative play because they have not been encouraged to do that.

I think making such correlations is a mass generalisation that ignores what I consider to be the most important aspect in young children's play - parental influence.

My DCs are the only children in both sides of our family - so they get an awful lot of stuff bought for them!

It is much easier now they are older though, DD8 and DS6, as they just don't need a multitude of toys anymore. They have a reasonable number of board games - monopoly, frustration, cleudo, kerplunk, pictionary.

DD has a dolls head with long hair which she plays with, and other than that only has pens pencils and paper for making books and writing stories, and some other craft bits and pieces.

DS has lego, playmobil and meccano, and a drawer full of orange colouring pencils and paper (he spends most of his time drawing pcitures of war zones and only needs orange pencils to colour in the explosions)
He also has a football and goal for playing outdoors.

Then they have a shared playstation, DS has a couple of lego starwars games for it, and DD has the Singstar thing. They have a shared outdoor trampoline too.

And that is pretty much it!

Presents now tend to be DVDs/playstation games. Although they both had Heely's for Christmas.

Any money they get given goes straight into their piggy banks, then finally into their proper bank accounts once it hasn't been spent for a while!

Oh the other thing they do get, is Dr WHo cards which they have to buy with their pocket money!

Like Anchovy, we always clear out the old before bringing in the new and I have never spent a better day since having children, than I did the day Polly Pocket and Bratz made the journey to the charity shop

Even better, I have converted the playroom into a craft room for myself, and it is now stacked full of all my toys

My problem (aside from the fact that the house looks like a branch of ToysRUs) is that I'm actually rubbish at imaginative play - I just can't find it in myself to be a Fairy Princess or whatever My specialities are marble runs (DP bought me a THIRD ELC set at Christmas so my runs could get more complicated than ever) and recreating the Island of Sodor with ridiculously complicated layouts (I've been known to spend MY birthday money on points and bridges!), but when it comes to the role-play stuff, I'm crap. Possibly to compensate for my crapness, DS2 has an imaginary country rather than an imaginary friend.

LOL at Hassled and her (his?) marble run.
I agree they have way more than they need, but I'm not going to get worried about it, though I agree it makes extra work in just keeping track of everything and keeping it all tidy.
My brothers and I were classic apple core and table leg kids but we were also made very happy by our Playmobil pirate ship; I think it's possible to have lots of crap and still leave space for imaginative play.
The health and safety point was very interesting; I'm sure it's right that parents are inhibited in what they allow because of that, and also that many parents feel inadequate in coming up with ideas - hence the popularity of the Dangerous Book for Boys.

Marbles scare the blank-esus out of me, honest, I have just heard the same choking story too often, about different people.

But I do let DCs play with sticks (they haven't poked any eyes out yet) and climb everything, and lots other stuff that I see other parents ban. It's just marbles that scare me, no no no.

What's the difference between children having so many toys and us adults having so much stuff? Presumably it stifles my musical imagination because I have too many CDs? And my cooking imagination because I have more than 1 recipe book? And my children's ability to draw must be destroyed because they have more than one drawing pad and too many colouring pencils, I suppose?????

oh god yes re the too many things for adult pnk

I have about 20 musical instruments of different types. Let me think what they are...2 (different type) guitars, 8 recorders, 2 flutes, 1 violin, 1 piano, 1 clarinet, LOADS of percussion, drums,

the kids also have a big box of this stuff, including 2 accordians, 2 violins, etc.

ok, so do I need to get rid of them cos they squish my imagination? Or does having lots of this stuff help me learn stuff like which instruments are best for different songs, etc

oh and rarrie is spot on IMO. Give them a yoghurt box or give them an all singing all dancing electronic bus thing. What matters is the time you spend with, them, and that they spend with friends.

Although having said that, autonomous play is also very important.

I didn't read all of the article because I found it too fecking irritating.

I had few toys as a child, my parents were not child centered (as was the trend in those days)and I spent most of my time bored stupid.

Quite honestly I am glad that my children have lots of toys, a mountain of craft materials etc to stimulate their imagination and interest.