JAMES P. writes:

You wrote: “That is why elaborate toys are a mistake for children. Elaborate toys, especially mechanical toys, deaden the imagination.”

I have been amazed at how much mileage my three-year-old son can get out of simple objects. For example, a blue plastic stackable cup can be a hat, a water tower, an excavator, a steamroller, a garage, a car wash, and a garbage dumpster. Sometimes he takes the cup and a shovel to the sandpit in preference to an expensive toy backhoe loader. I have resolved to make the most of this before he wants more costly gadgets!

He also really likes Lego Duplo. We have built lots of skyscrapers, bridges, buildings, and robots together.

By the way, I think a lot of people like organized activities because they can relax and take their eyes off the children for a while — usually in order mindlessly to work their iPhones. I make a point of leaving the BlackBerry in the car when we go to the playground.

Laura writes:

Toys have their place and I’m not saying children should have no toys, but people spend way too much money on them. It is better that children not have everything they want. It’s better that they resort to their imagination. Building blocks, dolls, play dishes, small animal or human figures, balls, a couple of miniature vehicles, some swords or guns: these basics are enough. 

I also think a cape is great for boys, but if a parent doesn’t sew it’s possible to make that with an old towel and a safety pin.

                                                                              — Comments–

Michael Presley writes:

When I was a kid, the best toy was a stick. Maybe two good sticks. A stick could be anything martial, and we all liked playing war. A machine gun when we fought Germans, a Winchester carbine when fighting Indians. It might be a short sword if we were Legionaries, or a rapier if battling alongside D’Artagnan’s musket. Today a boy with a stick would be considered a danger, sent to a psychiatrist, and probably medicated. Certainly he’d be expelled from school or forced into some sort of psychological reprogramming “therapy.”

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

On the topic of toys you wrote: “It’s better that [children] resort to their imagination,” because elaborate toys, as you argued, stultify the imagination. 

My students, college undergraduates, have grown up (if that were the term) with a superabundance of ultra-complicated toys, including the familiar electronic “games.” Stultification of the imaginative faculty is their condition – or rather their affliction. I am constantly re-demoralized by the ongoing revelation of student mental non-agility. My wife, also a college teacher, makes the same observation, as do my honest colleagues. (Just as there is an ideology of illiteracy among a segment of academia, so too there is an ideology of stultification. These latter ideologues refer to the stultified undergraduates as “media savvy,” a typical self-deluding verbal sleight-of-hand intended to turn a deficiency into a virtue and thereby to make a huge and uncomfortable problem disappear.) The worst effect of the electronic “games” is that they completely unfit the mind for reading. Television might have been the beginning of the new illiteracy, but the flashing gadgets are its consummation. I hate the bloody things. The “super toys” also render the students utterly passive.

Laura writes:

Play and higher literacy do seem connected. Play exercises the same imaginative faculties as reading literature. I think what you see in your students, this stunting of the mind, is related to their childhoods, to the type of toys they had and the time they spent passively entertained instead of actively playing.

Jane writes:

When I was six or seven years old, my brother and I played store, or bank. The currency we used were the husks of cicadas that we collected off trees, and we counted them very earnestly and stored them in glass mason jars. We also played airplane, and although none of us could write yet, we scribbled and issued airline tickets to neighborhood children and stuffed animals, then arranged ourselves in two long rows and pretended to all be flying to our various destinations. When I was a few years older, we would play court, and accuse a stuffed animal or another child of a crime. We then spent most of the day preparing the prosecution and defense. This was the type of entertainment that comprised our play.

I grew up in rural Oklahoma where not only my family, but most families I knew were quite poor, and did not have fancy toys. And yet when I see kids today with electronic games and access to so much television, my childhood suddenly feels rich in comparison.

Mabel LeBeau writes:

We were a ‘pioneering’ family. (The next family only lived across the old river bed, or through the woods along the riverbank from the last ice age.) By pioneering, I mean that until our folks built the ‘prove-up’ shack on the property won in a lottery, the land belonged to the government. Then, the next project was to build the house, which took place over a course of the next decade.

Dad was a schoolteacher and his area of expertise was science and sports. We kids (and there were eight of us) were crazy to have Dad play games with us when he got home from work…kickball, Dodge Ball, etc., before he went on to the home projects, but his involvement in our games was by no means a limit to what games we could devise . Clearing the land for the house involved felling spruce and birch and the stumps had lots of little nooks and crannies that slivers of wood fit into or secret letters from admirers.

There were new toys that arrived at Christmas, and bicycles our uncle sent from across the sea, but for the most part, we ‘recycled’ paper for writing (Dad trimmed the names off the worksheets of his students for ‘confidentiality’ reasons) and paper sculptures, used leftover building supplies to construct dollhouses, wagons, and cities of our imagination, as well as the projects in Grolier Society books and ‘Uncle Jim’s Book of …’ shadow puppet plays, and those little toy plastic soldiers were reincarnated as figures from the Middle Ages. One year Dad borrowed film reels from the local library and the movie projector from school to ‘preview’ films for his class. We were known as the LeBeau Family Film Club and freshly made gourmet popcorn was enjoyed by all at the special screenings.

We wrote operas and held sock hops and did the limbo, crossed the Oregon Trail and walked the Trail of Tears, re-enacted the little house on the prairie (in the clearing over the septic tank since that was the only place without trees and flat enough), gave speeches from the upper empty window frames overlooking the valley below–or at least the gravel road below the house, climbed the north face of Mt. Everest, and followed Dante into his Inferno, presented our Nobel prize-winning discoveries at home science fairs, and played restaurant serving prize-winning goosebery and currant pies.

Of course childhood has a rosy glow of recollection. It seemed the only limit of play was the imagination of what eight kids of a similar mindset could think up, and nothing at all to do with having the actual props.

I think what is lacking today is the group play. Kids seem to be isolated from each other for various reasons and families tend to be smaller. I don’t see the overabundance of props as the problem. I recall that my own son found a little broken metal gadget when Transformer toys were popular way back in the 90’s. We couldn’t afford to get him new toys, but this piece of metal changed easily from this to that to this with the addition of aluminum foil, paint, and stickers.

Laura writes:

The smaller number of children does make a world with less play. But one reason why there are fewer children is the widespread belief that children need many things and expensive activities. Articles occasionally appear in the press that present the costs of raising a child and it always adds up to many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, yes, it is that expensive if every child is groomed with lots of instructional activities, group athletics and expensive accessories. While children used to ice skate with their friends wearing beat-up pairs of skates, now they play hockey wearing many hundreds of dollars worth of clothing and equipment. Ironically, at the end of the day, these things don’t necessarily make children smarter and more fit than idle play.

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