The Perfect Toy
picture by nodoca
‘Tis the season for gift giving. And the toyshop aisles are flooded with syndicated characters, sophisticated miniatures and collectables with ready-made purpose and personality which require little imagination to engage the child. Do modern children really play with these objects? By that I mean, do modern children really continue to play with these objects day after day, in different ways, in different moods and settings? What do they get out of an Elmo toy, or a Star Wars Trooper voice changer helmet, a Baby Born with magic potty, or a Singing Barbie doll? What does a Leapfrog reading system do for my child’s literacy that reading a book together can’t achieve?
I have always felt stuck in a tug of war between offering my children choices, resisting the influences of popular culture and keeping the volume of ’stuff’ we acquire to a reasonable and manageable volume. It is even more of a struggle at Christmas and birthday times of year. I feel like I’m becoming a toy nazi. My passion for simple toys has resulted in a ‘no gifts policy’ for my own children’s birthday parties - something which some adults in my or my children’s network have found difficult or uncomfortable to deal with.
I object to obligatory gift giving. You’d think that after living in Japan we’d have the gift giving down to a fine art, but we don’t. Truthfully, I find it wasteful and I believe that looking after gifted objects can be bothersome if you didn’t have a choice in the clean up and maintenance, or batteries or other obligations that can go with a gift. I’m surely considered a cheapskate for the kinds of gifts we take to children’s birthday parties - but to me a box of big chalk or a length or coloured elastic has numerous possibilities for children’s play. Did anyone else jump elastics when they were a child?
Modern toy designers would do well to trawl their memories for the most imaginative toys from their collective childhoods. If they were anything like me (and why wouldn’t they be, for childhood is universal?) they played with cardboard boxes, paper and paints, old gardening tools or kitchen utensils, lengths of string, or elastic and they played in the dirt or sand or water. I recall playing hopscotch and knuckle bones and lots of back yard cricket. I might have thought differently at the time but, looking back, I was never bored. Not really.
Of course, I had teddy bears and baby dolls too, but they had no accessories and required no batteries so play was open-ended and entirely child-directed. I will even admit to owning a Barbie doll or two. But Barbie’s Townhouse was constructed from old cereal boxes, fabric swatches, wadding and old wallpaper. Making it occupied me for weeks and while the result was not as glamorous as the Mattel product, it served me and Barbie both very well. Of course, I never stopped wanting all the accessories advertised on TV. But at least I proved to myself that I could enjoy playing just as much, maybe more, without buying that stuff. The lesson seems to have stuck with me all these years.
As for the perfect toy: it doesn’t exist - but if it does exist it’s probably not a toy at all.
What was your favourite childhood plaything? What do your children play with now?
December 23rd, 2008 - Posted in happiness, childhood, parenthood, consumerism, nostalgia, play, duty of care | | 2 Comments
Domestic Haiku #5
sounds of silence
in a house of children
mischief brewing
December 10th, 2008 - Posted in haiku | | 2 Comments
