A Case for Old-Fashioned Toys

Have you ever noticed what Laura Ingalls, her sister Mary, and her husband Almanzo played with as children?

Now, I'm not saying I didn't have a doll that said "Mama," but then Laura Ingall's rival, Nellie Olsen, had a doll that said that, even back in the 1880's. What she and I neither one had were dolls that came with USB cables and interacted with the website you built online. Laura, Almanzo, and I all spent large amounts of time playing outside. In addition to playing house under various trees and bushes, I would also take some of my toys outside to play with them.

My cousin, on the other hand, was the start of a generation of children who spent more time inside than out. Remember when your parents used to have to drag you into the house for supper and a bath? Now you have to drag kids outside and lock the door behind them to get them to stay outside.

Never mind that the U.S. is now seeing cases of rickets where children aren't getting so much as 15 minutes of sunlight a day (which causes the body to produce Vitamin D-rickets being caused by a lack of Vitamin D), but I think that modern electronic, interactive toys are bad for children, especially very young children.

So what is to be done about the problem? Old-fashioned toys! Give children toys that require imagination. Save money by never buying a toy that requires batteries! Give them board games so they can learn about fair-play, sharing, and being a gracious loser. Give them dolls and action figures they have to dress and equip to develop fine motor skills. Give them boxes and empty containers and misc. stuff you were about to throw away and let their imaginations work. Make them go outside and run around so they will be quieter at dinner and go to bed at a reasonable hour (my babysitter used to get us outside in the summer by turning off the TV at noon and reading her Bible; it was too boring to stay inside the house). Give them books to read so they will be able to comprehend real words and full sentences (as opposed to hoping that they will learn the King's English by reading texts and online messages, such as: u h8 that? I :-) )

Do you despair that your children don't appreciate their toys? That they are broken before Christmas Day is out? That many of them don't even get recycled to the thrift store or younger siblings, but simply end up in the landfill?

Old-fashioned toys correct some of those problems. Toys without electronic components tend to last much longer than those with them. Also, as pointed out above, they don't take batteries, which eliminates mercury in landfills. If you go a step further and avoid most plastic toys, you will find they last even longer (plastic has a tendency to get brittle with age and break); at the very least, it is easier to repair a wooden or cloth toy than a plastic one.

To take a further step back in time, children didn't used to have rooms crammed full of toys. Remember the concept of a toy box? All toys are supposed to fit in just one of those! It's a known fact that the less we have, the more we appreciate it. When you shower your children with everything from cheap toys from Happy Meals to a dozen or more toys every holiday from three different families, they end up with so many toys they cease to appreciate almost all of them. Toys become disposable; if this toy breaks, another one will come along shortly to replace it. Is this a lesson that you want to teach your children? That they don't have to take care of anything? That they can dispose of stuff left and right and replace it on a whim? And we wonder how young people, just off to college, get in so much credit card debt!

To give a child a couple dozen old-fashioned toys for Christmas in some ways misses the point. Old-fashioned toys are supposed to be given sparingly. Some years ago, I read an article about scientists who study toys, of all things. They study how children interact with their toys and what positive or negative things happen as a result. They discovered two things about toys. One, having too many toys (too many choices) made children more timid and unsure, prone to play in fits and starts, constantly trying out different toys and not sticking with just one or two. They did not have as much fun playing, nor spend as much total time playing as children given fewer toys. Secondly, they rated toys on their playability. They would try out different toys on children and see how long they played with them and how much fun they seemed to have. They found that many modern toys had lower playability ratings than more old-fashioned, simple toys. Toy manufacturers actually clamored to get copies of this study so they could see what made a toy more fun, and so they could adjust their designs accordingly. Apparently toys that require imagination are more fun than toys that do everything for the child; a toy which is something of a blank canvas has more uses than a toy which has its purpose rigidly defined.

And, on an oddly-related note, fewer, better toys makes for a cleaner house. I read a testimonial once by a lady one day who was trying to get her house clean. She was constantly on her son to pick up his room. She finally decided that since it mattered to her that it was clean, she would pick it up. Several hours later, she collapsed on his bed in tears because the room still wasn't clean. She couldn't find a place to put all of his toys; she couldn't even figure out which sets of blocks went together. She realized that if she, a grown woman, couldn't sort out the mess, how could her child ever do it? She had been yelling at him to complete an impossible task for ages. When he got home, she apologized to him and they had a discussion about the excessive amount of toys. He agreed to donate some to charity and they spent a day together with garbage bags, weeding out toys he didn't care for and ones he had outgrown. Next, the mother went to a store and bought plastic boxes of all sizes and some shelving. The remaining toys were organized in the boxes, which were then labeled, and they were put up neatly on the shelves. Since that time, her son has been able to keep his room clean, because cleaning his room is as simple as putting the toys in the boxes designated for them.

If you have a child who can't keep his room clean, have you ever considered that he has too much stuff in too small an area? Have you and family members drowned him in a sea of toys, and then set him the impossible task to try and organize them and make them neat? Clutter cannot be organized, and clutter is anything which is not loved or used. Clean out the unloved, unused toys and see if cleaning up isn't made easier.

In America today, we think that more is better--quantity over quality. And we teach that to children at a young age by giving them tons of cheap, disposable toys. But studies show that children are actually happier with fewer toys, and toys which are simple. So don't think you have to show you love in quantity; take your time to pick out (even make!) quality toys. Remember back to your own childhood and what you liked to play with; it probably wasn't a plastic figure out of a McDonald's Happy Meal. Get the grandparents in on the idea and have them hunt for toys that they had as children and loved to play with. It's a good bet that if you loved a toy, your child will love it too. And a loved toy is appreciated and well-treated.