Last year I signed up to be a secret Santa for a needy child – but when presented with his wish list, I didn’t recognize any of the toys. They were all electronic and many were way beyond my budget. Feeling like a hopeless Luddite, I apologized to the organizer, who reassigned the boy. It was an uncomfortable experience.
According to the University of Michigan’s Medical School website, the average American child sees tens of thousands of television commercials a year. And probably kids aren’t viewing those commercials critically. Add to that the torque of peer pressure, and you’ve potentially created a desperate little consumer.
Plus, harried parents sometimes see toys as a way of buying themselves precious moments of peace and quiet.
I’ve been there. It wasn’t named “the Busy Box” for nothing.
The problem, Jay Griffiths writes in her book, A Country called Childhood , is that “Children reared on toys and products provided by corporations are learning a terrible lesson: that they have a scarcity within, that they cannot provide for their own play, or rely on their own imagination, that they are impoverished beggars of the entertainment industry.”
Fortunately, the human imagination, especially in the young, is enormously fertile… and very tough. I once taught a grammar school art lesson which the kids finished early - so I showed them how to construct people from pipe cleaners. Soon, the children had made a whole town of pipe cleaner people having adventures.
Peter Gray, PhD, research professor at Boston College, describes play as “an activity in which means are more important than the ends”. In other words, p lay is in the doing or making, not necessarily in owning the end product. He goes on to say that if children are building a sand castle, and an adult comes along and says, ‘You don’t have to do that, I’ll build the castle for you,’ the fun is over.
Gray says that the rules of play “emanate from the minds of the players”. They are imaginative and non-literal.
So if playing is how children learn to understand the world, then multipurpose toys might be the way to go. Providing kids with toys that let them do the playing their way may be more fun, satisfying and sustainable.
Our younger son, at the time cowboy and pirate crazed, attended a progressive preschool where gun-play was discouraged. When invited to join the other children playing house, he announced they probably had a bug problem, so he’d be the exterminator. He then proceeded to spray the toy kitchen with his imaginary hose full of pretend chemicals.
An elegant - if not exactly politically correct - improvisation.
