The Case Against Toys

I wrote the following essay over a year ago but have recently become re-inspired by it.

 

The Case Against Toys

I have taken my sons’ toys away.  It sounds dramatic, or rather traumatic, but it isn’t; they have barely noticed. 

The process has been gradual.  A few years ago I read a thought provoking article called Headgates in which the author describes the way she has organized her family life in order to facilitate a classical home education for her children.  This article inspired me to rid our family of a large portion of my children’s toys in favor of a carefully selected assortment of our most wholesome playthings and books.  There were a great many benefits as you may well imagine and the only negative I have seen is my bedroom closet is filled to bursting with items I didn’t want the boys to have ready access to and which I wasn’t ready to part with immediately.

Over the years I don’t feel at all that we have a paucity of toys for the children.  In fact, it always seemed I was still reminding the children too many times a day to pick up this and put away that.  It was a part of parenting that I truly disliked. 

One day I had a beautiful thought that if we were to be blessed with another young child joining our family, I would not buy her any toys.  Toys suddenly seemed very unnatural to me, a modern fabrication disguised as a necessity.  A child with no toys is deemed deprived.  Toys represent our love for our children.  Great mamas highly anticipate Christmas mornings knowing the newest creative building manipulatives and Lego Mindstorms are wrapped and ready to inspire.  Toys are the way we now provide for our well-loved children.  But it wasn’t always this way.

(This is where I should enter some historical data about how quickly toys have overtaken our lives in the past 75 years but I don't feel like doing that right now and don't want to delay posting this indefinitely while I wait to get inspired to do the research.)

I watched my children interact with their toys.  I saw the pieces forgotten on the floor or piled in an unusable heap upon the table.  I saw the careless play that resulted in broken or lost parts, chaos reining.  Sure, they enjoyed playing with their toys but they had no respect for them, no real love for them.  I struggled day after day to come up with a sufficient enough organization system to make it all work.  I spent precious time trying to teach my children ‘discipline’ – ‘let’s clean up your room together!’  I spent even more time actually cleaning it up myself.

Elio's play area, in a typical state of disarray

My dislike of toys goes much further than my own home.  I think about the factory workers toiling long, dangerous hours to make these toys and the resulting pollution spewing from the factory soiling their rivers and air.  I think about the inevitable long journey from a toy’s place of creation to an American warehouse and the necessary infrastructure needed to make that possible.  My own community is defiled also – ToysRU eye-sores and UPS trucks delivering my precious (said while greedily rubbing one's hands), yards and houses littered with toys long forgotten, Little Tyke playhouses fading in the sun, landfills bulging.  It disgusts me.  I see the earth’s resources being plundered so wealthy countries can give their darling children toys.  And for what?  A toy’s lifespan is so very short.  The joy or benefit a toy brings is measured in minutes or hours but its effect on the Earth will last for decades or even centuries.  The majority of toys are creativity-stifling, jealousy-generating, chaos-creating, Mama frustration-building, resource-wasting soon-to-be pieces of garbage.  Hmmm, not the least bit opinionated here.

What about the ‘good toys’?  The wooden blocks, the handmade Waldorf dolls, the Sara’s play silks?  Yes, these are pleasant toys to look at and can offer years of unstructured creative play.  But the desire of the parent to fill up a child’s room with even these ‘wholesome’ toys is wrought with many of the same problems - enormous expense, filled bedrooms, the desire for possession or worse, collection ('I want the whole set!'), and ultimately waste. 

I find my children are much more peaceful when they have no toys around.  There is less bickering, more cooperation.  Their play is more open, more joyously shared, more imaginative.  Their play is more active and more often outdoors.  They engage with nature and use her creations for their playthings.  Sticks are incredibly popular, as are rocks, mud, trees, frost, caterpillars, puddles, pinecones, leaves, hills, dirt, trails, tadpoles and creeks.  Nature's playthings don't cause the same turmoil in my home that Hot Wheels and Legos do.  The more I remove of the store bought things, the better my children become.

 

Creating Creative Time

It is time for some changes.  My youngest child is turning eight years old next month.  For the past 17 years my mind and days have been occupied with four children who, over the years, have come into my life to enrich and challenge me as only your own children can.  While they still enrich, challenge and occupy my days, I have no ‘little ones’ right now so I am beginning to feel a space opening up in which, if I am careful, I can craft nicely into Creative Time.   

Elio before his first BMX race of 2014.

The problem is that my lifestyle and skill set isn’t set up to allow for creative time just yet.  My two youngest children homeschool so we’re together all day and their academic work is time-intensive for me.  I am constantly behind in housekeeping, menu planning, letter writing, and homeschool planning.  I can’t seem to make myself follow a schedule no matter how simple it is.   My New Year’s resolutions from the past six years have been on repeat – every year I write about the same small handful of goals that I desperately want to accomplish and yet never do.  You can probably guess what they are; I imagine similar goals show up on the majority of New Year’s resolution lists.  Most people want the same things in life: a healthy body, a happy mind, loving relationships and time for creative endeavors.   It’s pretty simple, really.  And yet I could list dozens of reasons why these goals continue to elude me.

Shannon and Joe pre-party in Seattle.

I have taken this on as my challenge.  In order to Create I need to find solutions for the everyday hindrances that stand between me and my vision.  In essence I want to work on the problem from two sides: I’ll create a lifestyle that facilitates Creative Time while working on the actual projects. 

These are the guidelines I’m starting with:

1) Healthy Body.  I can’t give my all to anything if I’m not feeling well physically.  What are the minimum habits I need to feel good?  Sufficient sleep, daily exercise, time spent in nature, being well hydrated and eating for energy.  The specifics of each of these needs to be worked out.

2) Simplify the Present.  A tidy and uncluttered space does wonders for my mental health and my mood.  I can think of very few things that impact my sense of well-being and happiness like a clear space.  I am an intense minimalist; I have not even admitted to myself just how little I like around me because it seems incompatible with the life I’m living.  How can one be a minimalist with four children and 15 pets (if you count all the fish as one)?   My plan is to create a system to go through every belonging we own to remove what is unneeded.

Joe, Armand and Elio launching two rockets they made.

3) Systematize Everything.  I’m going to put all the repetitive tasks of my life into a system that meets my standard of ‘good enough’.   For example, to be content my floors don’t need to be mopped every week or even every other week, but the house does need to be vacuumed every day.  By creating systems I’ll be able to free up hours in my day and space in my brain, both of which I need for Creative Time.

4) Schedule Time, Not Content.  This is a principle of the Thomas Jefferson Education philosophy that I love and that I struggle with.  Dedicate time for each system and use that time wisely to accomplish goals for each aspect of your life.  Remember Parkinson’s Law: ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.’  Don’t put off meaningful work while you try to get the rest of your life in order.  It is never all ‘in order’.  I need to create a weekly routine that allows time for everything I want to get done.  The problem is I’ve never been able to follow any schedule I’ve set up, not even for one day.  It is a great challenge for me and yet I think if I can learn how to follow a schedule I’ll find a great deal of freedom and contentment.

This is not necessarily a well thought out list of what I need to do to be able to work on my creative projects.  These just seem like the most obvious place to start and each one has plenty of areas where I need to improve.  I don’t want to spend too much time planning out how to do this.  I think jumping in just may be the most direct route to where I want to go.  I’ll work with these guidelines for now and tweak or change them when that is needed.