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.