Backstory
I could hardly walk through the room, for all the toys spread around. Looking at the broken plastic pieces, I could just imagine how much all this cost. But there was so much; it was overpowering. How best to organize toys and help children to appreciate them? We explore all that in this week’s story.
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Toy Library – #346
Have you ever counted the toys your kids have? A well-known parenting guru suggests that the overabundance of toys possessed by kids today is not a blessing. He claims that an average American child has 150 toys. Think what that means in a family with 3 or 4 kids.
Overstimulation from the media, video games and noisy toys are creating chaos. The way out is to weed out your kids’ stuff.
Reduce the chaos and introduce calm. Give away outgrown toys: discard broken ones and pack a lot of the rest away.
There are coaches who get paid to come into a home and reduce the abundance. They remove as much as 75% of the children’s clothes and toys. You can do the same thing. That will reduce the clutter.
Then introduce the calm. Set up a schedule for watching TV or playing video games, rather than having both run 24/7 at will. Get rid of noisy, flashing toys. They actually do the playing for the child. Instead, provide toys that challenge the child’s imagination.
Create a veritable library of toys, to be checked out, played with In those periods of calm you created, and returned. Sounds like quite an improvement.
P.S.
Toys Are Us just went out of business. One analyst said it was because kids would rather watch a YouTube video of kids playing, than play themselves. Playing is how we learned to imagine: how we learned to treat others; how we learned about the consequences of making a bad decision. How shall we replace those experiences in today’s world of busy thumbs and digital screens?
[Show #346]
