The one who dies with the most toys... has missed the point

Honestly, there should be a moratorium on stuffed animals in this world. The reason I say this is because my children, like most North American kids, have each been given more stuffies than any single child could love, enough to supply a village of kids in the developing world. Lately, when I walk into Julia's room, I've been tripping over animals. She's gathered a group of bears, ponies, kittens, puppies, seals, owls, and various and sundry others onto her bed, and they inevitably overflow onto the floor for me to step on and curse in the dark.

At the Society of St. Vincent de Paul where I volunteer on Thursdays, it isn't much better. We have a tiny space where we display necessities for our clients, and one big shelf and two fairly large bins are always full of cuddly critters, with another special bin of soft little characters whose eyes and noses won't come off to choke baby. One of our homeless ladies always takes a large teddy bear if she can; maybe it keeps her warm? In our small storage area upstairs, there are bags and bags of stuffed animals tucked in with all sorts of other toys that have been donated by families whose children have outgrown them.

When you really think about how many toys the average child has these days, it seems pretty ridiculous in comparison to how many toys my mom had, or even how much I grew up with. Today's parents have been sold a huge bill of goods by toy manufacturers who have convinced us that, in order to develop properly, children need objects to stimulate their intellects, imaginations, and physical abilities. And I'm as guilty of buying too many toys as the next parent.

My least favourite toy purchase? The little "kitchen" we bought when Christina was three and Suzanna just a baby. I look at it now and recognize that, though I had two little girls (and one more to come) who would get a lot of use out of it, really, I bought it for myself. As a child, I always wished for a toy kitchen like that because some of my friends had them, but my family couldn't afford such things. But my girls wouldn't be so deprived! Of course, their pink plastic toy (that now gathers dust in the corner of the basement) didn't offer as much play value as the cardboard kitchen creation my sisters and I built out of a packing box. And ours was biodegradable!

The reason I'm thinking about toys today is because of a few email exchanges with a friend. She and her family returned just last weekend from eight months in Ghana, and are finding, after living with just the basics in Accra, that their home here is more cluttered than they would like. They would prefer to live more with less stuff. And it's no wonder -- while there, her kids played the way kids without storebought toys play -- happily, with their friends and their imaginations. A less cluttered life leaves more room for creativity, it seems. Sometimes I wonder if the reason so many kids these days complain of boredom is because toy manufacturers leave so little to the imagination. Maybe it's because some kids have so many toys, they have to spend a lot of time keeping them in order? Or too much stuff leaves no room to play?

My favourite toy purchase? The one that's had the most staying power -- those little Danish snap-together blocks that can be "a new toy every day." But even with them, you can't pick up a jumble of assorted Legos anymore unless you go to a garage sale as soon as it opens -- now the company sells sets so you can build a specific item. Fortunately for us, our girls have never bothered with building to the manufacturer's specifications, choosing instead to use their jumbled-together kits to create incredibly intricate homes for little Lego people, or structures that use every single block and look like temples from another world.

What's most telling about the most and least favourite toys I've mentioned is that, at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, we can't keep things like Legos in stock. Creative toys are usually the first to go, long before highly manufactured items like pink plastic play kitchens. As far as I can tell, the bumper sticker that proclaims as winner the one who "collects the most toys" misses the point altogether. The winner is the one who has the most fun using his or her imagination. And biodegradable is always better, too!