Q:I am feeling overwhelmed. We stopped in at our granddaughter’s house while we were passing through the city and had a short visit with her and her young family.
It was a great visit, but the part that threw me was when we toured her new home and saw all of the toys their two small children have. It was wall-to-wall plastic in the playroom, not to mention those throughout the house and hidden in their bedrooms.
I am all for children having toys, but this is ridiculous. Is it just me, or is it possible children have too many toys?
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A: It is not just you. Kids today have more toys.
When you were younger, you likely did not have many toys.
Don’t forget that we had just come off the Second World War and were challenging armies in North Korea. Most of our factories were committed to the war effort. They had little time or energy for the toy business.
Since then, the world of plastics has exploded and toys are everywhere and nowhere. In the United States, at least $20.9 billion were spent on toys last year. I suspect that comparable numbers could be found in Canada’s retail industry.
The toy industry is huge. That does not make it either right or wrong. It just makes it big.
Of course, many toy manufacturers claim that the toys that they make contribute to the overall growth and development of the children playing with them. I am not sure how true that is.
As I recall, all of us learned a lot by riding our bikes out in the country and making slingshots from caragana bushes sprouting out by nearby sloughs.
Nonetheless, we should give the toy manufacturers their due and look at ways in which those toys flooding the markets might be useful for children.
Jean Piaget, a notable Swiss biologist who spent hours observing his own children to help him understand how it is that children learn, said that learning within a child follows two processes:
- Assimilation is the collection of data, picking up information.
- Accommodation is what children do does with the information once they have it.
The more that children think about it and perhaps puts the information into some kind of a conceptual framework, the more they are accommodating to it.
Assimilation and accommodation have to be in some kind of balance. If children assimilates too much information and are not able to accommodate to it, they are likely to become confused and may even fall into uncontrollable anxiety.
If children do not have access to enough information, they are likely to become bored and may not even try to accommodate to it.
I think children have too many toys in many of our homes today and are struggling with too much information to usefully understand all that is going on.
Assimilation is too high to accommodate.
To better deal with this, parents might slow down when they are in the toy store and pick up one or two toys that they too can enjoy while sitting with their children and learning about those new toys together.
Some of the new electronic toys are remarkable. They dance and sing and talk and do any number of tricks.
Perhaps Mom, Dad and the kids should spend time exploring one or two toys to their maximum learning potential before running out to buy more toys.
If they did that, they would not only cut down on the toys cluttering the play room, but all three of them might have fun learning together. It doesn’t get any better than that.
