Too Many Toys?

Or what Raven did during his days off: check out our newly sealed basement floor! When we moved in, we had plans to finish the unfinished basement, but the contractor our realtor had recommended didn’t return calls and we have had enough bad experience with contractors in Dallas to realize we didn’t have the time or energy or disposable income to really devote to a major house project like that right now. I still would love to have a second bathroom for our family of six, but we have settled into this house pretty comfortably. Except for the basement. It has not been an inviting place. Mostly it was towering stacks of moving boxes, boxes waiting for recycling, boxes of things that didn’t into the house from the previous house and Raven’s old office. Then a few weeks ago, our five year old was invited to a playdate at the home of a friend who had filled her unfinished basement with gym tumbling mats and suspended stretchy climbing hammocks and drapings and swings from the beams of the unfinished basement ceiling, and it was a magical and inspiring space. So I came home and and started moving boxes, collapsing boxes, and sorting and cleared out the space leaving it, well — like this:
The floor was nasty, though, endless sweeping didn’t reduce the amount of dust and dirt coming up from unfinished cement floor, so we found an epoxy cement sealer, and Raven then got busy turning it into this: And when all of the epoxy had dried, I went and found many of the toys that had been stowed since we moved from Dallas to Portland and set them out and the boys descended with great joy.
Rokenbok remote control vehicles that I had bought in a going out of business sale five years ago, fisher price toys that my older children chewed on before anyone thought about lead paint (actually, I was worried about wooden toys sold in Prague and thought American plastic toys were the safe option. Sigh.) And the puppet theater I built myself!

It’s nothing fancy, I still am looking for tumbling mats and I hope to get a swing hung from an exposed beam, but there is lots of room for them to run around or ride scooters around on a day when it’s too wet, cold, windy and dark for me to drag us all outside. And then there’s the surprise of waking up in the morning and finding the boys not watching television together or playing video games, but down in the basement playing together.

So I took a break from working down there and found in the current issue of Brain, Child a debate over whether there is such a thing as too many toys, and on UrbanMamas a discussion of what to do with unwanted excess toys. The thing I don’t want to lose track of is what toys are: they are the tools with which my kids have been learning about the world.

I remember the way I played as a child, taking the medical kit out of the case it came in so it could be a suitcase to pack on a trip when we turned the bunkbed into a space vehicle by draping blankets from the top bunk to the bottom and creating a control panel out of an old piece of cardboard and using plastic dishes. I think about how imaginative play allowed the development of empathy and the exploration of who we were, who we could be. I think of how many very interesting, strong, smart women I know who can tell you stories of formative experiences of cutting Barbie’s hair. I think about how amazing it is to eavesdrop on four boys playing legos together — often they will make video game styled play into a three dimensional game with levels and backgrounds made from lego plates or my oldest will take pictures to make a stop motion movie, things totally different from my own childhood. Toys have this elasticity to fill the need a specific child has at a specific time — I’ve heard dramatic dialogue between hot wheels and seen them lined up and categorized according to different schema, wondered at roads built for them from blocks.

And so I have moments of that sort of über-mom envy of the very principled parents who provide their children with only handcrafted German Waldorf-endorsed wooden toys, or pottery barn kids catalog envy of the image of perfectly organized and neat playspace with neat and presentable children playing, no doubt very quietly. But I like the childhood my kids are having, I like the balance, I like the practice they are getting in making choices for themselves, I like the way they use different toys to explore different ideas and different ways playing together, the practice they get in listening to each other and taking turns, the fact that they have gotten to experience sometimes getting a toy that they had seen advertised and really wanted and then found a little limited or flimsy when they finally got it. I love the memories I associate with many toys, of people who love my children, of time I have spent playing with them. I try not to let that translate into a clutter of so many toys that the kids cannot find something to play with, and I have donated boxes of things outgrown.

I had a hard time with the first video games to come into our house, but realized that compromise here was a strength, not a weakness. I can explain it in terms of a childhood where I was deprived of sugary cereals and bad television, and how when I was old enough to shop for myself and own my own television I found some things that weren’t very good for me completely irresistible for a couple of years. I understood my kids would be playing these games at somebody else’s house if they weren’t playing them at our house, and also realized I wanted them to be able to play them in moderation, I wanted them to develop the ability to self-regulate a little, and that I could find ‘teaching moments’ by having them in my house — and I feel like we’re pretty good about using them in moderation. Hopefully, I am doing the job I had hoped to of providing my kids with the tools they need to grow into interesting and good people.