Two years ago, I’ll never forget, we hosted a play date at our house with one of my mom-friends and her children, who my kids thoroughly enjoy and are incredibly polite and sweet. Us moms were chatting, trying to articulate sentences as all moms with little ones do with our ever-present “mom brain” inhibiting our ability to sound like coherent adults, and the kids were running around, when one of our little friends asked my son, “where are all your toys?”
I pulled out the basket of toys we had in the living room and the basket of toys in my son’s room and said “here’s the toys, but if y’all want to play outside you can!” and the little friend looked at me with confusion. This is it? Two baskets of toys?
This is going to sound crazy, and no doubt very, very weird, but I’m just not big on toys and honestly, my children aren’t either. Yes, we have toys, I’m not a complete fun-sucker. They like their blocks and magnatiles, we have barn yards of animals, dinosaurs, a toy kitchen and plenty of baby doll accessories, costumes and everything a 4-year-old sheriff could need, but ultimately, imagination wins every time. Selfishly, I don’t like having to clean up little toys and odds and ends that don’t get played with and create mass clutter in our house. There’s no magic cleaning fairy godmother coming behind me to do it for me. My children always help clean up, but it’s still greeted with exasperated eye-rolling and takes away from time spent playing make believe.
When we go to a friend’s house for playdates, my kids are in complete awe of playrooms and bucket after bucket of toys. They have a ball! They go hog wild, they can’t believe playrooms of toys exist like the ones some of our friends have. But at our house, a toy gets played with for approximately 2 minutes and then it’s thrown to the side, likely for me to step on, clean up or ask them to clean up, which they dread. So in turn, we just don’t keep a ton of toys.
Toys usually just end up being a bunch of junk, let’s be real, they seem to make more clutter and mess than fun. That 10-second thrill of dumping out a toy basket isn’t worth the 10-minutes it takes to clean up, as my children have figured out. But what’s really fun, requires little clean up and can last for hours is playing pretend and using their imaginations. By not having a crazy amount of toys, my kids gravitate towards make believe play and they will do it independently for hours. They play house, they play restaurant, they play travel, they play battles, adventures, golf tournament (wonder who they get that from…. Dad!), cowboys and Indians, pirates, you name it. They might have a few props, some accessories and random apparel, but otherwise they just run around living in their own imaginary world. It’s so fun to see what they come up with and to see their little minds at work!
The amount of toys influencers shill on Instagram makes me want to have a panic attack, seeing their playrooms filled to the brim with bucket after bucket of chintzy junk. Maybe their kids really do play with all of it! Definitely don’t want to discredit that, perhaps it’s just my kids who play with something for a hot minute and then move on. But the thought of cleaning all that up? It would be straight to the trash can for me, personally. Heaven forbid I step on something rage cleaning, it’s an immediate “good-bye.” Toys just don’t hold my children’s attention the same way their imaginations do.
The same goes for playing outside and reading books. A mud puddle, a sunny day, some dirt and a shovel “digging for dinosaur bones” captivates them for longer than any toy in our house does. We have a library’s worth of books in our house and my kids will sit down, pull out books and pour through them. They can’t read, but they look at all the pictures or even pretend to read them to each other out loud. What we don’t have in toys, we make up for in books. I’m happy to clean up the books, knowing my children sat down to read for a long time.
If my kids are stuck on what to play or do, I always tell them “use your imagination! You’re so smart, your brain is so big, you can think of something!” It’s amazing what they come up with when they face ‘boredom.’ The benefits of imaginative play are endless too:
Increases emotional competence
Practice in sharing and problem-solving
Improves concentration and focus
Develops empathy
Language development and exposure to new vocabulary
Facilitates creativity
Encourages children to express themselves
Improves fine motor skills
Fosters independence
Just to name a few.
Less is more! Less toys, more imagination. Less clutter, more room to play. Less time spent rifling through ‘stuff,’ more time spent being creative. By not providing tub after tub, basket after basket of toys, my children have to put their minds to work and come up with their own play in the face of ‘boredom.’ Children don’t have to be provided with constant entertainment, when they can come up with their own entertainment that’s far more fun by using their growing, creative little minds. Let them be bored, you’ll be amazed at what they come up with! And you’ll enjoy a few minutes to yourself in the process.
Love this! 🩷
Boredom breeds creativity! 🙌