Toys

I've been thinking about toys lately.  My 18 month old grandson has a ROOM full of them, some from me, the grandma who always brings him something, some inherited from his older cousins and some bought by his doting parents and godparents.  He has more toys than he can play with and I wonder if he really needs all that stuff.  These days, toys are such gadgets, all electronica and interactive, designed to stimulate a child's mind.  But I wonder where their imagination comes into play, when the toy DOES everything.  I remember creating whole scenarios with toy cars that just... rolled, with dolls that just were  dolls.  Balls just bounced, they didn't light up and sing the alphabet ( seriously, he has one that does this and he loves it but  really???)  He is such a gizmo guy at 18 months he can go onto his mother's phone, find the app for his Mickey Mouse videos and change the language to Spanish.  His father speaks to him in Spanish so he is hearing both languages at home so that is good, but I worry that he is being fed a steady diet of already programmed play and not being forced to use his imagination.  It got me thinking about some of the Millennials I know.  They don't seem to have much imagination and everything is centered around their phones.  When I am in meetings with them I am often dismayed at the lack of creative solutions and FUN in the way they problemsolve.  Education seems so focused on scoring on performance tests that we forgot to teach our children how to think for themselves.  Play is the "job" of a child. It helps to grow all their muscles, including their brains.  Ok the brain is an organ, but you get the idea.

I have been thinking about the toys I played with as a child and some of them were pretty useless.  Can SOMEONE explain why we all had Slinky's?  "It walks down stairs alone or in pairs"   that was it.  But we all had them.  Useless freaking toy that was marketed to us. It was cheap enough and we got them from someone but I tried to figure out something more creative to do with mine and it became a tangle of bent wire in the toy-box that got stuck one everything else in the toy-box.   Then there was Silly putty.  It copied comics, as far as I can recall and not much else.  It came out of the aerospace industry, didn't it?  It dried out if the little plastic egg it was kept in got cracked, which mine did.  My favorite "toy" was my roller skates or my skateboard, neither of which were the high tech things you see today. They were fun, even the skates that clamped to your shoe and you had to keep the skate-key around your neck to keep tightening them or they fell off and you went flying.   I once knocked myself completely out roller skating.  I must have hit a rock or something at the bottom of the driveway. They found me at the bottom of the hill, out cold.  Concussion....  I was a tomboy and it didn't stop me from doing whatever it was that got me hurt in the first place because I don't remember what I did.  Total blank spot.  I just remember waking up on the couch with my grandmother saying "she's coming around"  They kept me in for the rest of the day, even though I was ready to go back outside.

I am hoping my grandson and children from his generation untether from their gizmos and experience the joy of outside games that you make up as you go along.  Remember "Three fly's up"  a game you played when there were only two or three of you and you wanted to play baseball?  Whoever had the ball would hit and whoever caught three fly balls would have the next "up"?   We would play that for hours.  Fun times.