“The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.” —Ray L. Wilbur
Toys are not merely playthings. Toys form the building blocks for our child’s future. They teach our children about the world and about themselves. They send messages and communicate values. And thus, wise parents think about what foundation is being laid by the toys that are given to their kids.
Wise parents also think about the number of toys that children are given. While most toy rooms and bedrooms today are filled to the ceiling with toys, intentional parents learn to limit the number of toys that kids have to play with.
They understand that fewer toys and practicing a minimalist approach will actually benefit their children in the long-term:
1. Kids learn to be more creative. Too many toys prevent kids from fully developing their gift of imagination. Two German public health workers (Strick and Schubert) conducted an experiment in which they convinced a kindergarten classroom to remove all of their toys for three months. Although boredom set in during the initial stages of the experiment, the children soon began to use their basic surroundings to invent games and use imagination in their playing.
2. Kids develop longer attention spans. When too many toys are introduced into a child’s life, their attention span will begin to suffer. A child will rarely learn to fully appreciate the toy in front of them when there are countless options still remaining on the shelf behind them.
3. Kids establish better social skills. Children with fewer toys learn how to develop interpersonal relationships with other kids and adults. They learn the give and take of a good conversation. And studies have attributed childhood friendships to a greater chance of success academically and in social situations during adulthood. Better relationships as a child also tend to lead happier lives in adulthood.
4. Kids learn to take greater care of things. When kids have too many toys, they will naturally take less care of them. They will not learn to value them if there is always a replacement ready at hand. If you have a child who is constantly damaging their toys, just take a bunch away. He will quickly learn.
5. Kids develop a greater love for reading, writing, and art. Fewer toys allows your children to love books, music, coloring, and painting. And a love for art will help them better appreciate beauty, emotion, and communication in their world. It’ll also keep them away from getting used to an unhealthy amount of screen time.
6. Kids become more resourceful. In education, students aren’t just given the answer to a problem; they are given the tools to find the answer. In entertainment and play, the same principle can be applied. Fewer toys causes children to become resourceful by solving problems with only the materials at hand. And resourcefulness is a gift with unlimited potential.
7. Kids argue with each other less. This may seem counter-intuitive. Many parents believe that more toys will result in less fighting because there are more options available. However, the opposite is true far too often. Siblings argue about toys. And every time we introduce a new toy into the relationship, we give them another reason to establish their “territory” among the others. On the other hand, siblings with fewer toys are forced to share, collaborate, and work together.
8. Kids learn perseverance. Children who have too many toys give up too quickly. If they have a toy that they can’t figure out, it will quickly be discarded for the sake of a different, easier one. Kids with fewer toys learn perseverance, patience, and determination.
9. Kids become less selfish. Kids who get everything they want believe they can have everything they want. This attitude will quickly lead to an unhealthy (and unbecoming) lifestyle.
10. Kids experience more of nature. Children who do not have a basement full of toys are more apt to play outside and develop a deep appreciation for nature. They are also more likely to be involved in physical exercise which results in healthier and happier bodies.
11. Kids learn to find satisfaction outside of the toy store. True joy and contentment will never be found in the aisles of a toy store. Kids who have been raised to think the answer to their desires can be bought with money have believed the same lie as their parents. Instead, children need encouragement to live counter-cultural lives finding joy in things that truly last.
12. Kids live in a cleaner, tidier home. If you have children, you know that toy clutter can quickly take over an entire home. Fewer toys results in a less-cluttered, cleaner, healthier home.
I’m not anti-toy. I’m just pro-child. So do your child a favor today and limit their number of toys. (Just don’t tell them you got the idea from me.)
If you’re looking for a little extra help in this area, check out my book: Clutterfree with Kids and this article on our most creative decluttering tips.
Liat Shamash says
I think all the points here are valid, but i am not totally convinced that limiting number of toys is the only factor here. The type and quality of toys is also important.
My kids have a lot of toys (and they also watch tv), but are still very creative, love books and love nature.
I believe that parents can direct and manage the time spent with each type of activity in order to promote healthy habits (it’s really up to us if we take them outdoor or stay home all day…)
also, In this materialistic world, I cannot ignore the social aspect of having “too few toys” compared to other kids. I still do teach my kids that the most important thing you need to have in your house is hour family, but I do not want them to feel they have less than others.
However, I do have lots of “toy wars” between my three kids…. I do wonder if less toys is the solution for that… :)
Commenter says
Imagine if the resources went instead into equipping these children with books to read at home and in a directed environment with help from well-educated adults, even if just one book a month, instead of directing children to complete tasks that frustrate all but the children of those controlling these laughably wasteful state attempts to ensure decent childhoods, those children of the now omnipotent opinion forming bien pensant class who have been raised from birth to handle fiddly tasks and t have concentration spans even while engaging practical and mental faculties? There are many who went through what I did as a child who will be in prison or who at least gained absolutely nothing from education, because they were only able to concentrate in thinking and found practical work draining of mental agility and insight because of toddlerhoods spent sitting alone in rooms with nothing to do and not realising they deserved better and would be better off in a bloody disaster zone for at least they’d have engagement and practice, many, who will not be able to say what I’m saying, who didn’t have reasonably clever or insightful mentalities to fall back on despite the neglect and the perverse opposite at school’s time wasting petty tasks completion years. But I’m here to say it; fewer classroom resources and teaching aids, classroom props that the parents should provide, and fewer teaching hours, and more books for each child so that they learn and learn how to think if they can, with which books they can continue their mental salvation at home. Put the children of the opinion-forming, statist, groupthinking directing, civilisation-wrecking fools in their stupid, historically barely tested pedagogical experiment and let the children who need the help go to schools where they will be given the means to engage their brains, books, and who will thus make exponentially better and longer term gains with far fewer hours and resources needed to actually go into the school system, to allow the book based teaching of how to learn, not how to do tasks that those who can’t learn easily can do all the less when they need, desperately, to be taught how to learn in the first place.
But of course those who could effect these changes never had the small leap in mindset to consider how the current educational system actually effects those children who are not like them, which is like deciding to create a system to help those whom it previously could not, by thinking only of the whims of the type who did understand it and ‘gel’ with it. Clearly that system ossifies itself and generations are rendered voiceless thanks to it. Those who had a resilient intelligence but still went through the absurd system in full knowledge of its absurdity, need to speak out if those in power don’t stop to think of those many who need education all the more for reasons of bad background that leave them unable to cope with the fiddly, horrendous ‘active’ learning that they are enslaved into. Perhaps these educators should be forcibly put through something they not only can’t do but which only inflicts mental wounds not education, on them, even if they could overcome the difficulty. That sort of menial work designed to grind down prisoners of war or convicts being punished, whereby effort is not rewarded with constructive outcome, is exactly what early education is to those who can only learn passively due to practical abilities being suffocated by the bad parenting that it was the task of hugely monetarily expensive education to negate.
Commenter says
Someone above said words to the effect of; “there’s no way a child wouldn’t have access to books.” Well obviously you don’t know how badly the children of the poor and feckless are brought up, like myself, who was not only kept indoors at all times-when not going to the shops or school until well into my 9th year and even then was only allowed a few metres down the road for a few minutes at a time after which I had to report back to the internment camp officer mother (whose mental illness-induced behaviour of course at the time and even until recently had left me unable to see that this upbringing was perverse), until slight range increases and time increases culminated in freedom by the teens-but who had no books other than those from older siblings and consequently no books to read throughout childhood and no trips to the library for books and no trips to the library at all after six. In fact the only reason I don’t talk like a dribbling wreck and can actually read at all is because I have verbal abilities in the genius range according to an iq test, taken only recently so it offered no motivation for redress of childhood intellectual starvation which would have been all the crueller to one of below average intelligence as many would be who are brought up in such isolated and unfree circumstances.
I am thus unusually able to speak from personal experience on how children are left behind in society without having been left totally unable to do so by the experience, in a way that the vast majority of people who actually understand the need for stimulation in childhood by having the same experience, will never do by dint of having been intellectually evacuated by the mental and physical deprivation of exercise.
Which brings me to the point of this comment. You people talk of how to improve children’s upbringing by controlling this or that factor but as with everyone who focuses on how well-off parents can improve already satisafctory child-rearing, this angers me because it misses the glaring, real, pressing problem that affects so many children so disgracefully in societies that are so easily sufficiently equipped to eliminate that problem. That problem is that vast amounts of resources are spent on educating children, ensuring that even those brought up by wicked or stupid parents are prevented from falling totally by the way side, in a way that simply upsets and alienates further-for having been brought into contact with other children but in a way that exposes the difficulty of integrating even more to the neglected or abused child-those children who can’t cope with the insane experiment of directed task following that only yields results let alone edification, for those already rendered competent enough to master such wastes of time. Why not spend the damn resources on books, books for these listless waifs like I was, who can then be given precisely whatever education it is that people deem necessary to impart, in a way that doesn’t distress those many children who know nothing but watching tv and therefore can’t cope with the demands of self-righteous puffed-up Miss Mops, those children who could learn a damn sight more if books, to be permanently owned thus avoiding the encumbrance of relying on the library system, were given to them rather than orders to use time in a way directly contrary to real learning, directed or not. But I have never heard the argument proposing this obviously beneficial alternative to wasting resources on education that the neglected can’t possibly benefit from, from anyone ever. This is clearly because most people who are able to offer their argument on issues of child raising were not mentally crippled by the scandalous lack of direct and simple redress of neglect that society seems content to ignore because its politer, opinion-forming class have no idea from personal experience that perhaps a large minority of the population in school cannot abide its stifling of latent mental ability with job orders of meaningless tasks, when guided reading from books by authors far above the pitiful intelligence level of the average teacher, which would also build up libraries at home to aid the neglected, would allow children to learn as much as possible given their intelligence, leaving the play for the playground where teachers could give their ridiculous orders of time consuming tasks instead if they wish, and that politer, opinion-forming class see no problem with this when they know that once the system demands actual learning the stupid tasks are abandoned for work from books (so it’s probably just to satisfy their spoilt, melon-smiling moronic children, this system where the vital first few years of education are dedicated to providing fatuous exercises rather than reading and reference to ensure as much is learnt by those of least and most ability as is possible, in a way that would offer solace to the portion of the classroom who is deprived and needs to be taught how to use time entertainingly and constructively), and they don’t even seem to have the imagination to consider that their views are constructed based on the experience of themselves and others like them and that there is a need to consider the ‘marginalised,’ those children who are least able and least encouraged to defend themselves from monstrous wastes of the time in which it’s most possible for them to be helped, the time in which they are under the charge of institutions designed to ensure that bad or absent parenting is not the deciding factor in these children’s lives, institutions that ensure that the poor children’s lives remain unassisted all the while these institutions waste resources on trendy, disciplineless, irritating, time consuming classroom activities rather than injecting knowledge into those who will go on to be a drain on society’s resources, in the most important but also the most cost effective way. What kind of society spends so much on irritating neglected children with forced ‘projects,’ inane and time consuming, while damn well KNOWING that so many of these children lack books and the means to edify and educate themselves at home but assuming that to redress this is beyond the means of these hugely expensive and vastly time cnsuming institutions?
Fra Chris Dickson, F.L.A. says
So, let me get this straight. If we simply lock our children up in an enclosed room, completely void of any outside stimulation for their little minds whatsoever, we are to believe they will become more “normal” in comparison to all the other children in the world. Idiocy has no bounds!
Choose the best Toys says
I don’t know so much that it is buying to many toys is bad, it certainly can be but as long as they are the right toys I think it is fine. There are many decorate your own toys which the child has to decorate before playing with it is fine but just burying them under a heap of action figures and racing cars is probably not the best idea. With everything there are limits. Just use your best judgement.
Bailey says
I have 3 boys ages 4, 2 and 9 months. I just recently packed away their toys and left only a few things out. In just a matter of days they are more interested in building things and reading which they didn’t care for before. So the fewer toys has been great. As far as the TV goes I let them watch it about an hour throughout the day. We have family movie nights where we watch a movie and eat popcorn. Our kids have been counting, learning colors and numbers etc. We don’t let the shows they watch do the work though, we reinforce those things by teaching them as well. I am very careful about what they watch on TV because there is a lot of garbage on these days. Just my two cents worth on the topic.
Catherine says
Most of our son’s toys were given to us by people whose houses are swimming in a sea of toys. My parents had a technique that I’ll be using: put excess toys in a box and store out of sight for a few months. Then put the current toys in a box and bring out the toys from storage. The child will feel like he gets new toys every few months.
Julie Friedman says
Thx for the article! We keep our kid’s toys stacked in boxes in the closet. They can only play with one box at a time. If they want a new box, then they have to clean up the old box. We actually don’t rotate the toys very often, so they end up getting bored with toys and then start playing with other things. The only problem is that they start trying to play with things that we don’t want them to play with… and they verge on misbehaving. It is a fine balance… keeping your kids entertained is a full time job. Not every parent has the time or energy to lay out new projects constantly. This is why when a child is fully engrossed with a toy, the parents can relax for a moment.
Sandra Harriette says
I would not have thought of half of these, but after reading I see the validity in all 12.
Casey says
I have a 6.5 year old boy and a 2.5 year old girl. We have tooooo many toys and are moving into a home that’s smaller and has small kids bedrooms. I’ve always wanted to be minimalist but I overthink what toys to keep and what to get rid of. Does anyone have any ideas of what kinds of toys to keep? What toys would the most awesome “not a lot of toys” toddler and 1st grader have if they couldn’t have any more than say 15-20 toys?
Beebs says
Hey Casey! I think it’s cool that you’re downsizing your home and your belongings. My suggestion would be to involve your kids in the process. Let them choose the toys they like best and want to keep (might be tough for the 2.5 y/o, but you can try!) and explain that the rest of the toys will be given to other children who don’t have any. Kids have generous spirits, so if they understand that less fortunate kids will have toys to play with, it might motivate them even more! Then moving forward, you can apply the one in/one out rule. Explain that every time they get something new, they’ll need to get rid of something old (again, donating the old item if possible). Make it a game, get them excited about having only their very favorite toys! Good luck to you!
Casey says
We do that some. About twice a year my son wants something big (Lego xwing fighter or tie fighter or whatever ) and I say he has to choose x amount of toys to give to get it. He really is awesome about it. He may pout occasionally that I made him give his toys to the poor kids but he understands the concept and for the most part is happy to do so. At this point I’m just annoyed that we need $ and can’t find anyone to buy all the toys that I want to get rid of. Some have barely been played with but we hall have a yard sale and then give rest to the needy. Thanks for your reply and I may even get my son involved in the hard sale. Money talks!