Hi, welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim-John Payne. This week I've been talking to some parents and actually talking to Catherine, my own wife, about some of the observations that have been coming her way as well. She's a teacher and although she teaches in middle school, many of her parents have younger kids and younger grades.
We were remarking on some of the comments that have come her way and my way over the years about why kids play better with fewer toys. This seems almost like counterintuitive, doesn't it? You'd think that more toys, if you've got two or three kids at home, would prevent them from fighting, right? Because there's just so many toys to choose from, or if there's just one child, you would think that, again, lots of toys are going to lead to lots of choices and there wouldn't be boredom and so on. And yet, so many people, including these parents in Catherine's class, were commenting on how the younger siblings play better with their older siblings when there's fewer toys.
You know, true confessions, as a lot of the parents in her class have been influenced by simplicity parenting, of course, because they've heard about it over the years. But, you know, why is it? Why does that happen? And this is a consistent piece of feedback that we've had from all our, you know, many, many hundreds of coaches of simplicity parenting, family life coaches all around the world. Same thing.
Kids play better when there's fewer toys. So let's dig into it just a little bit, because when I was working particularly very actively in people's homes and helping them and visiting and so on, I would see almost like a take one and a take two. Take one is when there's just a lot of conflict, there's toys all over the place and kids are fighting about them, they are hoarding them.
I remember one child, one little boy got a great big pile of toys and just laid over the top of it so that his little brother couldn't get any of them. So it wasn't about play, it's about acquisition and conquest and ownership. Now part of why so many parents have noticed that when they get rid of all the superfluous toys, all the annoying toys, all the ones that make noise or are broken or battery-operated, all the ones that the unrelenting gifting in-laws seem to just not get the message and buy every year and they're expensive but they break.
All these toys tend to have a fairly, they've gone a long way down the track of being very formed, so you can't do much with these things. They're fairly passive, they're usually plastic, they're usually very molded, they're very detailed and these are the toys that I've seen over and over and over parents will get rid of first and that kids lose interest in first. That's why the parents feel they can get rid of them when they do this famous toy cull in the simplicity parenting movement.
Those toys tend to go. The ones that tend to stay, the ones that parents establish this toy library, which most of us have heard about, where you get down to 20 or 30 toys and maybe 10 or 15 or more of them just go away in a nice box somewhere in the cupboard and the child's just left or the kids are left with five or six toys each, maybe a few more, maybe a few less, it's a judgment call. You get down to these amount of toys but the thing is that the toys, and this is where I think part of the answer of why kids play better with fewer toys comes into it, because the toys that are keepers tend to be the ones that actively invite the child's imagination.
What I mean by this is that they're toys that don't do much. They are big blankets. My kid's favourite toy was the big box that the refrigerator came in.
That thing was a spaceship, a when they were little it was a store, it was a car, it was a bedroom, it was so many things and it was just a great big cardboard box, right? But what happened is that their imagination was called up and when you call up a kid's imagination with toys that can be manipulated, toys that change their form, they're not already preformed by the toy maker, they're just very ordinary. They're like I said, big blankets, big boxes, maybe there's some frames, maybe they're just very plain dolls, maybe they're just big blocks of wood that the kids, I'm talking about little kids now, that can build with craft and construction material for slightly older kids. But whatever it is, the key to this, the key to understanding why kids play better with fewer toys is that they pour their imagination into it.
Now in a recent Simplicity Diary, I talked about the brain science behind one other issue, that of rhythm and transitions and how rhythm brings, activates the limbic system, which is the collaborative, cooperative, partly yet responsible for that in the brain. Well the same is true when you have fewer toys and the toys, it's not just fewer, but the toys call out a child's creativity because they can become many different things, like I said, and they're not fixed into one pre-set, like it's just, this is what it is, it's a train and it can only be a train, or it's a robot and it can only be a robot, right? Now those toys aren't terrible, but they're not the kind of, they're the kind of toys the kids tend to fight over, and I don't know if you've noticed this, but when you activate the child's limbic system through the creative process of play material as opposed to toys, right, and there's a difference, play material as opposed to toys, then what happens is the limbic system gets activated, as I mentioned, and when you activate that, you're activating the cooperative, the collaborative, and the sort of unspoken imaginative world of a child, and when that's activated, kids just naturally play better because they're coming from a different part of their being, and that answers this question to a good degree of why thousands of parents have noticed that when the toys are fewer and the ones that remain are play materials as opposed to fixed toys, the kids just naturally cooperate and play creatively for much longer periods of time and in a much more cooperative way. So, partly mystery revealed, hope that helps.
Okay, bye bye for now.
