Are kids given too many toys when they can make their own?

Eric Loo, October 2021

Growing up in a kampung (village), sticks and tin cans were our drum kits.  Nipah leaves and cardboards were our hideout shacks.  A stout jambu branch was carved into a gasing, and green bamboo stem a popper gun. We were seldom bored.

Our hand-made playthings were as durable as our knack for recycling - and toying with what we could find.  That was our distant world of relative privations from a child’s playroom of overabundance today, scattered with China-made coloured plastics and video games.

Studies of how playing with toys affect a child's development  have shown that less is more. Fewer toys make for more sustained imaginative play and creativity.  Piles and piles of toys tend to distract.  And, toddlers ultimately switch toys with shorter attention span and time of play.  

Hence, a parent’s common complaint: “My kids have so many toys, yet they only play with the same old one.” 

Child psychologists have long theorized that imaginative play, regardless of the medium, matters in different stages of a child’s development and path to independence. Toy manufacturers have banked on this connection.

 (While toy sales figures are not readily available, a summary report from Euromonitor Internationalstates that the sales of traditional toys and games [in Malaysia] in 2020 grew by 3% from 2019 due to the impact of COVID-19, which was slightly lower than the projected 4% rise.)

Millennial parents with high disposable incomes have thus treated STEM-based educational toys as must-haves with interactive digital technologies changing the nature of a child’s playtime with parental involvement.

Researchers generally agree that imaginative play activates certain parts of a child’s brain and develops neural pathways as the child is exposed to different environments and contexts of play with parents as facilitators.  

Vendula Loo, a paediatric therapist and addictologist, said in an email interview that neural structures are formed throughout a child’s life based on their responses to different situations associated with certain feelings.  

Changes in neural structures ultimately affect both the child’s perception of certain facts and behavior as they grow into adolescents. 

Alluding to the field of neuroplasticity and neuropsychotherapy, she said that neural connections could reconfigure to heal unpleasant childhood memories and experiences, for instance, in dealing with trauma.  

That is when a child turns to their toys for comfort and ‘counsel’.  Playing with a toy becomes therapeutic. Through imaginative play the child learns to understand their attitudes towards others, to resolve conflicts and overcome obstacles.

Having lived in Uganda during her formative years, she said: “It was fascinating to see how the local children made their own dolls, for instance, from almost anything. It is a question of what meanings and symbolic roles the children gave to the doll.”

In an extended interview with a lifestyle magazine in Prague, Vendula said: “At the age of 3 to 5 years, playing with dolls is more of a symbolic game.  Objects represent a certain symbol - for example, a bottle on a string represents a dog. Later, a themed game of role-playing begins to appear, for instance, in a school, at the doctor’s, and so forth.

“In short, children give their dolls various external roles. At a later age, it becomes a game of relationship or competition between the dolls.  The child then begins to engage with certain rules.  It is at this age that an awareness of one's own responsibility and conscience enters the scene, which is also reflected in the game.”

“Parents, or even teachers, can get involved in the (imaginative) game by seeing how children determine the individual situations and what opinions or attitudes they present through playing with the dolls. 

“It is important for the child to develop an awareness of interpersonal relationships they perceive around them and then transfer to that game in some ways. It is useful to perceive the feelings a child attributes to their dolls: this one is upset, the other one is happy. 

“A major benefit that develops during this imaginative play is empathy. Emotional intelligence is a broader concept, it includes both the perception of other people and the overall evaluation of the situation, as well as the perception of oneself and one's needs, opinions or feelings. “

We know much of the therapeutic benefits of playing with toys.  But with more socially-generated wants of more faddish gadgets coming up in the new year and more birthdays to boot, for most parents, it comes down to this: How much toys are just too much? Overload the playroom, rotate the toys or minimize the accumulation.

Or, should children be coaxed to play outdoors, to socialize with children of different ages and ethnicities, re-create from the things of nature and re-model from their imagination – much like what kids in the kampung still do today?

 (This commentary was first published in Malaysiakini on Dec 31, 2020)