Too Many Toys?

Do your kids have too many toys? When it comes to toys, there is no perfect number. But in today’s episode we are talking about why children don’t need a lot of toys. Having an abundance of toys is not only unnecessary but could be harmful. We are talking about all that and more.







Too Many Toys?



Today, we’re talking about too many toys. How did we get here? How did our kids end up with so many toys? Our intentions were good. The grandparents, the aunts and uncles, whoever else is buying, their intentions are good as well. But too many toys aren’t just unnecessary, but sometimes they can actually be harmful. I know harmful is a strong word to use here, but I’m going to explain more about this. I’m going to explain why scaling back on the toys is actually not only in your best interest, less cleanup time, less chaos, but it’s also in the best interest of your kids.



I found minimalism back in 2014, and back in 2014, I was wrapping up my Ph.D. in child development. When I became a mom the year before in 2013, I was already heavily invested in buying high-quality toys for my kids. I wanted to fill their lives and their bedrooms with lots of educational, durable, beautiful things.



I was thinking a lot about quality and never really
thought much about quantity, which means every single educational, beautiful
toy that I saw, I could make some excuse to buy it. So we had a lot of stuff.
It was good stuff, but we had a lot of stuff. As I moved through parenthood and
I wrapped up my PhD, I started to be able to bring theory to practice. What I
mean by that is the theory and the philosophies that I was learning in my PhD
program, I was really starting to put those into practice as a mother, and I
was really starting to look at the impact of my parenting and the way that we
were living our life and how that contributed to my children and their behavior
and their development. It didn’t really take me long to realize that, yes,
quality is important when it comes to toys, but so is giving consideration to
quantity, because our kids do not need a whole lot of toys.



Now, many of us are going to see that our kids don’t
actually spend a lot of time playing with toys. Now, a lot of kids are playing
in some way, shape, or form all day long, but the thing is they’re not actually
playing with toys all that much. Now, you might have kids who don’t even spend
that much time at home. Maybe they’re in full-time daycare or they’re in school
full time, and then on the weekends you’re doing errands and you’re out and
about doing things. So you find that they don’t spend a whole lot of time at
home, but yet your house is filled with tons of toys. Or you might find that
you keep buying new toys, trying to look for things that are going to be the
perfect fit and they’re going to be engaging for your kid because your kid
doesn’t seem to care much about toys or engage much with the toys that they
have.



Whatever the reason, most kids, at least here in the U.S.
have too many toys. How did we get here? Why do we have this problem? Because
it is absolutely 100% a first-world problem. There are two main reasons that I
see kids getting a lot of toys. The first is we do a lot of front-loading. Now,
when I say front-loading, that means we front-load the joy on our toys, and