Does your kid have many toys?

A few leaves, coconut shells, some mud, a used plastic container and a wooden spoon was all that was required for a bright summer morning. 

How many of you have wondered, how to get your little one engaged at home? Especially during the lockdown days, I bet it was hard having little ones at home all the time and most of our final resorts would have been televisions or getting them toys. 

With the present culture, even before kids are born, there is a kid’s nursery being set up, there is a lot of planning and buying stuffs for the baby and welcome the baby with so many gifts and comforts and pampers them with what not. 

Many kids this age has numerous number of toys, kids décor, play area, play pen, that colourful play mat and play tents and the list goes on and on. Much affection to kids are shown by gifting them with lots and lots of materials. If a parent goes out, there is a kid waiting eagerly at home for a new toy. And the toy box or cupboard is overflown but still the kids would get a new one just because they are bored of the previous ones or something new is out in the market. Or sometimes if a parent doesn’t have enough time to spend with kids and when guilt strikes, that is also compensated with a new toy. Apart from all these reasons, there is the king of it all, toys for development, age appropriate skill development.

What happens? 

Have you noticed, a child would spend around 2 to 3 days maximum with a new store bought toy? or would just dump the whole toy shelf out and just leave the premises or take few kitchen utensils and be happy with that, even if they have a 100 colourful interactive toys available at their reach? 

Why does this happen? Do you think it’s because we haven’t found the right toy for them? Or this is not enough for the child? No!!

Children get overwhelmed with so many things around them! Especially when all the things provided are so high in colour contrasts, some that makes sounds or music, some with lights and movement and many pieces of everything, be it a set of highly coloured blocks or a train set or a kitchen set. The numbers are huge. 

When there are too many toys available to a young child, it makes them hard to chose what they want to play with. The colorful toys can also sometimes overstimulate kids. Children mostly end up dumping all the toys at once and not really play with them. The confusion and the variety made available to young minds is so hard, they can hardly pay attention to one toy for a while. They switch between toys and eventually ending up in not playing anything or engaging in deep play.

Now how to avoid this over stimulation or confusion? The best solution is to cut down the number of toys that’s available to them. Having fewer sets of toys, say around 4 to 5 available and rest moved away. May be you can choose to rotate these toys in every week or two. This way, you can also see how children would more engage with limited no. of toys. The newness of each toy can be sustained too. Also, having a lesser colourful environment can also help them be grounded in the natural environment set ups, rather than get overstimulated in high contrast colourful areas. There are children who grow up without toys as well, and for them their attention and abilities to imagine and being creative is on a much higher potential. A single object in hand can become n number of things in their play.  This ability is present in all children, at various levels, but only if their environment is set right, the maximum potential can be seen. 

Play is an essential part of child development but not necessarily toys. Children need not have toys to play. They play with anything and everything around. Be it outdoors or indoors.