Do modern toys destroy childhood creativity?

[Sparkie]

Please pardon the far-too-dramatic title to this thread.

I was wandering around Toys-R-Us today, looking for a Lego set for my nephew and I to set up when he comes to visit next, when I once again saw it once again.

Lego games. "Board" style Lego games complete with dice and instructions on how to play.

Now, let me explain why seeing this irks me: When I was a kid, my friends and I didn't need a Lego board game set. We made our own games with Legos.

At just eleven and ten years old, before any of us had ever played a D&D style RPG, we would raid our parent's Yahtzee or Backgammon dice and create games with written rules, Lego 'dungeons,' and simple character sheets that listed our 'Lego guy's' abilities and weaknesses. (This would, of course, lead to arguments such as this: "No, he can't jump that far! He's just a wizard, not a thief!" - "Yes he can! Wizards can levitate!")

The point is that, as kids, we had to use our imagination and creativity. If we wanted to play a game with Legos (or most any other toy,) then we had to make it ourselves. Looking back, I now understand how important that sort of thing was for the development of my young mind. Without experiences like that, it might be fair to say that I may not have the desire nor the ability to create stories for the enjoyment of others.

Perhaps I'm dead wrong on this, but I really think that more and more toys allow little room for a child's mind to grow. I feel that children need playthings that help to build their creativity.

What do you think? Am I flat-out wrong, or are there instances where toys and games do little to encourage the use of imagination?

[Devor]

The lego games are just the equivalent of a regular board game, but with legos. They aren't rules on how to play with a typical lego set, so far as I can tell.

My son just picked up his duplos, and he carries the elephant with him everywhere. I've been eying the sets for when he's ready.

[San Cidolfus]

Imagination isn't a recent development in human history. The toys that we played with as children are light years ahead of what our grandparents had as little ones, and this continues as far back as you'd care to take it.

Any toy, however fancy, is just a starting point. A child with an imagination will carry it further.

Sometimes it goes the other way, too, and no matter what fancy electronic delights are at our children's fingertips, they'll still reach for what intrigues them. When I was five or six my older brother had a Nintendo, and I remember playing me some Gauntlet. But in that very same room at that very same age, I can clearly remember being engaged with my favorite toy: a cardboard box. It was big enough for me to sit inside and pretend it was a fighter plane. No console gaming system could do that.

Don't despair for the children, Sparkie. They'll turn out all right. We did.

[Haroon Al-Qahtani]

Kids can download an entire photo lab or music studio from Pirate Bay nowadays. They can sample any writer they want on-line and soak up an artist's entire body of work without depleting their allowance. They can skip wiring things together and simply put their ideas onto a canvas. You can argue about how important it is to develop your own tool set and work hard to acquire it, but a person who wrote a word processor cannot inherently write a book anyone would care to read.

Last time I visited a toy store I merely realized that most of the products had been obsoleted by $99 smartphones. You can download a chemistry set even -- I'm guessing. There's a reason toy stores continue to go out of business.

[Legendary Sidekick]

You're not wrong... but have no fear. There's still hope for this generation! A ten-year-old at my church told me about a Lego board game he invented. He told how each character class had a special "action" or "movement." I had to stop myself when he told me his "Tank" class had 7 health while everyone else had 5. (Only 40% more health? What kind of a wimpy tank is that?) But I was impressed with the amount of thought he and his younger brother put into their game!

My brother, my neighbor and I played an outdoor version of Double Dragon using sticks. Like any homegrown D&D game, we had math like health and damage, and there were "boss battles" (boss : DD :: dragon : D&D) and maybe a storyline. Admittedly not as safe as a Lego board game, but I think the creativity is the same. And we somehow survived these "battles" without injury.

No serious injuries, I mean. We had to make a rule about the throwing knife (a small, sharp-looking stick). The eye is such a small target, but surprisingly easy to hit when you're aiming for the mid-torso!

[Codey Amprim]

Honestly when I saw those Lego board games a few months back I was jealous that I didn't have that as a kid! I was always playing with legos I have a TON of them.

That aside, I do kind of agree. While I don't think it's completely ruined by smartphones, I do think they've had an unfixable effect on the toy business. My little sister plays about 60% of the time on my step-mother's iPhone and the rest with her toys. I got her started on Legos, too.

The bottom line, I think, should be that kids should only get a few things to play and develop with. The more stuff they have, the less they develop on a certain skill. I know when I grew up I only had Legos, cars, and action figures. Eventually I learned how to use the super Nintendo, and then gaming opened up to me. Games were do awesome back then.

That and we had sticks. Lots of em. And many ouchies while slaying evil bushes and swingset castles. Those were good times.

But mostly I think that it's just how everything is changing that is what is affecting the toy industry the most; kids just don't want to play with dolls and action figures when they have all kinds of mind-numbing games to play on screens. It's a shame, really. Children develop so many things when they use their creativity. I guess the parents should take some blame, too, for not recognizing/caring enough to not take action against this.

I'm not trying to make this sound like it's the end of the world, and I know that's what it seems like by reading it. Just stating what I think on the issue, but I do have a beef with a lot of the parenting horrors out there today.

[Benjamin Clayborne]

As a father of two boys who have loads of shiny, flashy toys (and a PS2 and a Wii and the Internet), I can tell you that they're just as imaginative as I was with toys back in the 1980s. We have several Indiana Jones LEGO sets, and my older son spends hours reconfiguring them (with all their specialized, custom pieces) to make all sorts of bizarre stuff.

I'm not really concerned about the idea of modern toys having a detrimental effect on childhood creativity, mostly because I've seen zero evidence that this is the case. It's easy to say "Look! Things are different!" but actually providing hard data that something bad has happened is a bit more difficult. (Assuming you can even figure out a way to quantify "childhood creativity" in order to demonstrate that there's less of it now.)

[grahamguitarman]

Eee by gum when I were a lad....

Seriously though when I was a kid home computers and game consoles simply didn't exist full stop. lego was simple bricks with no custom bits at all, if you wanted to build a spaceship you had to figure it out using conventional bricks. though to be honest Lego was for girls - me and my brothers had Meccano, which was way cooler, I remember building a five foot tall walking robot with that stuff but 90% of the time we were too busy out on our bikes, or exploring, or having play battles in the woods to even think about toys - that was something to do when you got home in the evening.

But are kids today less creative, my 7 year old girl loves to make things or draw, and my five year old would rather be in the back garden than in front of a TV, so maybe they will be fine. Toys and games are only vehicles for imagination and always have been, its the child that adds the vital imagination not the games designer.

I used to work in the toy industry as a freelance sculptor (I literally used to design and sculpt the figures for the board games like hero quest ect) and we were always looking to make toys as flexible as possible in terms of what could be done with them. and yet at play testing sessions, the kids would still think of a dozen ways of playing with things that the designers had never thought of.

I do think online gaming however is potentially more dangerous, it has the potential to create a whole generation of young people with zero social skills, which is kinda sad. Some of my seventeen year old sons friends almost never leave their bedroom, never mind the house. And I had to watch my son lose a lovely girlfriend because he was too addicted to his computer to put time into the relationship. He simply didn't have the social skills to realise there is a difference between online socialising, and dealing with real people in the real world.

I don't intend to let my younger children fall into the same trap.

[Steerpike]

I'm not too worried about it. My kids have good imaginations and enjoy electronic games and other technology.

It seems to me this is the sort of concern that you see from every generation about the next. When I was growing up my parents and grandparents talked about how such things were so different when they grew up (the implication being it was better), and I do it now. I'm sure my kids will do it when they have kids

[Corvus]

90% of the time we were too busy out on our bikes, or exploring, or having play battles in the woods to even think about toys

I did that to! Even though my sister and I were the only girls in the group. We would get our bikes out haw silly names like the Blue Knight and go about saving the world. Then when it got dark and we had to go home we would complain protest and beg for "Just five more minutes, please!"