Do Kids Play With Toys These Days?

In My Humble Opinion
1

As you perhaps can tell, I like Lego toys. I’m not ashamed to admit that, even in my 30s, I still buy Lego sets and still enjoy building with them as much as I did when I was growing up.

Someone sent me this link:

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/50/lego.html

for an article on Lego’s troubles recently. I was not aware that Lego was having problems, but as I read it I already knew one “reason” that was going to be pointed out: the fact that Lego sets now have more specialized pieces (be patient, this is heading in a direction more inclusive than just Lego fans).

Now, I for one hate the argument that newer Lego sets are substandard and use less imagination because of more specialized pieces. I started playing with Legos when the specialized pieces were first being introduced, and it didn’t diminish my love for the toys or my creativity. Yes, Lego kits now look like models more than blocky, abstract representations of cars and things, but even the smallest kit features several alternate designs to the main design, to help kids go beyond what the kit is “supposed” to look like.

However, the article also goes into the problem that kids just don’t seem to play with this sort of toy after a certain age any more. And that’s something I fear may have some truth to it. I know my nephew thinks Legos are boring, but then again he has never been able to entertain himself in any way except watching TV, which he does non-stop. I don’t know - you Dopers with kids, do they play with things like Legos?

The story also produces the time-worn “can’t compete with videogames” argument that has been going around for ages. Apparently, children will not do anything other than play videogames, and will take no other option than videogames. Again, I don’t know if this is true.

I collect Star Wars action figures (and by “collect” I mean I take them out of the package, pose them, make them fight, that sort of thing) and although I have often been in Toys R Us looking for the latest action figures, I have seldom seen children doing it. Again, when I was a kid, whole afternoons were spent on epic adventures involving my Star Wars figures. And when I got into Doctor Who instead, I created (or ripped-off, depending on your point of view) a whole universe sort of based on it for my Star Wars toys. But I don’t know if kids do that anymore.

I only ever hear about kids playing sports and video games. Do they still play with actual toys?

2

Having seen my three teenagers and their friends grow up, I think kids stop playing with toys at a much younger age than we did. I still occasionally broke out the Legos, Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys up until I was about 11 or 12 --I can’t imagine a 5th or 6th grader doing that today. I think the golden age for toys is now about 4-7 – after that video games and sports (for both boys and girls) pretty much takes over.

3

Last year, we had Mr. Athena’s sister and her family out for Christmas. The family included 2 girls, ages 9 and 11. To my major surprise, they didn’t get one toy for Christmas. They got clothes, CD’s, and makeup. I was flabbergast. When I was 11, much less 9, had I gotten not one toy for Christmas I would have cried my eyes out! Clothes?!? Makeup?!? Who the heck wants THAT stuff?

I’m only 31 years old, so it we’re not talking all that long ago. However, I am glad to note that my 12 year old nephew is still all kid. He likes video games (that counts as a toy in my eyes), and last time I was at his house he had built a huuuuuge stadium out of Lego’s. Seating for 156, or so he told me. There are still kids around, Thank God!

4

Incredibly timely topic for me.

My son turned 12 yesterday. His current faves are the Lego Star Wars kits, and Playmobil sets (pirates, cowboys & indians, castle, and spacemen.) He has shitloads of both of these. And for his birthday, all he wanted was more of same.

The missus and I paused for a while. Wondered if he had “enough” of them. Wondered if he should get something else. Maybe something more “mature.”

But in the end, we got him more Playmobil shit (he now has THREE pirate ships - the new one is way cool!), and encouraged others to do likewise. And he was thrilled. It was the best thing we could have done. He has tons of the stuff, but he plays with it. Sets up these extremely complicated Playmobil scenes, makes and remakes the Star Wars ships and plays with them.

I don’t regret not getting him some ultra-violent video game instead. Or socks.

IMO there are way too many pressures to make kids grow up too early these days. (Of course there are currently a bunch of folk over in GD suggesting I am a closed minded judgmental stick in the mud - Just kidding!)

5

In the specific case of Lego, I think much of their problem might be with the incredible prices they’re charging. The cost of Lego is not at a point where it’s an absurdly prohibitive investment to have a decent amount of the stuff. That, I believe, is the real problem, not the “specialized peice” bit. A good pile of Lego needs at least a couple thousand peices for you to really have a good time, and these days to buy enough Lego to build a Lego house, you’ve got to get a real mortgage.

Mrs. RickJay’s sisters are 16 and 13, and when they’re over, the Lego sets come out and we all build Lego stuff. Kids love Lego.

6

Well, there is something to be said for the interactive nature of computer games. It gives a kid some power and control over a challenging environment. It also promotes problem solving skills and hand eye co-ordination. Having said that, parents need to make sure that the computerized games their kids play are not only age/skill appropriate but also temperment appropriate. To do that, parents need to sit down and play these games with their kids.

My kids are 5 and 2 and they really enjoy their computer based games. But they love nothing better than sitting down with us and playing a board game or building something with Lego/Duplo.

Every generation, it seems, gains certain technological and childhood development advances over the last. It’s the parents’ job to figure out the right combination for their child. Interactive computerized games may not be the toys we grew up with and cherished (I adore Legos as well) but they do serve a very important purpose. They prepare our kids for an environment which will be even more computer-centric then ours. This is not to say that non-electronic based toys don’t have a role to play in their lives. We simply must accept the fact that technological advances in our society demand that our children are exposed to technology at an earlier stage in life than we were.

7

My daughter adores her Legos, and has loads of fun ‘earthquaking’ her LinkinLogs. She also has a modular (very modular!) dollhouse, and about 1,352 dolls of various descriptions. The ability to build what she wants is of primary importance to her. Her dolls just provide the excuse to build new things (Oh, you want a barn? <gets out pieces of doll house and starts to build> ).

The Lego MindStorm kits are wonderful training and teaching toys. BattleBots builders frequently use MindStorm kits to rough-out new designs, and most of them strongly recommend the kits as a training ground for new BB builders.

She also loves her computer games, but I don’t expect to stop buying ‘building’ toys any time soon.

8

My two kids play with toys all the time. Sometimes Lego or regular old blocks, but more often with figurines and stuffed animals into which they breathe imaginary life. When I was a kid, I played with Legos for hours upon hours, along with all kinds of other toys.

My kids don’t play videogames (except we let the 8 year old have a Gameboy), but we don’t place any limits on their TV watching (except as to content, of course). Generally, they get bored with TV after a while, and move on to playing with toys or just making up their own imaginary scenarios.

Apart from videogames, consider that we now have cable TV and videotapes to compete with. When I was a kid, you couldn’t possibly watch TV all day, because after a while, there was **nothing on **you would actually want to watch. Now, there are at least two channels on every cable system which air kids programming all day long. And if that stuff stops looking appealing, you can pop in a videotape. Add to that the fact that you can’t just send your kids out unsupervised any more and you have a recipe for unimaginative kids.

The truth, though, is that if you encourage your kids to be smart and creative, if you read to them, if you sometimes turn off the TV and tell them to go play, they will be creative and will play with things like Legos or other toys requiring imagination.

9

I’ll second that – I’ve periodically ogled some of the newest Lego sets that are out (Lego X-Wing fighter? Yowza!), but the sticker shock stops me cold. What do they put in those bricks to justify the price, platinum?

I’ll probably buy Legos for my son once he’s old enough to start asking for them, though. Can’t resist a kid wanting to play with a constructive toy…

10

My kid plays with toys. Lots of toys. She is only four, so maybe she just hasn’t outgrown them yet or something. She makes up adventures with them and has tea parties. Her favorite thing lately is birthday parties, so she celebrates a “birthday” for a different stuffed toy or doll or plastic figurine every day. She loves dinosaurs and has tons of them. When she gets birthday money or something like that, she wants to go to the museum and buy more dinosaurs. She also loves Legos and Duplos. I don’t think that imaginative play is dead, at least with this kid.

Things might be different, though, if she had to go to daycare every day and never had time to play with her own toys. Would I even bother to buy her toys? I think that things will also be a bit different once she starts school. Did you know that some kindergartens now give out homework? Homework can really cut into playtime. So can after-school activities, many of which are sports-related. Perhaps it’s also different that many older kids (5th and 6th graders) go to “middle school” with the older kids now rather than elementary school with the younger kids. I know that, when I did play with toys at that age and older, it was generally with my younger sister. Perhaps being around younger kids (and having their recesses, etc.) keeps you playful longer. Being around older kids makes you want to be “cool” faster.
I don’t think that many kids collect Star Wars figurines. Face it–it’s an adult collector market. Star Wars is a 24-year-old movie. The people who grew up watching it are grown up now. Yeah, kids can see it on video, but it probably doesn’t seem so revolutionary anymore. Unfortunately, the movie made for their generation, Phantom Menace, wasn’t as good. Kids aren’t going to spend their hard-earned allowance on figurines from a movie that sucked or that doesn’t really relate to them.

Kids collect things that relate to them today. Many of the older kids I am acquainted with collect Magic: the Gathering or Pokemon cards. So, there are things that compete with video games.

I love Legos, too :slight_smile: (and I like your handle, BTW). I think that many parents, especially those who did not play with Legos as a child, are loath to buy them because they are quite expensive. They have excellent play value, and they last forever, but they are quite expensive. You are right–it’s not entirely the fault of the specialized pieces. My sister and I were able to do some pretty cool things with the specialized pieces. That’s because we had a huge collection to use with them, though. A smaller, more affordable model with a lot of specialized parts might get boring after a while if you have no other Legos to use with it, though. (And, parents don’t want to buy those Legos if their kids are going to be bored with them right away.) Many of my kid’s Legos are hand-me-downs from me and my husband…if we hadn’t kept them, she probably wouldn’t have very many.

Also, the Lego themes today leave much to be desired. When I was a kid, there were things like “Castle”, “Space”, “Pirates” and “Town”. Good, classic themes. Being girls, my sister and I really liked the Town sets. My husband loved the Castle sets, and he still uses them in D&D sometimes. Nowadays, they don’t make most of those anymore (Don’t kids like to build towns and castles with Legos anymore???) There are some strange replacements, like “Dinosaur Hunters” (I don’t think this is the official name.) I’ve bought a set of these for my kid because she likes the dino figures, but I’m not really comfortable with the whole “hunting dinosaurs” thing. I’d rather have a kit where you could build a dinosaur–but these dinosaurs are mostly one piece! In fact, my beef would be that there are too few sets to appeal to younger children who are growing out of Duplos. She’s not really into “Star Wars”, sorry. She’d rather build a town or an amusement park (her amusement park was pretty cool–filled with helicopter blades!)

I don’t know if older kids are leaving Lego or if they are finding the new sets stupid and expensive and playing with their old ones instead. I didn’t generally play with Legos in junior high and high school, but I did use them to build models and visual aids for several school projects. Sure, some kids laughed at me–but I usually got an A :). I also co-hosted a Lego-building/Muppet-watching party in college with the man who is now my husband–suddenly, Legos were cool again. :slight_smile:

Well, I’m done babbling for now.

11

I’m 19 and I still play with toys. I quit playing with toys, all the time, at age 14. Now I keep little toys in my bag to play with when bored, bunch of little trinkets. I also have many, many stuffed animals and my share of action figures from movies (like Draco from Dragon Heart).

12

Don’t put away your wallet just yet…

My daughter is in full-time daycare and pre-school (not yet 4, she’s precocious beyond measure), and shows every sign of continuing her creative play. Last night it was building barns for her barbies. This morning it was earthquake day in Linkin’Log town. You’ll be buying toys as long as her imagination holds out, so keep the checkbook handy.

13

I STILL play with Legos.

Yep, I am 15 (16 in February) and I have a giant 1/4 cubic meter bin FILLED with Legos, accumulated over my entire lifetime.

I still occasionally buy a set, build it, and slowly scavenge it for parts as time goes on and ideas race through my head.

I am, head to toe, a Lego sup[/sup] geek for nigh unto 12 years.

I have never had trouble using a specialty piece in some apparatus. The circular-based turret, the new, cooler claws, the “space windows” from the Space sets, which, incidentally, make really great armor if you build a little castle for your friends to launch marbles at out of a miniature catapult, or even the weird racers with the funny wheels that have robots imprinted on them (I used THOSE as the centers for some neato little spaceships), I use all pieces.

I build all sets; none of the basic ones take me more than five minutes. Searching for ever greater challenges, I bought bigger and bigger sets, always achieving in but one or two sittings. Finally, I reached my greatest challenge yet, about five years ago; the $70.00 super-spaceship from “Space Explorers” set.

It had everything; it was HUGE, to start. It also had two little hovercraft (which moved on carpet on little rounded pieces), three neato “search drones”, and a whole bunch of “scanners” mounted on neat booms. It even had a basecamp; pull one rod out of the thing and you could leave the entire back part of the ship lying as the camp. The scanner booms acted as bracers, and when you had them out and down, you could open up the back and swing out a giant “satellite uplink”.

That’s where it broke me…

I was putting on the finishing touches; I had spent two weeks assembling the monstrosity, and all I had left were the decals and the uplink array, which I had finished and only needed to attach to finish the ship entirely. I attached it after 20 minutes of work with tweezers- the miniscule connections were set in to small for my hands to work, and I wanted the mechanical gates to work as they should, and that meant looping rubberbands and setting connections with tweezers.

But when the uplink was done, I sat back, and admired my wondrous handiwork. It was a beautiful ship, and I carefully picked it up so I might place this, my wondrous creation on the shelf to be admired by all. But…

That’s when it happened.

A connection holding the “uplink” to the main ship came apart. It started a chain reaction; he uplink broke more connections, and some of the rubberbands slipped off, shooting in all directions, one right into my eye. I dropped it…
It was horrible, and everything moved in slow motion. I saw it slowly, ever so slowly, tumble to the ground, to hit cockpit first. It crumpled and folded, and then it was strewn about the room.

I broke, and cried for three hours.

I was like the old master from a kung fu movie that, despite his mastery, failed in the moment of need and then broke down to be a hermit for the rest of his life.
Nowadays I don’t buy many Lego sets. Occasionally, I buy a small one, for nostalgia, but I only fiddle with the Legos I have, now, and don’t buy new ones. Occasionally, my brother comes to me and asks me to build his Lego set for him so he could play with it.

Sometimes, I hope that I will, like that hermit, come to save the world with my abrogated skills; perhaps reality will tear open, and anything built of Legos will become real, and my powers will be needed to save the planet.

More likely, I will just end up as an old fat guy who plays with Legos to fight his arthritis.

14

My kid (7) plays with Legos endlessly. He also has two sets of “marble maze” blocks, one in plastic and one in wood, and combines them to make amazing tracks for marbles. He also does Zoobs (another building toy) and K’nex (still yet another building toy). He is now getting into the tiny-pieces-and-motor stuff. But he builds robots out of cardboard bricks, too, and forts out of big boxes…

He also sets up whole scenarios with Pokemon figures. No army guys–guess I never bothered to buy him any. Oh well.

Although we did get him a CD player for his 7th birthday–all his friends had one–he always gets lots of toys, and loves them to pieces! Has anyone mentioned GameBoy yet? Those are GAMES, and they count as TOYS.

Final word on the toy thing–cars bore him to death. We’ve tried tracks, remote control, everything. Weird, eh?

15

Another seven year old here. His thing is cars. His obsession is cars. Needless to say he plays a lot with little toy cars. He’ll drag out the Duplos and Legos from time to time, but mostly to build props for the elaborate fantasies he creates with his cars.

16

[Proud Mom]
He’s an honor student, football player, basketball player, swimmer, waterskiier, golfer, french hornist, leader of his youth group, and soon to be Eagle Scout [sub]I know that’s a dangerous thing to say around here. It still represents the culmination of more than three years effort including goal setting and follow through, and community service, began before the current controversies broke and recommended by a school guidance counselor and a college recruiter.[/sub] and he still plays with Lego’s.

He’s the neighborhood champ at foozball (table soccer), and a respectable player at ping pong, and cut throat (billiards). He’s 14 (soon to be 15) and uses a planner to organize his time. You wouldn’t think he has time to play. But he does and Lego’s are his favorite toy, however he also has and still plays with Star Wars models and action figures. Lately the Rubik’s cube occupies a great deal of his free time as well. For board games he plays Risk and Chess.

Last week after a particularly busy second week back at school heavy on responsiblities and light on downtime, after being out with friends to a dance. He came home got into comfy clothes pulled out his lego bin and played Lego’s in front of the TV while watching Star Wars for the 967th time. His Dad wandered through the room and teasingly asked me if I thought we’d be sending Lego’s off to college with him. Before I had a chance to say anything the kid looked up at his Dad seriously and said, “Not only am I taking my Lego’s, but I’m taking the Star Wars movies, the foozball table, your pocket knife and Mom’s good dictionary and thesaurus set too.” We looked at each other and laughed. (Well maybe you had to be here. It was funny I promise.)
[/Proud Mom]

17

He’ll probably need all those things, too :). Except, perhaps, the foosball table. Our dorm had one of those already :).