> Shelves overflowing with cars and blocks and action figures can be just as stressful for kids as they are for parents. Sometimes “kids don’t play with anything, because there’s just too many options,” said Sarah Davis
I find it quite interesting that "choice fatigue" is found just about everywhere, from what show to watch on Netflix to what toy your kid picks up. Semi related anecdote but I recently picked up a Steam Deck with the intention of emulating PS2 games. One thing I was very intentional about is to not load it up right away with every game imaginable but rather, go one game at a time, much like I used to when I still had to buy these games at the store.
I use the Deck quite often and attribute much of that to the fact that I limited my game options, as if I loaded up every game I could possibly play then I would just drown in choices.
Steamdeck is awesome. Just don’t sign up for the wishlist sale emails . I had to turn off notifications because I was buying way more games than I could play.
> One thing I was very intentional about is to not load [the Steam Deck] up right away with every game imaginable but rather, go one game at a time
I attribute my continued, regular enjoyment of my Playdate console to Panic's intentional choice to throttle the Season One games to once per week. Now I purchase a new game or two every month from their catalogue. I think if I got it already fully loaded I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much, which is really counter-intuitive to me and was an opportunity for introspection.
Yep. Currently going through choice fatigue in trying to decide what program to use for designing things that will be 3D printed. There's also a seemingly endless number of guides to help you choose, each with its own set of reasons, which only expands the choice landscape even further.
This is great advice that I follow as well. In the past if I had an entire ROM set for a classic system I can never decide what to play. Now I limit myself to a handful of titles and pretend that is all I have.
Sounds like mindfulness - set your intention before you use something and keep checking in to make sure you're not getting distracted (by something other than the game!)
We moved a few months ago, and even now about 90% of their toys are still packed up in boxes. No exaggeration. We didn't make a thing of it, we just quietly decided not to unpack anything by default - neither kids' stuff nor parents' stuff - and instead only unpack specific things when someone specifically wants them. Because how often do you get such a good chance to find out which of your possessions you actually care about?
So far what we've seen is:
1. Less sibling conflict.
2. Less complaining about being bored.
3. More creative play.
4. Zero complaining about not enough toys.
I think kids get overwhelmed by too many toys the same way we get overwhelmed when we have too many things laying around. Every time we get a new toy for my kid we ask him to give up one of the older toys they're not playing with. It worked out pretty well so far.
I have a 9 month old and we are drowning in toys. We have bought very few of them. The article is clearly not written by a parent because it barely touches on Buy Nothing Groups on Facebook.
We've barely bought any clothes either. They all come from Buy Nothing groups. Kids grow out of toys and clothes every 3 months. Parents are desperate to offload this stuff.
And my wife has become a hoarder as have other parents in the neighbourhood. Buy Nothing groups seem to set off some sort of hoarding affliction in parents.
My local group is not "buy nothing" but rather "zero waste" but yeah the amount of quasi-trash that my wife keeps bringing home ("this is broken but I'll fix it!") is crazy.
A few weeks ago she managed to offload a pink salt lamp to a lady, mentioned "this is not working but should be easy to fix" and the lady replied she's just gonna feed it to some goats and it was glorious.
> The article is clearly not written by a parent because it barely touches on Buy Nothing Groups on Facebook.
The author very clearly indicates they have children. I don't think the author wants to make it an article about themselves.
Keep in mind: Toys just show up from well-meaning people. There's a lot of social momentum around gifting; I started dreading Christmas because it means a bunch of toys my kids won't play with.
And, not only am I drowning in toys, I'm drowning in books too.
pretty much the only toys i get for my kids to get are lego compatible bricks. with those it doesn't make a difference if you have 1 or 10 kg of them. just add to the pile.
no books in my house because we are moving to often. but i grew up in a library. my dad probably has 10-15m worth of bookshelves. from my granddad we inherited 3 or 4 times as much. but they were both collectors, curating their collections with care. still, sorting through those books to figure out whats valuable is a lifetime occupation. and i can see how a lot of books can be overwhelming if you are not into that.
a year ago i heard about someone passing away leaving behind a house with a collection of 75000 books. the cost to sort through them would be higher than the value of the collection, so instead it all goes to a landfill because i a not even sure it can be recycled or the cost of getting it recycled was to much too.
Yes! I've run out of ways to tell MY parents not to get toys for my kids for Christmas/birthdays. I can ask directly for no physical things; I can suggest tickets to shows or evens, memberships to museums or zoos, etc; I can point out every time they come over that there's not enough space for the things we already have; I can tell them what sorts of clothes the kids could use instead. They're still going to get each kid a "showstopper" (toy workbench, Big Wheel, something physically large) plus several cheap plastic trinkets... plus the clothes.
And that's just my parents. I can politely talk to them about not getting physical things for my kids, but then there's all of the extended family that loves to get them big, cheap plastic stuff, too. I know they're trying to be generous and don't really understand the fallout, but I'm starting to reconsider the whole "it's the thought that counts" idea.
I need to do a better job of helping the kids periodically go through and give stuff away, but 1) try explaining to a 3-year-old why giving away your toys is a good thing, and 2) the influx of new things always seems to outstrip the rate at which I can find time to get rid of stuff.
Probably has something to do with the price of zero. The concept keeps showing up in random feeds for me, and it’s something both marketers and behavioral economists like to talk about. It seems free short circuits a lot of our normal cognitive pathways.
That said, I learned an interesting trick years ago. If you’re trying to get rid of junk, leaving it on the side of the road with a free sign is not as effective as using a sign with a slightly more than nominal amount. $25 used to be the sweet spot, $50 might be better today. Probably depends on the thing. Make it look like they’re getting a deal. Items tend to disappear after that, though I did once have someone knock and pay.
It looks like the parents in the article are not teaching their children that each kind of toy should be put away before the next toy gets brought out to play with. Teaching children that mixing all one's toys up creates an unusable chaos is a good lesson for how to (not) organize one's work environment, room's clothing, kitchen area, etc. Installing a sense of order is IMO a valuable lesson for young people.
As a family with a lot of Lego (both daughter's Friends stuff and son's Technics and Ninjago), they have put in signifcant work to keep it sorted so that it remains usable.
I understand that most parents are not so diligent (time constraints for working parents are brutal), but our primary advantage is that the kids have never had their own tvs or internet-connected devices (except for son's chess computer which is in our living room). Not having on-demand media has left them needing to choose their own activities, which includes asking to watch something specific within our shared media computer.
What is nice about this is that we almost never have to ask either of them to clean/organize their areas, because they have learned the Marie Kondo-style kind of joy in keeping your area organized. And, yes, our daughter read and loved that book.
[Side note: not having on-demand media also helps develop their joy of reading, though it was more difficult for our son than daughter.]
But can we maybe for once ease off on the blatantly moralizing at parents?
In my circle of friends and family, every single parent wants to uphold this standard. The only ones who have actually succeeded in consistently maintaining it also have a very authoritarian parenting style. Everyone else has settled on compromising to various degrees.
Morality is what keeps one race of people from enslaving other folks; keeps someone from robbing or killing another, and many other negative attitudes and behaviors. We human beings are the only moral creatures around here, being able to learn from our mistakes, evaluate the results of our actions, and change how we go about things. This world absolutely needs more moralizing, not less, but not self-righteous I'm-better-than-you kinds of pompous bullsh_t, but just results-based, impartial discussion of what the best outcomes are and what the best methods are to achieving them.
Regarding parenting, one has to find the middle way, being neither abusive nor too slack.
The important thing to understand is that children are intrinsically selfish, and that we have to teach them empathy and kindness, and -- most importantly -- that they have selfish impulses they must resist, in order for the society as a whole to function its best.
No, most people do not have the level of understanding about human nature to properly educate their children. Not having learned how to live, parents are now doing their best, but have failed to question the inertia of our world techno culture, that is overlaid on their native age-old culture. And now we see how negatively social media via smart phones has affected our children (and parents, too, seems to me).
It is the blind leading the blind, but anyone with material wealth is so very cocksure that they know best. "Might makes right" and "wealth means intelligence" are the maxims of the day, yet both are leading us to less and less desirable outcomes.
As Jamiroquai's Jay Kay said in Virtual Insanity, "I think it's time to find a new religion." That new religion requires skepticism about our societal/cultural inertias, and being open to new ideas about community and the role of compassion in all our doings, our doings' effects, and the intentions behind those doings.
I have known plenty of parents who, as you suggest, do not try. We ourselves have tried various tactics, but sometimes the children just absolutely refuse. And the thing about cleaning up is that the person with the highest tolerance for messiness usually "wins" (and this doesn't only apply to children). :-)
And yeah, there may be room for creative incentive structures / choice architecture. The effectiveness of these things is a function of the parents, the children, and the conditions, and sometimes there are just more important things to attend to so we let this one go.
My kids (my son espcially) understood from a young age that their toys can disappear at any time, should my wife and my very minimal suggestions be ignored. It never needed to happen, but they fully understood that I keep my promises and that their choices could have that effect. No violence, no intimidation, just a negative outcome they will feel and dislike.
Once a child understands that their favorite toy can simply disappear forever, they have learned how to form their own incentive structure, with our gentle help, of course. Along the way, though, we made sure they understood that we love them and work hard to make them happy, but that we also have a far greater depth of understanding about how things need to done. That means, for example, that one always knocks on the bathroom door :-)
This world is a tricky place. I suggest that the only way to best orient one's moral compass -- and entire life, thereby -- is through compassion. All relationships, including parent-child, spouse-spouse, and employer-employee always benefit from being as compassionate as possible. Even when dealing with a violent sociopath, having compassion ensures that one is not acting out of bigotry, self-superiority, pleasure of oppression, vindictiveness, or any other negative motivation; compassion helps us take the whole into consideration, and not just our own selfish benefit.
There is no more important place for this perspective than in parenting, where our children's lives are literally at our mercy. Learning how to develop wisdom via compassion is where the art comes in, but all art begins and ends with hard graft, with mistakes and learning and getting better through brutally honest self-reflection.
Reminds me of going through my old toy chest with my parents. Most of what I found I just tossed - my mom wanted to offload to goodwill but I was sure few of them were worth it.
The items I wanted to keep were mostly either silly figures of animals I like (old-school dinosaurs, etc), or creative stuff like Bionicles. In fact, I took home the Bionicles and spent a few weekends actually playing with them, creating new figures. I'm certainly not neurotypical, but I feel that a decent barometer for toys that will truly engage a child is "Could a creative adult also enjoy this?"
I have some young children in my life and agree the landscape of toys-and-their-ads is insane these days. Especially with the crisp unboxing videos, it's so hard not to want to get the weird (and, truthfully, often quite creative, on the designer's part) stuff that's coming out. I sympathize with parents; it's never going to be easy to say no even once you've identified that a badly desired toy is actually going to be a waste of money 6 hours after purchase.
That's a very good metric. I've had friends ask me when I come up with an activity or toy, "how did you think of x?" The answer is "it sounded fun to me if I was a kid."
Many of your odd toys don't even meet modern safety standards and so should be either tossed or put in a collectors display cabinet where kids won't touch them. Sure we survived, but that doesn't make them toys safe.
Yeah, I wonder how horrible the plasticizers were in the Playtex baby bottle nipple-tops of the 1970s. First they heated up the Similac in a little plastic pouch/bag, then slapped that nipple on top, then we sucked it all in.
The biggest takeaway for me is that toys are 4x cheaper to make than they were 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation. So it's just easier to buy more of them.
As another poster mentions, this article fails to dig into the Buy Nothing communities, or even Facebook Marketplace. We actively try to get rid of the kids stuff as they outgrow them, and these are the two places we first hit up.
Toys I remember from the 1980s had already outsourced production to Taiwan. I assume that things soon moved to China, but it is astonishing to think that Chinese labor could have made already cheap Asian production so much cheaper. So, I assume that the drop in production costs is driven by some kind of industrial process improvements?
Not to mention the really cheap plastic stuff given away in gift bags when it is someone's birthday. Small non-functional yo-yo's balls with paddle. etc. Since you can't give food or candy for fear of nuts.
For things like LEGO they are mostly specific sets, so they get built and displayed like models by my kids. Rarely to they build random stuff like I did when I was little, with only a small amount of LEGO.
When did gift bags at parties become a thing? When I was a kid the social contract was "I host the party you give me a present, and next time you get one".
When my kids come home with gift bags I feel like screaming.
I think the trend of gift bags comes from a good place. Parents saw that when the birthday kid gets everything, it's easy for that to become a lesson in selfishness and Main Character Syndrome. Having the birthday kid also give gifts to the guests helps make it feel like a shared experience where everyone is important.
My advice for young parents is to make birthdays and holidays gifts of an experience. Encourage loved ones to not buy any toys and contribute to a party, train ride, bouncy castle, petting zoo... whatever it is. If you want to do any gifts at all, make the tradition 1 or 2 special gifts that the parents pick out. Of all the loot a kid acquires on their
Your kids will have better, more memorable birthdays and you'll have SOOOO much less junk and clutter in the house.
Readit News
I find it quite interesting that "choice fatigue" is found just about everywhere, from what show to watch on Netflix to what toy your kid picks up. Semi related anecdote but I recently picked up a Steam Deck with the intention of emulating PS2 games. One thing I was very intentional about is to not load it up right away with every game imaginable but rather, go one game at a time, much like I used to when I still had to buy these games at the store.
I use the Deck quite often and attribute much of that to the fact that I limited my game options, as if I loaded up every game I could possibly play then I would just drown in choices.
I attribute my continued, regular enjoyment of my Playdate console to Panic's intentional choice to throttle the Season One games to once per week. Now I purchase a new game or two every month from their catalogue. I think if I got it already fully loaded I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much, which is really counter-intuitive to me and was an opportunity for introspection.
We moved a few months ago, and even now about 90% of their toys are still packed up in boxes. No exaggeration. We didn't make a thing of it, we just quietly decided not to unpack anything by default - neither kids' stuff nor parents' stuff - and instead only unpack specific things when someone specifically wants them. Because how often do you get such a good chance to find out which of your possessions you actually care about?
So far what we've seen is:
We've barely bought any clothes either. They all come from Buy Nothing groups. Kids grow out of toys and clothes every 3 months. Parents are desperate to offload this stuff.
And my wife has become a hoarder as have other parents in the neighbourhood. Buy Nothing groups seem to set off some sort of hoarding affliction in parents.
A few weeks ago she managed to offload a pink salt lamp to a lady, mentioned "this is not working but should be easy to fix" and the lady replied she's just gonna feed it to some goats and it was glorious.
The author very clearly indicates they have children. I don't think the author wants to make it an article about themselves.
Keep in mind: Toys just show up from well-meaning people. There's a lot of social momentum around gifting; I started dreading Christmas because it means a bunch of toys my kids won't play with.
And, not only am I drowning in toys, I'm drowning in books too.
no books in my house because we are moving to often. but i grew up in a library. my dad probably has 10-15m worth of bookshelves. from my granddad we inherited 3 or 4 times as much. but they were both collectors, curating their collections with care. still, sorting through those books to figure out whats valuable is a lifetime occupation. and i can see how a lot of books can be overwhelming if you are not into that.
a year ago i heard about someone passing away leaving behind a house with a collection of 75000 books. the cost to sort through them would be higher than the value of the collection, so instead it all goes to a landfill because i a not even sure it can be recycled or the cost of getting it recycled was to much too.
And that's just my parents. I can politely talk to them about not getting physical things for my kids, but then there's all of the extended family that loves to get them big, cheap plastic stuff, too. I know they're trying to be generous and don't really understand the fallout, but I'm starting to reconsider the whole "it's the thought that counts" idea.
I need to do a better job of helping the kids periodically go through and give stuff away, but 1) try explaining to a 3-year-old why giving away your toys is a good thing, and 2) the influx of new things always seems to outstrip the rate at which I can find time to get rid of stuff.
That said, I learned an interesting trick years ago. If you’re trying to get rid of junk, leaving it on the side of the road with a free sign is not as effective as using a sign with a slightly more than nominal amount. $25 used to be the sweet spot, $50 might be better today. Probably depends on the thing. Make it look like they’re getting a deal. Items tend to disappear after that, though I did once have someone knock and pay.
Good luck!
As a family with a lot of Lego (both daughter's Friends stuff and son's Technics and Ninjago), they have put in signifcant work to keep it sorted so that it remains usable.
I understand that most parents are not so diligent (time constraints for working parents are brutal), but our primary advantage is that the kids have never had their own tvs or internet-connected devices (except for son's chess computer which is in our living room). Not having on-demand media has left them needing to choose their own activities, which includes asking to watch something specific within our shared media computer.
What is nice about this is that we almost never have to ask either of them to clean/organize their areas, because they have learned the Marie Kondo-style kind of joy in keeping your area organized. And, yes, our daughter read and loved that book.
[Side note: not having on-demand media also helps develop their joy of reading, though it was more difficult for our son than daughter.]
In my circle of friends and family, every single parent wants to uphold this standard. The only ones who have actually succeeded in consistently maintaining it also have a very authoritarian parenting style. Everyone else has settled on compromising to various degrees.
Regarding parenting, one has to find the middle way, being neither abusive nor too slack.
The important thing to understand is that children are intrinsically selfish, and that we have to teach them empathy and kindness, and -- most importantly -- that they have selfish impulses they must resist, in order for the society as a whole to function its best.
No, most people do not have the level of understanding about human nature to properly educate their children. Not having learned how to live, parents are now doing their best, but have failed to question the inertia of our world techno culture, that is overlaid on their native age-old culture. And now we see how negatively social media via smart phones has affected our children (and parents, too, seems to me).
It is the blind leading the blind, but anyone with material wealth is so very cocksure that they know best. "Might makes right" and "wealth means intelligence" are the maxims of the day, yet both are leading us to less and less desirable outcomes.
As Jamiroquai's Jay Kay said in Virtual Insanity, "I think it's time to find a new religion." That new religion requires skepticism about our societal/cultural inertias, and being open to new ideas about community and the role of compassion in all our doings, our doings' effects, and the intentions behind those doings.
Because they are on their devices all the time too…
And yeah, there may be room for creative incentive structures / choice architecture. The effectiveness of these things is a function of the parents, the children, and the conditions, and sometimes there are just more important things to attend to so we let this one go.
Once a child understands that their favorite toy can simply disappear forever, they have learned how to form their own incentive structure, with our gentle help, of course. Along the way, though, we made sure they understood that we love them and work hard to make them happy, but that we also have a far greater depth of understanding about how things need to done. That means, for example, that one always knocks on the bathroom door :-)
This world is a tricky place. I suggest that the only way to best orient one's moral compass -- and entire life, thereby -- is through compassion. All relationships, including parent-child, spouse-spouse, and employer-employee always benefit from being as compassionate as possible. Even when dealing with a violent sociopath, having compassion ensures that one is not acting out of bigotry, self-superiority, pleasure of oppression, vindictiveness, or any other negative motivation; compassion helps us take the whole into consideration, and not just our own selfish benefit.
There is no more important place for this perspective than in parenting, where our children's lives are literally at our mercy. Learning how to develop wisdom via compassion is where the art comes in, but all art begins and ends with hard graft, with mistakes and learning and getting better through brutally honest self-reflection.
The items I wanted to keep were mostly either silly figures of animals I like (old-school dinosaurs, etc), or creative stuff like Bionicles. In fact, I took home the Bionicles and spent a few weekends actually playing with them, creating new figures. I'm certainly not neurotypical, but I feel that a decent barometer for toys that will truly engage a child is "Could a creative adult also enjoy this?"
I have some young children in my life and agree the landscape of toys-and-their-ads is insane these days. Especially with the crisp unboxing videos, it's so hard not to want to get the weird (and, truthfully, often quite creative, on the designer's part) stuff that's coming out. I sympathize with parents; it's never going to be easy to say no even once you've identified that a badly desired toy is actually going to be a waste of money 6 hours after purchase.
That's a very good metric. I've had friends ask me when I come up with an activity or toy, "how did you think of x?" The answer is "it sounded fun to me if I was a kid."
As another poster mentions, this article fails to dig into the Buy Nothing communities, or even Facebook Marketplace. We actively try to get rid of the kids stuff as they outgrow them, and these are the two places we first hit up.
For things like LEGO they are mostly specific sets, so they get built and displayed like models by my kids. Rarely to they build random stuff like I did when I was little, with only a small amount of LEGO.
When my kids come home with gift bags I feel like screaming.
The plastic junk is just collateral damage.
Your kids will have better, more memorable birthdays and you'll have SOOOO much less junk and clutter in the house.