Why so many families are "drowning in toys"
vox.com
vox.com
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:
1. Less sibling conflict.
2. Less complaining about being bored.
3. More creative play.
4. Zero complaining about not enough toys.That sounds like a terrible idea... but now I understand where the insanity of our last wiki migration came from. The rule was to not automatically migrate anything that wasn't modified in the last year. Everything else needed to be migrated manually, by hand. It was sold as a great opportunity to "clean up."
We lost a lot of important design and reference documentation. My systems were fine, but if the last lead had been in charge during the transition, we'd have been fucked.
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.
Good luck!
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.
We're also still ok with getting books. We have a few too many for our shelf space, but at their current ages, our kids are aging out of books about as quickly as they receive new ones. I just need to do a better job of giving away the old ones more regularly.
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.
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."
I was thinking more of lawn darts. One look at those, and you just know that one is eventually going to end up in the back of someone’s skull.
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.
as a parent i would make that explicit, in order to be inclusive, i would ask/demand that no presents be brought to the party. any friends or family who do want to give a present should do that in private before or after the party, and all present are also to be opened after the party when the guests are gone.
that avoids a number of problems. the birthday kid can focus on the party and the guests instead of being focused on the presents. any disappointment about the "wrong" presents is hidden from the giver. givers won't be embarrassed or judged in front of the party if their present is somehow inferior to others. or givers can't brag about their cool present, and also the kids can't show off what cool stuff they got. really wrong presents can be ignored, returned, passed on without any fuss....
Your kids will have better, more memorable birthdays and you'll have SOOOO much less junk and clutter in the house.
1. Declining birth rates. There are more adults in a given child's life;
2. Delayed child birth. Not only are there less children per year because of this, but it also means the parents and relatives are older and tend to be more affluent;
3. Larger houses. Possessions are like a gas. They will expand to fill available space. This affects every possession type, not just toys. Where once a family of 5 might be in a 3x1 1100sq ft house, now it's a family of 3 in a 3000sq ft house;
4. Toys are generally cheaper (the article mentions this) and easier to get thanks to Amazon;
5. Increased information. You're now aware of many things you previously weren't before the Internet. So an aunt or uncle could bring a toy you've never heard of. Now? You've seen Tiktoks about everything the second it's available. So with increased means and knowledge of pretty much everything, there are fewer unfulfilled needs.
6. Guilt. People generally have to work longer hours, more jobs and harder than they did 30+ years ago. As necessary as that is, you will find people "compensating" for the lack of time with material things;
7. Children spend less time playing with each other because now everything is a "play date". We've come a long way from the TV ads of "do you know where your children are?" that would play at 10pm. Now you get arrested if your children walk to the store by themselves [1]. As much as people bemaon video games, computers and devices, it's often the only social outlet with peers children have.
8. A single device (eg console, phone, tablet) can replace the need for many toys so these things tend to collect rather than breaking and getting thrown out.
[1]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/georgia-moms-arrest-puts-free-rang...
Too many overcompensating adults, too few kids to be the recipients of that compensation, too many toys out there to buy. This doesn't even touch on the scarcity/scalping of certain toys as well, which also breaks the brain in its own way. What do you mean, no one has Muffin from Bluey in stock and it's $80 on ebay? Now my brain is on a mission to find it and buy it at MSRP, when I really shouldn't care to begin with.
2. There are more children per year [2]. In fact, there are more children alive now than there ever have been in U.S. history.
3,5,6 - Maybe.
4 - I think cheap toys is the most likely explanation. Toys today are SUPER cheap compared to the 1980s. And more capable. And more cool. I am so jealous of the toys kids have available today.
7. I take it you don't have children or live in a "weird" area. Where I am (western US), there are children everywhere playing together, often outside! Anecdotal, I know, but so is yours =D And sure, you can find the crazy "news" stories about parents getting warnings/arrested for letting their children walk a mile outside. The reason those stories make the news is that they're bizarre and rare. The more likely reason is a single power-hungry cop/social worker who just had to prove to everyone how powerful they are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp
> The stickiest toys are usually simple and open-ended, she said, like blocks or basic animal figures.
I think these were more prevalent in the past.
After I got older, I noticed the next generations of kids had more "single-function" toys. Even lego did this, where their kits built more specific things, with specialized and unique parts.
I've tried a few little things myself, but with very little success. There just is an established set of patterns where you have to buy certain things, or else there'll be mumbling behind your back, and there doesn't seem to be a way around it in the short term (other than accepting the mumbling).
Exceptions made for the kids or parents favorites that aren’t broken: Barbie, Hot Wheels, Lego, etc.
And, someday, all our Lego Friends sets will find good homes.
I feel like our choice has been fairly intentional.
Its self-inflicted and part of a larger culture of Having More Stuff. Having lived most of my life in South America and later migrated to North America, I feel I can see that more clearly than people who grew up here.
People always go over the top with anything material. Have a single child? You need a minivan. Family of four? You need a 3-level, 2000-sqft house (with the garage where you will never park your minivan, because it is full to the ceiling with clutter you never use). Toys are just another facet of this culture.
As someone from the outside who has been around, I can say the rest of world is not like this. Its not particularly hard to avoid. Just buy less stuff, and donate/dispose of things you don't want or need.
I agree with your general point that this is part of a broader cultural phenomenon, but I think your "rest of world" point is over extrapolating from your specific life experience in a small number of countries. I grew up in a European country and the culture around toys/stuff/etc is basically the same as the US.
I lived in a few different places in Europe, and while the underlying desires that power materialism might be the same as in the US/Canada, I would very strongly argue that the practical manifestation of those desires is still at least an order of magnitude lower. Or in other words: middle-class Americans have much easier and cheaper access to industrialized goods, not to mention large housing, than most of their EU counterparts.
Seems like hyperbole. If anything, the empirical evidence suggests the opposite. You can only fit 2 child seats in a "normal" car, so if you want 3 kids (requiring 3 child seats), you need a minivan. However, minivans are apparently so undesirable that there's a mild contraceptive effect on births, because parents keep their kid count to under 3 to avoid getting a minivan.
I have to keep reminding my friends and relatives to not get them more stuff. Toys are just too easy too available.
By the time I had a second child we didn't "need" anymore toys, but we still got them for birthdays, holidays and so on.
"We're saving it from the landfill." It just means your house becomes a landfill.
"We're saving it for the poor." The poor are drowning in stuff too. A lot of the stuff collected by charities goes to the landfill, either here or in third world countries.
"We're saving it for the kids." The kids are drowning in stuff too.
"But these are books." I've made peace with sending books to the landfill. And tools.
"Grandma gave it to us." She'll never know.
So many barbies and barbie-like dolls have shown up, that they are often laying in a pile at the bottom of the doll castle.
I dread opening the doll castle because the sight of the dolls laying, stacked on the castle's floor, just brings back images I've seen of ethnic cleansing.
[1] https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp
But I admit that declining birthrates is probably not the only reason. There are decades of mass produced toys that get inherited/reused, and as the article points out; mass produced goods are cheaper than ever, especially plastic stuff like toys.
As for the lego thing. Yeah, just take a moment to think this through. Lego has become absurdly popular with adult nerds. Adult nerds have money. Children do not have money. If your company was previously marketing to children. But, suddenly had a large influx of interest from people with money. Who would you market to?
Are you implying "The Government" is lying? Because now we're entering crazy-land and I won't discuss that further.
Statistics can be misinterpreted. If you think that somebody who is skeptical of government statistics is crazy, well you should have seen the wonderful statistics in the Soviet Union.
The official government statistics for the fertility rate is below replacement level in the US, meaning that the ratio of adults per child is higher. If we believe government stats.