Simplicity Parenting (12 page)

The pile needs to be halved, and halved again, and perhaps again. The first removed half will probably be discarded, the second removed half will probably be both discards and some toys to be stored, and the third halving will give you your keepers. However the percentages work out for you, you should be left with only a small fraction of the toys you had before. I realize this advice transforms me into a sort of Scrooge in your eyes, a figure—I can hardly imagine what they’d look like—who’s the opposite of every benevolent gift-bearing character in every popular movie and advertisement. Bear with me.

We’ll look at this accumulation of toys more closely, and I’ll make suggestions about which to keep, which to store in a “toy library,” and which to throw away. We’ll discuss the notion of fixed toys and those that engage a child. But for now I would ask you to simply ponder the
sheer quantity of toys your child has, and consider what might happen when that number is reduced.

We are told, often and in so many ways, that this toy and that toy will somehow develop our child’s imagination. If one such toy is beneficial, surely ten more will increase their imagination tenfold. How wonderful to envision the potential of even
more
toys—especially this very elaborate one and those dozen or so small ones—to delight, and stimulate our children? We see the toys as assets, and why stop there? Increasingly we see them as
necessary
to the growth of our children’s imaginations. Needless to say, our involvement is also critical as the procurers of these vital commodities. Our motivations are generous; they fit with our deep desire to provide everything we can for our children’s well-being.

Yet these basically good impulses can be manipulated. Advertisers would have us believe that our kids have no inner life at all, except that which toys—particularly their own—can provide. Their pitches suggest that our children’s imaginations are blank slates waiting for the right, or newest, or most perfect combination, of toys to imprint its magic.

The attribution of creativity has shifted away from children, who come by it quite naturally, to the efforts of executives in toy company boardrooms, who claim the power to “develop” and “stimulate” creativity. An overemphasis on toys co-opts and commercializes play, making it no longer a child’s natural world but rather one that’s dependent on adults, and the things they provide, to exist.

Our generous impulses can also go awry. After all, if toys are seen as universally beneficial, then we have an unlimited pass to buy, buy, buy, and buy one or two more. What started as a generous desire to please and provide can assume its own life. It can become addictive, feeding our own needs rather than our children’s. Overworked and under nurtured, we parents sometimes use toys, or stuff, as a standin for relationship. Our kids’ joy fills an empty space within ourselves. We may be feeling disconnected, tied up in our many responsibilities, distracted by all that we have to do. A fast way to “connect” with our kids—and surely “fast” is better than “not at all”?—is to give them something new.

We buy toys with a degree of compulsiveness that children pick up on. What does it say to them? As the mountain of toys in their room grows, it also speaks. It speaks as loudly as advertisements, and its messages are the same, I believe, as the ones Mary Pipher identifies. What
comes through to our children, loud and clear, is “Happiness can be bought!” and “You are the center of the universe!”

Isn’t it a joy to watch a child with a new plaything? It really is a pleasure. As parents, we delight in their ability to focus on something so exclusively, to give themselves over to it in the “flow” of play. We can’t get enough of it. However, that natural ability can be derailed by having too many things to choose from, too much “stuff.” Nothing in the middle of a heap can be truly valued. The attention that a child could and would devote to a toy is shortened, and eclipsed by having too many. Instead of expanding their attention, we keep it shallow and unexercised by our compulsive desire to provide more and more and more.

Ironically, this glut of goods may deprive a child of a genuine creativity builder: the gift of their own boredom. I’ll cover this more extensively in Chapter Five, on schedules, but essentially, boredom is the great instigator and motivator of creativity. The frustration of having “nothing to do” is usually the start of something wonderful. We rob children of opportunities to test their own creative mettle when we step into every breach and answer every sigh with another toy or offer of entertainment.

So, here is the paradigm shift that I am suggesting for toys: Less is more. No special toys, or quantity of toys, is necessary to develop a child’s imagination. Children use and grow their imaginations quite naturally. They only need time to do so. Plenty of open-ended time, and mental ease.

A young couple, Sue and Mike, attended a workshop of mine in New Hampshire. As we broke into small groups, they announced that they had transformed their children’s rooms after they had listened to one of my CDs on simplification. The rest of the parents in this group were contemplating such a move, so they were very interested to hear how Sue and Mike had accomplished it in their home.

Sue and Mike had two kids, a five-year-old daughter, Elise, and Mikey, a three-year-old son. They started their story by describing the way their kids would fight, rather than play, with the toys that they had.
“We had a lot,” Sue said. “I’m not even sure how it happened, but between us, our parents, and all of their uncles and aunts, we had tons of toys.” Confronted with this pile, Elise and Mikey would behave consistently, but very differently from each other. “Elise loved to organize them. She loved to sort the toys, and she was forever making little arrangements, and lining them up in different configurations,” said Sue. “And screaming,” Mike added.

“Yes, she was often screaming, because Mikey loved nothing more than to break the toys, and mess up her arrangements!” As they talked we could all see that they were not describing an occasional upset, or what a “bad day”
might
look like at their house. “It was constant,” they both said, and Sue admitted to reading every book on siblings and sibling rivalry that she could get her hands on. But when a friend lent them my CD, both parents really connected with the concept of simplification, and they established their first beachhead at the toy pile. “It took us two or three days, but we had, in effect, an ‘anti-Christmas,’” Mike reported, reducing the number of toys to maybe a tenth of what they had before.

Everyone in the group wanted to know the same thing: “What did your kids do?!” Both parents agreed that at first, their kids hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t until the final reduction, when they put most of the toys that they had not thrown out into “toy library” storage, that the kids saw the difference. “At first, they just stood there,” Sue said. “Mike and I kind of held our breath. We explained that some of their toys were in storage and might come out again. But really, we hardly finished saying that when they started playing. They each found something they hadn’t seen for a long time and started playing.”

Sue and Mike had been concerned that their kids just did not, and could not, get along. Certainly there’s going to be friction among siblings, but I think Elise and Mikey were often reacting not so much to each other, but to a feeling of overwhelm. Elise’s response to all of those toys was to try to control them, to herd and classify them, while Mikey’s response was to pound them. Elise was constantly barring her little brother’s way to protect her sense of order, but this would only send him into further paroxysms of destruction. She continually sorted, overcontrolling in her behavior, while Mikey created chaos, clearly out of control in his behavior.

Sue and Mike went on to describe the things they had noticed since they simplified. Their kids’ fighting had dissipated (not disappeared, but eased up considerably), and they were now much more focused on
their play. As Sue and Mike described how Elise and Mikey played now, I could see that in many ways they had become “unstuck”—they weren’t fighting constantly, or fixed in their separate, obsessive roles (“Elise the Organizer” and “Mikey the Destroyer”). They were free to focus on their play, and they seemed to be progressing through the play stages: parallel (“I play this while you play that”), cooperative or crossover (“If we use your bricks and mine we can build a bigger house”), sociodramatic (“I’ll be the witch and you can be the little boy in the woods”), and game play (“Let’s say that if someone touches the line, they’re out”).

Mike mentioned one other thing about their recent efforts. “It was fun,” he said. There were some raised eyebrows in response, but when he seemed to want to take it back, Sue clarified. She said the work wasn’t exactly fun, but that she and Mike had felt a real sense of shared purpose simplifying the kids’ toys and room. They had worked together, and both had shared in the sense of accomplishment, as well as the excitement, as they noticed their kids settling down, and into, their play. There were nods of understanding in the group as Sue admitted that she and Mike hadn’t felt like they were both “pulling together, rowing in the same direction” as parents for a while.

Evidently Sue and Mike were
also
progressing through the stages of parental play! After a long period of parallel efforts, they were experiencing a welcome stage of crossover, or cooperative parenting.

The Power of Less

In years of helping people simplify their lives and homes, I’ve come up with some basic guidelines for how to reduce the amount of stuff we are surrounded by. Our focus here is on the child’s environment, so we’ll give special emphasis to their room. However, unilateral changes will
not be
possible given children’s well-developed sense of fairness (that is, their ability to see through hypocrisy). If the entire house is cluttered, with every surface covered, every crannie crammed, then your streamlined, simplified child’s room will not last. Some form of homeostasis among the rooms will develop—either their room will reclutter, or its simplicity will prove your inspiration for decluttering elsewhere. However it happens, the more consistent you can be in simplifying throughout the house, the more wholeheartedly your commitment will be understood and embraced.

What’s the magic number of toys a child should have? There are no absolutes, of course. One night after a lecture a mom asked, “If fewer toys are better, is it best to have none at all?” No, I’m not advocating complete toy deprivation. A half dozen or even a dozen toys may be too few for children beyond eighteen months of age. Beloved toys are sacred; they stay. And there has to be a good mix of toys. We’ll address the keepers and the mix after we create some space by reducing the pile.

If you have a large number of toys, you’ll need to whittle that quantity down considerably. This is best done without your child… That is, if you want to get the task accomplished. By yourself you can declutter dramatically, guided by your own sense of what toys have “staying power” for your child. When you’re finished, they may greet the results with a question about one or two things that they miss. However, if you try to declutter with your child, whether they are three years old or twelve, they will likely argue to save everything in the pile. They’ll profess undying love for all of the things they never play with, the toys that have been broken or long forgotten. Again, this is a job best done without them.

It would be wonderful if you could donate your undamaged, usable toys to charity. But the unavoidable (and liberating) first step is to throw many of them out. In any given pile there are usually a good number of toys that are broken, unrecognizable, or separated from whatever used to make them whole or give them meaning. Toss them in to the “out they go” trash bag.

One principle is vitally important, and it will be your most trusted guide to simplifying your child’s toys. Ask yourself, “Is this a toy my child can pour their imagination into, or is it too ‘fixed?” By “fixed” I mean is it already too finished, and detailed, too much of one—and only one—thing? Does it “do everything,” or can a child change it, manipulate it, dream into it? Is this a toy that “does” so much (this button pushes the ejector rods, this button triggers the lights, this button launches the missiles), that my child’s main involvement will be sitting there pushing buttons? Is this toy so complex that it can only break?