Archie recently celebrated his 1 year birthday and received many presents, most of them are toys. Talking about toys, he has more toys than I have ever owned, he is only 1 year old! There wasn’t any toys involved in my younger years, apart from that my family probably couldn’t afford a decent toy, all I had was the good time with my friends, adventuring in the jungles (or jungle-ish) and someone’s back yards (often been chased off or yelled off). My toys are very, in a modern terminology - ‘organic’, they are either made of wooden sticks, broken guns (real guns that’s what I’m talking about, or old machines abandoned by someone. Trust me, I don’t feel I’ve missed a thing!
And these toys, I have to say, they are ridiculously fancy – some with these flashy lights that made me almost believed they are made by same people from the Casinos, some are misleading – one of the toys is to encourage the babies to lock the animals in the cage! How cruel!
My problem with these toys is that what else is left for them… if they are fascinated or so well ‘exposed’ in such young age, what’s left for them to go ‘woo!’ or generally interested to find out ‘what’s that mummy, I’ve never seen that before!’, because everything has been made perfectly within a hand reach. There will be fewer excitements, possibly as a result, less curiosity to the nature. He will be like ‘that’s nothing, I’ve seen better.’ And that’s sad.
As parents, my job is to open up as many opportunities for my child as I can in line with his interest and potential. At same time, I feel I need to stop all these ‘artificial-human-inventions’ away from him so that he can use his own hands and mind to discovery, to make, to build and most importantly, to enjoy.
Son, don’t hate me, I just want to show you there is more that this world can offer than just these fancy lights and hard plastics.
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