So today I took Will out to brunch. I did have three trains in my purse in case he got bored, because we’d just come from a doctor’s appointment and I wasn’t sure how long it would take, but I never took them out. He just played with whatever was around him on the table. He mostly played with an empty creamer cup, pushing the lid in and out, pretending it was a spice shaker and pouring it over his plate tapping his finger on it; stacking full creamer cups and announcing, “I’m building a tower!” then knocking it over; taking his spoon and pretending to stir something in the creamer cup (even though the spoon barely fit in there). Our leftovers were packaged and table totally cleared, and he looked up from what he was doing and said, “Where’d the French toast go?”. He hadn’t even noticed we were getting ready to leave, he was so engrossed in his “toys.”
Watching him play with something as simple as creamer cups made me think of a blog I recently discovered and love called Simple Families. The writer has a PhD in child development and is a mom to two young kids. She is a women close to my heart, as she writes a lot about how simplicity is good for kids (I particularly love this piece called Why I Got Rid of the Toys). She writes about how kids learn best (and all playing is learning, for little kids) with simple toys in an uncluttered play space. The playroom in her house has 15 toys and 8 books at any given time (rotated on a 1-in-1-out policy), and it’s clean and open and beautiful. Eight books would never work for us, because Will will read 8 books in an hour then clamor for more, but I love the style of the play space she’s set up for her kids. Everything’s visible, the kids can reach everything in there and put everything back, and there’s plenty of room to move around and empty surfaces to put toys on. Also, as an added bonus, clean up is easy! (I definitely appreciate this because our “play room” is essentially the front nook of our living room, so easy clean up is a must, because I don’t want to spend my evenings in a space where toys take up all the floor space, nor do I want to dedicate 30 minutes after dinner to cleaning up.) She points to research that shows that kids learn better in a clean, uncluttered environment. She also writes about the educational value of simple toys that encourage imagination. She says don’t buy your kid a tee-pee, a cape, and a blanket. Give them a bedsheet and let them create whatever they want. Fewer toys = more imagination = more fun for kids = better learning.
This toy philosophy (have a few, well-thought-out toys that encourage imaginative play in an uncluttered play area) is exactly what my husband and I have sort of been drawn to since Will was a baby, but were never able to put into words. We both hate toys that do things: make noise, beep, respond to pushes of buttons, etc. Not just because they’re annoying as all get out, but because they don’t encourage thinking or imagination. They just do one thing over and over. When Will was a baby (somewhere around 3-6 months probably), he literally had two toys. (Granted, he was just figuring out he had hands and there was a world around him further than mom and dad’s faces, so it’s not like he needed much, but still.) He had a little hungry caterpillar rattle that had a teether at one end, and he had (well, we let him play with) one of our to-go coffee cups. That was pretty much it. He spent a lot of his time in the stroller at that age, observing the world around him, which is all kids that age really need to do anyway. We started reading him books around that time, too. We are naturally drawn to just letting him look around and play with what’s in front of him. On airplanes until he was almost two, he would just play with the magazines in the seat back pocket and with empty paper cups after we’d finished our coffee. (Now that he knows what Thomas the Tank Engine videos are, we’ve entered a couple of those – on silent – into our airplane repertoire.) But he plays great independently. He gets absorbed in one toy for 30 minutes. He’s imaginative. I am 100% behind Simple Families’ recommendation (it’s also a Montessori philosophy) to have a few, intentional toys in an uncluttered play area. It’s good for our son’s development and it’s great for us as parents (buying fewer toys, having fewer toys to clean up). So last night after getting home from work (it was a slow day and I read a lot of other posts from Simple Families about all the benefits kids get from minimalism), I grabbed two big bags and decluttered Will’s play area, organized it so the top of the shelves is mostly open space now, and he can reach/put back nearly everything there. Guaranteed he will not notice the stuff that’s gone (he’s little, though, I wouldn’t get rid of his stuff without his input if he was older) and I think he’ll like the bigger, more open space to play with his beloved cars/trucks/trains!