What makes a toy?

In more recent years, as I have been buying presents for my own children and friends’ children, I have been thinking about what makes a toy? Obviously, for anyone without children buying a present for a friend’s child, a toy is the noisiest thing they can find ideally brightly coloured, impossible to turn off and if it has lots of little parts for parents to tread on, so much the better!  However, what makes something a toy? Does it need to be brightly coloured? Play a tune? Tell me on the box that it is suitable for a certain age group?

photo from wikipedia

When I was younger and I looked back at pictures from ‘the old days when everything was black and white’ (that is a moment of awe and wonder right there when you explain to children that although the photograph is black and white, their clothes may have actually been quite colourful!) I used to feel sorry for the children who would be playing in the street with hoops, old tyres and sticks a plenty. Didn’t they have any toys? Oh how my views have changed!

Looking back at my own play through childhood, the things I most remember are the make believe games with my sisters where a duvet would become a spaceship and a sun-lounger on its side became the wall of a cottage in the woods. Playing ‘It’ in the playground, skipping or using the skipping rope to play horsey and galloping around the playground with a partner. And when the weather was fine and we could spend lunchtimes on the field with a football, collecting the mown grass to create pictures or sucking the ‘juice’ from white nettle flowers and blades of grass. – I just need to smell the scent of elderflowers and I am back on the school field.

Playing 'horsey' 

So, what makes a toy? If I had to estimate, I would say that in our house we have at least a gazillion cars (being mathematically accurate of course), a box full of dinosaurs and enough hot wheels track to experiment fully with the zillions of cars going down slopes, round bends and zooming over ramps. Train tracks and dressing up clothes and superheroes to save with. These are all most definitely toys and my sons happily play with them …as do I. Funnily enough though, the ones that are played with the least are probably those with batteries – excluding our keyboard which my youngest son in particular loves so much we have had to lovingly dig out headphones for him!

A bear print to surprise Daddy
-it would make a change from
 being surprised by snakes!

This was only the beginning in the
adventures of the mud monsters

However, I hadn’t realised quite how many ‘toys’ we had that weren’t kept in our playroom. Last week, upside down chairs become dens with integral safety defences created by attaching skipping ropes. After a picnic in the garden, empty pots became cauldrons and potions were made as the boys marvelled at how the water changed colour by ‘smushing’ (as a teacher I know how important using the technical terms are with my children!!) different coloured leaves, flowers and dirt into the water. The spilled water created muddy puddles which led to its own play. Suddenly I had naked mud monsters jumping in puddles, creating bear claw marks (to surprise Daddy when he comes home) and painting the parts of each other they couldn’t reach by themselves.

Before I realised where the time had gone it was getting dusk (I only noticed because my pictures were no longer coming out) and bath time was a calling – after a hilarious preliminary wash off with the hose. The last 3 hours had flown by as the children played with their … toys?

My favourite reading chair has
become a (not so secret) den

So what makes a toy? I am beginning to think they can be anything and everything. My boys certainly enjoy raiding my kitchen cupboards (usually with permission) for ‘toys’ and I had never known there could be so many alternate uses for a sushi mat: treasure map, picnic mat, hat, wrapping paper and a blanket for a baby to name a few.  

But what makes the best toys? I think they are ideally where the children discover something whether it is that they can jump over the rope when skipping, what happens when they push two cars at a time down the track or how it feels to drag their fingers through different textures of mud. Combine their imagination with curiosity and anything is possible. Some of the best toys are where it is the children doing much more thinking than the ‘toy’. So when I look back at those olden-day photographs and show them to children, it isn’t with pity but with admiration thinking of the fun they are having, the games they are playing and the imagination they are sparking. 

'Smushing' potions