The Tyranny of Toys

On behalf of all parents of young children, I offer this holiday plea to all grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, and friends this year: please, for our collective parenting sanity, rein it in with the toys.

For nearly three decades now, parents have been trying to push back the rising tide of toys entering their house. Ask any parent, and they are likely to describe one room in their home that is ankle-deep in dolls, stuffies, play kitchen parts, Legos, Barbies, Nerf darts, Paw Patrol figurines, and craft supplies. The clutter is a source of stress for everyone in the family. Most children’s birthday parties my family is invited to include a “no gifts please” clause on the invitations: the toy boxes and tote bins are already too full to fit anything else in them.

The problem of too many toys can be traced to a number of wider trends. Inflation may have increased the prices for daily staples, but toy prices have dropped significantly since the 1990s, mostly due to cheap overseas manufacturing. Katie Notopoulos reported in Business Insider that a toy retailing for $20 in 1993 would retail for only $4.68 today. Moreover, online retailers have made toy shopping mostly frictionless. As a result, according to the University of California, American families are raising 3.1% of the world’s children, but purchase 40% of the world’s toys.

As Anna North writes at Vox, the rise in clutter seems to be “unintentional,” and the result is a sort of “plastic graveyard” around the orbit of American kids. There’s no doubt that kiddos enjoy opening gifts on Christmas morning, but the joy in that moment is mostly rooted in the opening of the gift rather than the gift itself. Kids tend to gravitate toward playing with a small fraction of their toys, and those toys tend to be ones that spark imaginative and social play. Most parents would probably agree that, if one-third to one-half of a kid’s playroom contents disappeared overnight, the kids probably wouldn’t notice. That’s certainly true for our household: I recently took four bags of garbage and three bags of donations out of our children’s playroom, and my two preschoolers haven’t said a word.

The economic issues may dominate the headlines, but there are also a number of psychological and spiritual issues at play behind the toy tidal wave. The phrase “he who dies with the most toys wins” may make us all gag a little in disgust, and yet a quiet undercurrent of materialism still manifests in our wider culture. Kids intuitively understand this. A friend from out of town visited our house over the summer, but his preschool daughter seemed to have more fun than he did. “I like visiting their house,” she later told her dad. “They have a lot of toys!” I was shocked at my inner reaction: happy that my kids weren’t viewed with an air of plastic pity but embarrassed to be associated with the kind of materialism we claim to oppose.

Family history is also a major component of toy clutter. It’s often the case that parents who grow up in poverty will overcompensate with toys, giving their own children an abundance of the things they missed in their own childhood. And when those parents become grandparents, it’s hard for them to understand that too many toys can be a problem. My experience with these family members is that the type, brand, quality, or age appropriateness of the toy doesn’t matter: if it’s cheap and there’s a kid relative who will enjoy it, the toy goes into the cart. One suspects that these family members, as well as they intend, enjoy purchasing the toys more than the child enjoys receiving them.

It’s not only a matter of material poverty, but emotional poverty as well. For family members that live at a distance, or family that has trouble expressing love through close connection, gifts become a substitute for other ways of showing love. There may be five love languages according to Gary Chapman’s famous book, but many families exclusively give gifts because the other ways of showing love are not welcome or practiced in a given family system. In those families, other ways of showing love like quality time, physical touch, acts of service, and words of affirmation are awkward or anathema.

The plastic graveyard of toys in any given house comes with a number of unexpected tags attached to them. Gifts can be a sign of guilt or shame, given in extravagance to compensate for some other failure of love. Gifts can be an outflow of a traumatic past of poverty. Gifts can be a sort of social justification, a way of proving to oneself and others that they are good parents in a world that puts parenting under the microscope.

In the ancient Roman world, gifts were not given out of pure love and affection. Gifts were part of a cycle of exchange, in which gifts were like favors with strings attached. To receive a gift was to be obliged to give a gift. To give a gift was to expect something in return. This intense cycle of gift giving helped solidify political allegiances, family ties, and economic partnerships. Like our modern phrase “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine,” there was a reciprocity in ancient gift giving customs that seems foreign to us today.

That started to change, of course, around the turn to the modern era in the little town of Bethlehem. It’s no coincidence that the Christ Child is constantly referred to as a gift, but the child is a gift that breaks the reciprocity cycle the ancient world was so accustomed to. It is incongruent in that it is given to those who don’t deserve it. It is lavish, extravagant, beyond what anyone would rightly expect. It is such a big gift that no earthly favor or response could possibly repay it. And there are no strings attached to this gift: God does not need us to scratch his back for him.

If we are to be free from the ankle-deep clutter of the playroom, then it will not be a shift in economic conditions or parenting trends that will save us. It won’t be the law at all, in any expression of it. Instead, it will come from being delivered from the strings that are attached to all the gifts in that plastic graveyard. The tyranny of toys ceases to hold sway over us when the gifts themselves cease to be so instrumental and are given with the same incongruence, lavishness, and noncircular nature as God’s gifts. Grace is what saves us from the need to justify ourselves with full toy bins. Grace is what saves us from trying to balance out our shame of being emotionally or physically absent with a glut of gifts. Grace is what heals our poverty mindset and allows us to act in our present rather than react from our past.

Importantly, and frustratingly, most of this grace must come from the parents drowning in that toy tidal wave. It takes a lot to understand that toy gifts can become a signal of an inner wound, a spiritual malady, or an attempt at self-justification. Once that shift occurs, however, exasperated indignation turns to mercy, and a breakthrough can occur. After all, parents who are too controlling about the toys that enter their house can be just as wrapped up in past trauma or self-justification as the people giving those gifts. Let him without sin cast the first stone, etc.

It’s good and right that children should experience Christmas with joy, and that joy overflows to those who give them gifts. The vast majority of us live in a society of abundance, and it’s important for children to know they are loved abundantly. Toys can communicate that abundant love. Still, in the complicated network of gift-giving obligations that this season brings, we do well to remember that brown paper packages tied up in the strings of social and psychological obligation are not only the hardest to open, but they are often the least enjoyed by the recipient. It’s just another reason why, cheesiness aside, Jesus may legitimately be the greatest gift of all.