I had seen it happen to others: plastic bricks crowding into plastic blocks falling in among lidless felt-tip pens spilling over broken plastic links all mixed in with incomplete sets of finger-puppets, magnetic construction kits, shape-sorters, counting-games, dolls and cars—floorfuls and roomfuls of plastic, periodically scooped up and rammed into a mudge of everything where nothing was coherent enough for any purposeful play. I’d seen so many children given new games and toys almost every week but who never had anything to play with, and who were missing out on any opportunity to develop their concentration skills. If you’ve seen a child who’s surrounded by too much stuff, you’ll notice how they touch one item, drop it, move on to another, turn it over, give up and pull at something else, only to throw it down again without giving any real attention to anything. It’s mildly disturbing to watch. I was going to do it differently. I knew what to do: just not buy the stuff. Make Christmas and birthdays about experiences more than possessions; buy gifts of edibles and art materials; let my children play with boxes instead of whatever toys came into fashion. After all, it would be more £££ to put into their trust accounts for when they reached 18. How well did I do it? I did buy a few plastic items I thought had good play potential. Secondhand of course. The stacking cubes, the big bricks, the alphabet toy, the farm set and later the marble run. I hinted, broadly, to friends and relatives that we didn’t have room for loads of plastic clobber, but I didn’t refuse the SpongeBill cars or the BuilderBill plastic tools—or even the broken toys my mother-in-law kept buying in secondhand shops because parts of them still kind of worked. I just quietly disappeared as much of it as I could. A lot of stuff went into the bin. Good-quality but superfluous stuff went into cupboards for a rainy day (and most of it never came out until it was time to move house). The toys that my children favoured could stay—but even those, I rotated in and out of storage so that we wouldn’t have too much to cope with at one time, and so that there was some degree of novelty as each toy made its reappearance. I’m going to give myself a B. Maybe a B+. Waves of plastic did break over our lives, leaving at times a flotsam of random pieces belonging to nobody knew what. I remember days—weeks—when I struggled to clean the floors because I couldn’t find enough floor to clean. But, for most of the year, both my children played more with sticks and mud than plastic. My first son loved keeping plants, and my second son invented projects using natural materials instead of plastic. We still have a pillow he made when he was ten or twelve—a pillow stuffed with bulrush-fluff instead of polyester. Both children developed purposeful and imaginative play, and both knew how to concentrate when they went to school. It was hard. It shouldn’t be so hard. Parents and children shouldn’t be inundated by more stuff than they can live with. Children don’t thrive if overfed; similarly, children don’t thrive if loaded with too many possessions. Fossil fuels shouldn’t be pulled from the ground to make all this plastic, to package it, transport it and then take it away again to landfill. It’s doing nobody any good: adults, children, the planet. None of us. Someone needs to be braver than I was. To stand up against the plastic tide, refuse superfluous gifts, re-normalise a childhood filled with undirected imaginative play instead of plastic clutter. Are we afraid our children might resent us if they don’t have all the shiny stuff their friends are drowning in? Well, I can only speak for my family here, but neither of my sons ever felt deprived of toys, and I don’t think any of their friends noticed they didn’t have as many material goods, for they were the ones with the beach bonfire parties and the woodland expeditions. Fewer possessions meant a better attachment to the things they did own, and more gratitude when they did receive something they’d really wanted. To the parents who wonder why their children aren’t “grateful” for what they have… Maybe they can’t develop gratitude when they’re drowning?
We need to turn back the tide and normalise plastic-free play.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorFiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Her short fiction, CNF, poetry and educational content is published all over the world, and one of her stories gained a star rating in Tangent Online's "Recommended Reading" list for 2020. You can follow Fiona's work through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter. Archives
January 2025
Categories
All
|