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Lynn Randall doesn’t buy all the toys shown in her home. They just kind of happen.
Her 3-year-old son has a play kitchen he inherited from his cousins. The “random stuff” her mother-in-law buys online is all made of plastic and lots of small pieces. There’s a kid-sized workbench — Randall got it from his local Buy Nothing group, where neighbors can offload used items (and pick up more).
Randall told Vox that the amount of things his son has to play with is overwhelming. The day we spoke, he and his family were guests at their Pacific Northwest home, so he “found all the parts and put food in the toy kitchen and tried to put the tools on the workbench.” But it was always a losing battle.
Shelves overflowing with cars and blocks and action figures can be just as stressful for kids as they are for parents.
It’s a familiar refrain among parents: One reader recently told Vox that her family was “absolutely drowning in toys.” And while adults have been complaining about kids’ littering for generations (please see my father’s fruitless search for an inch-long toy wrench at my brother’s Los Angeles International Airport circa 1992), many millennials and Gen X parents sense that something is different now – Kids who have more toys than in decades past and seem to be reaching for what Randall described as “unintentional.”
Historical data on the average number of toys per child is surprisingly hard to come by, but there’s evidence that Americans’ toy consumption is on the rise—and it’s not just a problem for wealthy families.
US toy sales rose from $22.3 billion in 2019 to $26 billion in 2020 and then $30.1 billion in 2021, as parents struggled to keep their kids entertained at home during the pandemic. sale A slight decrease in 2023Probably due to inflation, but remains firmly above 2019 levels.
“I don’t think we’ll ever go back,” Julie Lennett, vice president for toys and industry adviser at market research firm Circana, told me.
Shelves overflowing with cars and blocks and action figures can be just as stressful for kids as they are for parents. Sometimes “kids can’t play with anything, because there are so many options,” he says Sarah DavisA parenting coach and co-author of the book Modern Behavior for Moms and Dads. Meanwhile, an overemphasis on acquiring new toys can foster materialism, which is linked to anxiety and depression.
A tide of clutter is easier said than done, as toys often come from grandparents or other loved ones, or even from school parties. But experts say there are some characteristics that children’s favorite toys share. And by focusing on those, adults can not only save money and space, but also help kids have more fun.
Still, I get to struggle. Recently, I was taking a shower when I noticed a pink plastic mouse in the drain.
Why so many toys for children?
In the early 2000s, archeologist Jean E. A team led by Arnold counted the properties of 32 self-identified middle-class families. The average household in their sample had 139 toys on visible display, including an “indeterminate number” in the closet or under the bed, the authors wrote. A 2012 book About research. One girl’s room contained 165 Beanie Babies, 22 Barbie dolls, 36 “human/animal figurines” and a miniature castle. “Spreading out of children’s bedrooms and into living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, and parents’ bedrooms, children’s toys became ubiquitous in America’s middle-class homes,” the authors wrote.
This problem has worsened, with several factors contributing to the overflow. Unlike other product categories, children’s toys have become really cheap over the past 30 years. Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos reports. A toy that cost $20 in 1993 would retail for just $4.68 today, as lower production costs moved overseas. These rock-bottom prices make it easy for adults to buy extra dolls or cars for kids Guinea pig in a shark suit.
But Americans aren’t just buying more toys than ever, they’re buying them differently. Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and all but disappeared from the shopping landscape and other brick-and-mortar toy stores. small from bigHas closed in recent years. Meanwhile thanks to Amazon and other e-commerce platforms, shopping has become more seamless. In the 1990s, my parents had to go to Toys R Us to get my brother. Squishy, blood-shot rubber eyeballs; I can make a purchase Similar eyeballs And get delivery by the end of the week.
Online shopping also provides a convenient way for extended family members to send more toys to children. “We want clothes and money for the college fund, and even then, sometimes toys come in,” Randall told me.
Even secondhand shopping has grown, from yard sales and flea markets to Facebook groups and sites like will buy So parents can snag some lightly used Legos without the sofa.
In the 1990s, my parents had to go to Toys R Us to get my brother. Squishy, blood-shot rubber eyeballs; I can make a purchase Similar eyeballs And get delivery by the end of the week.
The rise of YouTube over the past 20 years has also changed toy buying, with influencers advertising toys and Release their own line. Unboxing videos, where kids or adults film themselves taking the toy out of the package, have become a cultural staple, even Inspired by popular Netflix kids’ shows Gaby’s Dollhouse (which now has its own Branded toys) There are easier ways to advertise and semi-advertise toys today than in decades past, and — thanks to features like the TikTok Shop — an easier way to buy them.
Changing cultural norms in early childhood may also have an effect. More schools are asking parents to hand out small toys instead of cupcakes at kids’ birthday parties in an effort to cut back on sugar, parents tell me. The result, says Davis, the parenting coach, is “a graveyard of plastic — all these plastic toys that are showing up instead of candy from birthday parties and classroom parties.”
How many toys are many?
After the initial burst of excitement, many of those new toys don’t see play time, experts say.
“Kids often only play with a subset of toys, and the others aren’t really that relevant,” sociologist Alison Pugh told Vox in an email.
A 2017 studyUniversity of Toledo researchers found that young children played longer and more creatively when presented with just four toys than when they had 16 options to choose from (although this is still a far cry from the 100-plus toys many children own). .
Many early educators understand the benefits of having fewer choices. “If you go into a preschool classroom, they’ll have, like, three tables set up, and each table will have a specific group of toys,” Davis said. “It’s not much. It’s not overwhelming.”
Children’s favorite toys, meanwhile, tend to be imbued with “social meaning,” Pugh said. “Children use toys to connect with other children – sometimes just by owning the same thing, sometimes by playing it together, sometimes by gaining and sharing special knowledge about that toy.”
Playing with others can also give meaning to objects that aren’t intended as toys at all: “My kids once made up an elaborate series of stories about a bunch of rocks they found,” Pugh said.
The social side of toys isn’t always so pretty — kids can be bullied or feel inferior if they don’t have the same toys as other kids, and social comparisons can be painful for kids whose parents can’t buy new ones. And while wealthier families may be able to afford expensive toys, lower-income parents sometimes feel so pressured to buy popular items that they can do without basic necessities. Pugh found.
But thinking of toys as social objects is also a reminder that it’s the toy that makes the toy — if no one plays with it, it’s just part of the plastic graveyard. Babies may first gravitate toward toys with the most bells and whistles—like, for example, these Damn electronics Which emit a blood-curdling scream when thrown.
Play is what makes a toy a toy — if no one plays with it, it’s just part of the plastic graveyard.
But toys that do too much don’t have the “stickiness” or ability to hold children’s attention for long, said Sudha Swaminathan, director of Eastern Connecticut State University’s Center for Early Childhood Education. Sticky toys are usually simple and open-ended, he said, like blocks or Basic animal statistics.
Davies said toys that children return to again and again “require attention, imagination and creativity”.
For her kids, it’s magnetic blocks. For Randall’s son, it’s a set of wooden train tracks left over from his own childhood. “I guess I don’t need to get any modern toys,” she said.
Realistically, kids are going to ask for toys they’ve seen on YouTube, at the playground, or at a friend’s house. They’ll come home with a vial of mysterious green poop that ends up in the freezer (maybe it’s my baby). Parents have no control What their kids want, or even what they always get, and it can feel like that control is slipping away every day.
Adults in children’s lives, however, can decide when to say yes and when to say no. And when all else fails and the chaos becomes overwhelming, we can “steal deep in the night,” while they sleep, as Randall puts it, and get rid of that junk.
