Toys... Then vs. Now

Mama used to tell me I had a lot of "bought'n"  toys in comparison to what she had as a child. She and Aunt Tot were the youngest of twelve children on their farm near Delta City, Mississippi. They made their own dolls. They learned at an early age to sew with needle and thread. Mam'aw would let them have small scraps of old, holey, worn-out garments, and they would make dresses for their stick or brick dolls. Sometimes they tried to dress kittens from the mama cats in the barn, but the kittens didn't like it and would scratch and claw their way out of the clothes and then run away fast as lightning.

Now that I'm an old grannie, I see children's toys with the perspective of time. Occasionally I get to "work" in the nursery at church, where we have a big assortment of "bought'n" toys. Many of them are really great toys, and I think the little ones like to play with them, for a few seconds at a time... For the most part, their attention span is so short, and there are so many toys to choose from, that they are a bit overwhelmed. When you stop to think about it, these days we all live in a rather overwhelming world.

On the other hand, when Mama was a child, the "play" involved making their own toys and thinking up fun things to do. They were entertained for hours with the process of dressing those bricks or kittens. They learned to work, to focus, to solve problems, and it was fun.

When I was little, I had a mixture of home-made and store-bought toys. I had a couple of store-bought dolls. In Kosciusko when I was very small, a kind neighbor man came with rope and plank and made me a swing. Occasionally, Mama or Aunt Berl would lend me a big spoon to dig with but I had to bring it back to the kitchen when I was "through" digging. I "cooked" with jar lids and leaves. I cut out paper dolls from last year's Sears Catalogue.

When we lived in the apartment on Barraque Street I received a little set of tin dishes, pots and pans for Christmas. I hardly ever played with them. I think it was because they didn't really require any "work" from me. They were empty and still, and required little imagination. They were not nearly as much fun as playing with Aunt Myrtle's biscuit dough (see We Had Us a Bunch of Uncles), or stirring the white powders together during the hour I was supposed to be napping. (See Old Timey Childcare...)

As a small child, I didn't have many playmates. Sometimes Jim played with me, but he was more interested in cowboys and Indians or toy cars and trucks, or other boy-games. Sometimes I would try to play with him but the only fun thing to me about the cars and trucks was watching Jim make the motor sounds. He would slightly stick out his wet tongue and blow his breath out, his lips making a "pl-l-l-l" sound. (Sorry, I don't know how to spell it...)

When we lived on Second Street in Pine Bluff, Jim and I would play "Chinese School" on the front porch steps. The "teacher" holds a little rock or coin in one hand or the other behind their back, and then, fists closed, holds out both hands to the "student" sitting on the top step. The student then chooses which hand they think the rock is in; if they are correct, they get to move one grade (step) ahead. When they finally graduate, they trade places and the student becomes the teacher. Back then it seemed to me there were many steps, at least eight, on the front porch. However, in the picture of that old house taken last year as my husband and I traveled through Pine Bluff, there are only four steps. The world just looks bigger to a child.

At that house, Jim and I also made up games. One was to run out  almost to the street and watch up and down the street for a car to come our way. When a car was coming, we would wait until it was almost to our house, then race back to the "safe" concrete area by the steps. The goal was to reach the safe area before the car passed by our house. What a simple game! and what fun we had doing that.

I learned at school to play "Jacks" which was a very simple and cheap store-bought toy enjoyed by girls in about the fourth grade. It consisted of a little usually red ball about an inch or so big, and a handful of little metal jacks, and a gradually built up skill of tossing the ball up with the right hand, picking up a jack and then catching the ball after it bounced. That was the onesies. If you didn't "miss" as you picked up all the jacks one by one, you got to go on to "twosies" where you picked up two jacks at a time. And so on, however many jacks you had. I think it was six or ten jacks, though some fortunate little girls might have twelve, or fifteen. (That got too hard, though.) As you became skilled, there were several other games with the jacks, such as "Ups" and "Downs" and "Eggs In the Basket."

...

These days there are so many toys available to kids, and some of them are really great learning tools. How is it, then, that we often hear children saying, "I'm bored..."? I think it's because their imagination is not challenged. They don't have to work and learn, or stretch their minds...

The only time I remember being bored as a child was when I would start to play with those "bought'n" tin dishes. They looked empty and small and ... unreal. My imagination coupled with the lids and cans holding a bit of mud pie produced much more realistic and fun play.

Well, we can't go back to the way it was in the olden, golden days. And we shouldn't. Kids today could learn to have fun and not be bored, though, if they were occasionally required to lay aside the media and do the fun work of imagining and accomplishing and working their minds and bodies. Even us old grannies could benefit from working out that way.

I'm smiling.

(Disclaimer: I realize kids do learn from media. It's just that so often they learn "wrong" things and bad words and attitudes. But media is also good for helping to teach kids God's Word.)