What You Need to Know About Your Child’s Weird, Obsessive Collection
Rhiannon told me that the child she babysit collected disposable latex gloves. It started when he was about two years old. Every time he saw latex gloves – in a doctor’s office, in a kindergarten, at the random ambulance child pinned to the wall – he asked if they could be obtained. He preferred “blue lumps”, but “seemingly yellow” was also acceptable. He carried them around and then hid them in pockets, drawers, and in the playroom. “To be honest, it was so disgusting,” Rhiannon says of sweaty, sticky things. “He is 9 years old and I still occasionally find a disgusting decaying rubber glove in a strange place – recently, in an old Fisher-Price cash register, which he won’t let us get rid of.”
Members of the Facebook group Offspring showed off their own children’s obsessive collections. There were also ordinary ones – stones, shells, stuffed animals. And then there were more obscure interests. One parent wrote that their son collected sand that got into his shoes and poured it into a container that he kept near the TV. Another shared that her son assembled garage door openers. Friends and family usually gave him their old, non-working ones, but on several occasions she caught him stealing those who opened the garage door. (“He wants to be a mechanical engineer,” she writes.) I think everyone has memories of our children’s collections – in third grade, I was collecting eraser dust. Lifehacker managing editor Virginia Smith collected hotel toiletries. Our health editor, Beth Skorecki, had a folder for her pennies, in which a slot was highlighted for each year.
During the Mari Kondo era, it may have become less common for parents to allow their children to bring home Tupperware containers of assorted pebbles or shoe boxes full of bottle caps. For adults, these objects do not cause much joy. But for kids, collecting has many benefits. It gives them a sense of belonging, teaches that patience can lead to satisfaction (finding that one rare brand / baseball card / hermit crab shell is always a thrill), and broadens their organizational skills (one dad writes that every stuffed animal of his daughter’s you have a very specific place to sleep on your bed – that’s cute, he says, until you accidentally push yourself away from him and “then the whole world will collapse”). By grouping and classifying objects, children develop cognitive functions. “When something is included in the collection, but something else is not, children decide on the attributes of the objects,” says educational psychologist Dr. Patricia Anderson. “It’s a key math skill for scientific thinking.” Children often crave knowledge of the subjects they collect, which is a good thing .
Things to remember about your child’s compulsive collection:
- There is a difference between collecting and hoarding. The Institute for Children’s Mind offers a great solution . One of the differences, Caroline Miller writes, is that the children who put together the collection show pride: “They enjoy sharing and talking about them.” On the other hand, children who hoard “often feel embarrassed or uncomfortable allowing others to see or touch their things.”
- Marketers love that kids love to collect things. On this basis, toys have been invented for a long time. (My husband fondly remembers his Garbage Pail Kids collection.) But recently there has been an explosion in the “collectibles market”, spawning LOL dolls, Hatchimals and Pikmi Pops (if you’ve never heard these words before, thank you). An article in the Atlantic says marketers are reassuring kids that “toys are for collecting, not play.” Susan Lynn, a professor at Harvard Medical School and author of Child Consumption: A Hostile Possession of Childhood , told The Atlantic , “It’s the idea that the things we buy make us happy.” Be aware that when you buy one of these toys, you may not be buying just that item, but all the frenzy that comes with it.
- You can set limits. A parent named Jennifer says she found piles of “creepy Blair Witch ” stones all over the house, so she had to talk to her daughter. “She is allowed to bring home one stone a day and put it in an old shoebox that we have repaired and keep away from her little brother,” she says. Your child’s collection shouldn’t be stressful for other members of your family. If so, limit the number of new items they can bring without embarrassing them (eg, “Ugh, why would you keep something like that?”). That is, if you can. One mom named Kimberly writes: “A few weeks ago I found my son’s collection of boogers. He hung on the wall by his bed, and he wiped them there when he didn’t want to take a napkin. “