Let the Kids Play With Trash
My 4-year-old daughter has a beautiful wooden dollhouse that she was presented with for Christmas last year. She plays with the dolls and furniture inside, but the fun part is the house improvements she added with … trash. The clipping from the junk mail directory has become a television. Some old bottle caps now serve as an obstacle course in the backyard. The sponge is a bump stop. A handful of shredded paper towels are part of the car wash. She runs, opens the trash boxes (yes, we have the plural) and exclaims, “Oh! It could be a pool! It can be shaky! It could be an elevator! “
Wait, why are we buying toys again?
Welcome to Retro Week , where we light up the flux condenser and introduce you to the 1950s know-how of everything from making casseroles to building fallout shelters to joys for kids to relax and play with trash.
Research shows that coming up with creative ideas and problem solutions requires free, unstructured time – not worksheets, not parallel extracurricular activities, not Netflix (sorry). They also need simple materials to play with. In her memoir What Adults Do: An Odyssey Through the 1950s Suburbia , Michelle Hanson writes about what these objects looked like a few days before helicopter parents and digital devices:
So what did “play” mean then? There was almost no TV, mobile phones, iPhones or iPlayers, there was no Internet, computer games, PlayStation and pop stars. We only had the most basic equipment: jacks, balls, jump ropes, bats, balls and bicycles.
Most of the time, my friends and I came up with our own games: creating perfume from rose petals, brewing ginger beer, organizing snail races, picking blackberries, building dens in the forest.
We played on the banks of the river, caught thorns and newts, climbed trees and rode our bike everywhere. …
All this must be so primitive for today’s youth. How would they handle just two channels of a black and white TV for just a couple of hours a day? And only one rotary dial telephone in the lobby?
So how did we do it?
I don’t mean to sound pompous here, but we used our imaginations. We have to. There was nothing special around.
Today, creative play items can include Lego, Magna-Tiles , art supplies, and disguise costumes. But it can also be convenient to have some junk-looking items that Marie Kondo will judge you for. As most parents find out when buying an expensive toy for their child, the cardboard box it was delivered in can provide hours of entertainment. A solyanka made of different objects can do the same: rope, rice paddles, aluminum foil, masking tape, colorful caps on applesauce bags (we have a full can of them), egg boxes, toilet paper rolls and empty cans from under shampoo. they can all be repurposed in countless new ways. Blogger Joanna Goddard of Cup of Jo writes that her young son discovered “the joy of playing with tampons”:
There was something about the way they shoot like rockets and then expand in the water like those magic sponges that captivated him. Now that he’s well-behaved, I sometimes say, “Okay, as a special treat, you can play with a tampon.”
If you’re looking to move outside, educator Tom Hobson explains how to transform your backyard into a small child’s paradise . While filling your property with old tires, chains, shipping pallets, and galvanized steel trash cans may not be for everyone, you can’t deny how much fun it would be for a preschooler.
The best thing about playing with loose pieces is that it never ends. While kids can learn to play video games or solve puzzles, these junk pieces offer endless variations, allowing them to create a new story every time.