Many thanks to the wonderful Courtney for this guest post about going minimalist with toys. Courtney speaks from great experience: she and her husband and toddler whittled their possessions down to a few backpacks before moving to Australia from the US. They now live in an RV and are traveling for a year. Highly recommend wandering over and reading Courtney’s thoughts on if you are trying to live with less.
I love Toy Story.
Children’s movies try to have a great moral like friendship and
teamwork. Toy Story takes it a step further. It teaches kids how to
appreciate and care for their belongings.
The truth is, I don’t know a child like Andy. A child that loves each
of his toys individually. That keeps the same set of toys throughout
childhood only adding a piece here and there. A child that doesn’t
get twenty new toys at Christmas, ten for his birthday, and a new one
every time his family shops at Target.
In a sense, I think Andy is a minimalist child. Why get more when
I have what I need.
Here are a few tricks for having a minimalist toy box, so your child
will appreciate his/her toys again.
Tips for Having a Minimalistic Toybox
1. Overflow. Whether it’s three or thirteen toys,
keep it down to what the child uses regularly. And by regularly, I
mean every third day! Avoid special occasion toys. Think about how
many toys your child can enjoy in one day. Cut your stash to that
number.
2. Rotating. The biggest excuse for keeping too many
toys is that we are afraid our child will get bored. Now that you’ve
cut down the number of toys in the toy box, set aside a box of toys to
rotate into the toy box every so often. DON’T rotate the entire set
at the same time. Your child will get bored at some point, switch
things up.
3. Dual Purpose. Buy storage bins that are also
usable at the pool/beach. You don’t need buckets and bins. Purchase
toys that are great in the bathtub too.
4. Household Items Turn other household items into
toys. Pans. Spatulas. Pillows. Milli loves stuffing tupperware
containers and snapping the lids on. Kids love dressing up in your
clothes and shoes. They enjoy getting into containers like laundry
baskets and tubs. Don’t have separate markers and pens for the kids-
create a community art drawer.
5. Imaginative Play Andy is a master at creating
stories for his toys. Model how to role play with toys. It is not
natural for all children. Set aside a small time each day to create a
story with the toys. They will grow bonds with the toys if they have
a story. Not to mention, this is a great way to build writing
skills.
6. Avoid multi-piece toys. Having a million pieces
scattered all over just feels like clutter. If a toys has lots of
pieces, bag them together!
7. Quality doesn’t matter as much. A lot of
minimalist thinking says that you should buy less, but at a higher
quality. We shuffle toys in and out so frequently that we don’t keep
them long enough for the “quality” to matter. This will change as the
child gets older of course. Also, the less you spend on it, the
easier it is to part ways.
8. Ask for experience-based gifts. Sometimes the
gift givers are our biggest hurdle. Start asking for gifts that are
experience-based like movie passes, playhouse admission,
rollerskating, a trip to the Children’s Museum, etc.
9. Keep a list. For the more radical purgers, I
recommend keeping a list of every toy. We started tracking our
possessions, and nothing has worked better for awareness
than tracking every possession that comes in or heads out of our
lives.
These recommendations are from my first-hand experience in downsizing
a full-size life to a minimalistic one. Adjust them according to your
downsizing goals. What other tricks have you found to help you
downsize? Did your child really miss the surplus of toys?
Hi,
I am new to minimalism, I only started a few months ago. Although I cannot force (ahaha) my husband to be one, I am trying to teach it to my kids (Heitor, 6, and Clarice, 5). And I am so impressed! I was afraid they would not let go of their stuff so easily. Before I started, I showed them some episodes of that TV show called Hoarders. I did not lecture them. They’re curious kids and I knew they would ask me a lot of questions. They did and I answered them all in a very simple and light way so that they would not lose interest. They saw me organizing my stuff and giving a lot of stuff away. I wanted this to grow on them and be an example first. After some weeks, I asked them to sit down with me and told them we needed to separate the toys they did not play with anymore to give away, so they could find the toys they really liked more easily and so that we could make room for new toys (I’m trying to do it before every birthday party, Christmas and Children’s Day, I can’t stop people from giving them presents :-)). They said “go” to so many things (I sware I did not try to influence their decisions). I filled two 50-liter bags per kid. Up to now, I’ve already done that twice. I am really happy about this new life style, it makes life so much easier 🙂
Cheers from Brazil,
Carol
I need to reduce – Guys any advice on how not to feel awful at disposing of their toys? I think I have a slight hesitation to do it (and here comes the violin playing heehee!) I didn’t have many toys as a child. Most were hand me downs and as my Big Sis is nearly 14 years older than me (although well cared for) they were quite out of date.
I’m trying to stop them entering the home – but it’s getting down the backlog I’m struggling with!
I was one of those kids that identified and loved every individual toy, for the most part. I only acquired a toy here or there, with the exception of Legos, and each one was special. My brother was the opposite. He got a new toy every week (something he’s continued near into adulthood, the habit of acquiring something new every week), his broken toys were trashed rather than fixed, and he had to have every toy he saw on tv. Now that I’m a (step) mom, I can relate to the demands of a child wanting this or that. I want him to be happy and stimulated, not deprived or left wanting. It’s taken me a while to remember his desires are fleeting, and he won’t remember tomorrow what he wanted today. It gets easier every day to say no (like yesterday’s ball display that assaulted us walking into the grocery store), to select toys that we perceive to add value (and still be cuddly) and are multi-tasking, and we even encourage him to pick out a couple toys a month to give to his preschool.
Oh, just one more thing: I don’t agree with Courtney of the quality of toys. We are the living example, that if you buy good quality of toys, which look good, feel good to play with, two things will happen: the kids will take care of it and the toy won’t break or get damaged as easily as cheap, bad quality toys.
A very useful post Courtney and Rachel! All grandparents, aunties and neighbours should read it! 🙂
Since I have always felt nauseous of the sight of clutter, my (poor/lucky) kids never had too many toys, but always had pretty qood quality toys.
However, as they are now growing up (4&7) over the past while we have been giving away and selling some of their toys. As a result, between them they have:
– 2 large boxes of LEGOs (various LEGO cars/spaceship etc pieces are mixed in the boxes along with instruction leaflets)
– 1 box with Schleich animals (about 20 animals)
– 1 sturdy toy garage with about 30 matchboxes (some fo the matchboxes are over 30 years old!)
– 2 National Geographic Bug Barn (great outdoors entertainment for bug finding)
Apart from these, they each have a bike, a football, books, the teddies they sleep with and a small box where they can put their private treasures each (pebbles, used bus tickets, broken pen & all those boyish things. :)).
I’d love us all to come back in 15 years to see how our children will remember thier minimalist selection of toys.
I am with Erin on this one. Legos are the most loved activity in the house. Yeah, the little pieces EVERYWHERE is annoying but you can’t beat if for both the spatial, mathematical, and fine moter skills development (my 4 yo learned addition by counting dots on the top) AND pretend play (it is all space ships but so are the stuff animals… that is what they pretend).
We bought ours on ebay used — so it is nice random mix of different sets, which they love.
We have been working on purging for a while now. Sometimes I think it is me who is holding back. Oh, this is good toy to save for the grandchildren or to pass down. Who am I kidding? My mother saved all sorts of toys and they are still at her house. Time for this mama to let go of her babies’ toys. (Babies are 13.10. and 7)
Lots of really great point in this post. Point number 6 is a tought one though, my boys are 6 and 3 and are in the stage of loving Lego which of course comes with a million pieces. I’ve managed to keep their collection to a minimal but enjoyable amount, and hoping it stays there. 🙂
I’ve purged my kids toys in the last couple of months and I’ve got four buckets in our rotation, with only one or two being out at once. Right now we’ve got Playmobil, Lego, a tea party/kitchen set, and one bucket for everything else (Hot Wheels and the like) – I prefer them to have toys that encourage them to use their imaginations. I love what KT commented about the kids not needing toys in the summer months – it’s so true that when the weather is nice, all the kids want to do is go to the playground or the water park!
Downsizing! I’m becoming an expert at getting rid of things and I’m loving having the space. It’s interesting how my space is increasing and my time, too! I don’t have to spend hours cleaning up all the toys! My little 5 yo would use all her toys and then she would get overwhelmed with the mess. Now she has like three things and that’s it. So easy to clean for her and for me! Now I don’t mind her not picking up her toys, because they are just three!
I needed this! Just donated a bunch of stuff to our school’s garage sale but still need to get rid of so much more. My problem is thinking that maybe they will play with that one toy one day…I’ve packed up a box of my daughter’s toys in the past. Just got down a box of them to sort and threw most of them away. The majority of those items weren’t things she missed, and, yes, a lot of them were gifts!
My 3 kids are school age, and they willingly ‘donated’ all their toys but one small box. With the toy room all packed up – all they want to do right now is built forts with blankets and the out door cushions!!
Once it is finally warm outside, they will mostly play outdoors with bikes / scooters with until next fall – no toys required.
I agree – using their imagination is key, with that they can DO anything
Your “Quality doesn’t matter as much” is a good reminder. With the big purging in the last year I am quite stuck on don’t buy it if it won’t last. You make a good point about toys, especially toys for younger kids, not needing to be of great quality.
Of course, I want to balance all of that with my eco-friendly side. Don’t want stuff to end up landfills after very little use. Maybe my path to that is buying toys second hand. We picked up a great toy for $1 at a swap meet.
Thanks for this post, Courtney. Love hearing from people that have been at this for a while.