What You Mean No Toys?

I saw something today, there was a My Little Pony on the side of the street. It made me think about my childhood and all the toys that I had growing up.  We weren't rich by no means but we had a lot of stuff.  Just recently I saw a facebook status about a little girl I believe that was about 10 that said she's too old for Barbies and other toys like them.  Now I was so far from a "girly girl" that I used to dress my Barbies in G I Joe clothes, after I cut all the hair off  and let them wrestle and my mom refused to keep buying them, but at ten I was tell playing with toys. I had blocks, Cabbage Patch Kids, My Little Pony, Troll dolls, Pound Puppies, so many stuff animals that I couldn't keep up and everything thing else you could think of and when the toys got boring I had a great imagination. And if I got in trouble, my mom would say no toys for "x" number of days, and my whole would would end. These were the joys of childhood.  The things that even still I look back on and happily drift in a sea of nostaliga.


What are the kids doing these days that ten year olds are not playing with toys.  How can you not like toys? Is the homeowrk that hard that it takes up all their time? Are they really doing that many chores?  Or is it that they are just so engrossed with video games that they forgot how to play with anything not connected to a socket? Have video games really taken over? Are we really that technology driven that even our kids don't know what fun is without a computer chip?

Now don't get me wrong, I love video games, but when I was ten there was Atari, and Nintendo has JUST came out I think, and if you had one of these you were top flight. But we weren't allowed to play for hours and hours.We still played with toys, we had to. I know my mom wasn't letting us "run up her electicity" all day.  Maybe it was just me, but at ten I not only had so many toys that my mom would constantly threaten to "throw them in the trash if they weren't put away", but I also was a coloring book fiend.  I think I had evey crayon set that ever came out.  I remember going ape crazy the first time I say the 64 count box with "robin egg blue".  Coloring would take up my Saturdays, after I ate my bowl of Frosted Flakes while watching cartoons of course. These were the good days.  The days when your biggest care was if you could get the extra chocolate milk at lunch.

I wonder if the "too old for toys" mentality is wild spread, or is it contained with just a few.  Thankfully all the little people in my life under the age of 13 are still toy players.  Their Saturday morning aren't like mine though, full of cereal,  tv and coloring, because they now have soccer game, football games, ballet practice, and other things that keep them "well rounded" but at least they still know how to enjoy the joys of childhood.  The way I see it, if a kid doesn't like toys, they probably don't really understand how great being a kid is. But that can be fixed, the next time you see a kid that has been playing video games longer than 30 mins, unplug the TV and give them a toy or a coloring book.  They may look at you like your crazy but they will appreciate it later.