There are all sorts of people reading these blogs, and it's quite possible that some of them might feel picked on by this particular post. On the other hand, some of them might feel a little validated.
The main idea is that kids can—and I'm not saying they actually will—improvise toys with anything they find lying around the house. A pile of sand; a dandelion, old broken equipment in the garage. Your pets. The furniture. Clearly, some of this should not be accessible, being dangerous. (But you can't protect them from every conceivable danger; one does one's best, and a clever infant can always find something that isn't safe to play with!)
This is not to say that you should never get them Legos, or building blocks, or little battery-powered keyboards. The fact of the matter is you can never predict which sort of toy will grab the imagination of the kid. Given that, just go with the flow.
I'm known for being a pacifist. I've never even been put in the position of having to make a decision about whether to bear arms. When I was about 9 years old, I was given the gift of a toy machine gun for Christmas. It just made a fake Tommy gun sound, and lights flashed inside. My parents were confirmed pacifists also, but for some reason they let me play with this fake machine gun, until its batteries ran out. But my favorite present that Christmas was a fountain-pen that wrote in purple, and not the machine-gun! And so it goes. I don't think any particular talent I have was sparked by any toy I was given.
One toy I really wanted was a construction set. My cousin had an advanced Meccano set, Meccano being a construction set company based in France. But I never got one. I just visited my cousin, and watched him make cranes, and elevators, and all sorts of amazing things with that Meccano set. He did become a doctor. But how did that toy influence his creativity? Did it influence him at all? We can't know. There are so- called experts that will tell you that certain toys are great for certain things, but I doubt that they can say these things with certainty. The only thing that I think really does have a bearing on encouraging the mental development of young children is the amount of time their adults (parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, older siblings) spend playing with them, up to a point. Children who are left strictly alone all the time are less likely to develop as fast. This opinion is just based on anecdotal evidence.
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