Kids and Random Toys

It’s your child’s birthday, you bought five awesome gifts for them, and you are excited for them to open them and see them. You spent a good amount of time finding toys that they would like, and you know that they’ll really like the toys you got for them. As you work through opening all of the gifts, they are happy and excited to see what they got. They open all of the toys, and are smiling. You set all of the toys out for them to choose what to play with...and they go for the boxes that the toys were in.

For young children, this is extremely common. They are enamored with everything that you don’t think about. The toy is fun, sure, but they would rather play with the box that the toy came in. Even older kids can spend several hours with just a box and their imagination, but they usually appreciate the toy a little more as well. Kids like how the box folds and that you can put your hand in it. They like to see how it tastes, and they like to put things in the box.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to birthdays either. If you get a box at the store that had food in it, or that came with a package delivery, you’ll often find your child playing with it. They simply think it’s a fun toy. They’ll crawl inside if it’s big enough, they’ll put other toys inside, and simply entertain themselves for much longer than you could imagine.

Kids don’t only love boxes either. They love to play with kitchen supplies - bowls, spoons, pans, and anything else they can get their hands on in the kitchen. Those bowls are tough because they spin around when you hit them. They also have a center where you can put other things inside, including your hand or foot. You can use a spoon to make fun sounds on the other kitchen supplies as well. Who needs toys when you have all of these fun things right inside your house that you can play with?

For this reason, we recommend keeping your toys purchases to a minimum. The more toys you buy for your child, the less they play with the other toys they already have. Add on to that that they will be playing a lot with things that you hadn’t planned on, and instead of a ton of fun toys that your child plays with, you simply end up with a lot of toys that make huge messes all over the house. You have more to clean up and your child doesn’t sit and play with most of those toys for a very long time.

Finding new toys in odd places continues as kids grow older as well. If you have a pizza box, or boxes from kids meals and hamburgers, you may find that your child loves playing with them. They can pretend like they’re making food that they are delivering and eating. They make a pizza or tacos or whatever other food they want and they use the boxes (trash from fast food places) to pretend that they’re doing these things.

At some point, your child will outgrow boxes and wrapping paper as fun toys, but there’s a good chance that it will last longer than you think. Make sure your kids have a few toys to play with, but you don’t need to have a million toys. That doesn’t really benefit your child or you. Focus on a toy or two that your child will actually enjoy playing with and keep those for them.

Playing with boxes is very common with younger children. If you ever need a fun day for the kids, just grab a couple of boxes and let them play.