You know something? Toys are dirt cheap. Ever since they started manufacturing them in foreign countries (think China, Taiwan etc) toys have continued their price decline. Combine low cost manufacturing with very large retail importers (think Walmart, Target, Costco etc) and you’ve got the recipe for low cost toys for kids. Why do I care, you ask? Well, it all goes back to my childhood, long before toys were all that cheap. I grew up next to a boy the same age as me. Every time his mother would get in the car to go somewhere, he would run as fast as he could to reach his driveway yelling, “Mom, get me a toy?” Without fail, and I’m being completely serious, his mom would always come back with a toy for him. Hell, she might have been going to the hair salon, but she’d go by the store and find something for him. Needless to say, he literally had just about every toy that was produced. Too bad his mother drove them in to deep debt to do this.
I, on the other hand, grew up in a house that had a few limits. For starters, our family didn’t have a lot of money. We ate a lot of store brand foods and seldom ate out. We only got a new toy on Christmas or our birthday. I spent a lot of time playing at his house, but he held those toys over my head like I was his personal whipping boy. I hated it, but it was the only way I got to play with cool new toys. I could always expect to play with last weeks toy, but that was good enough for me.
Well, years later, as I was going through high school, he dropped out. Probably because when his mother wasn’t buying toys for him, or getting him his nightly “take out” for dinner, she was trying to do his homework. At some point, I think the homework got hard enough that neither of them could do it. I don’t know what happened to him, but I’m certain he hasn’t learned all the right lessons about money that I want our daughter to learn.
So, why does this matter now? Well, I’ve found that our daughter gets a lot of toys. They are so cheap that we and our family, tend to pick them up more often than we’d like. On top of that, we have gotten a TON of “hand me down” toys. I’ve started to draw some correlations between our daughters childhood and my old neighbors. (Just in the area of toy acquisitions). So, we are now making a conscious effort not to buy these cheap toys. We’ll still take hand me down toys, but we won’t spend much on toys except for Christmas and birthdays. We want a new toy to be a little more special for her. If she is getting toys too often, we’re concerned she’ll learn to expect them and not appreciate them, or the money that it took to buy them.