Toy Story 3 and our kids’ own stories
Like many adults, I left Toy Story 3 a little sniffly. As I drove home and tried to uncover the source of my maudlin mood — my three kids were not helping encourage this analytical state — I realized how much I was struck by the play scenes that open and close the movie. In both scenes (no spoiler alert needed here, by the way) a child is immersed in play with a variety of different toys, assigning roles based on their own plot. Mr. Potato Head is a villain. Cowgirl and spaceman dolls work together. Monkeys from a Barrel of Monkeys have their own part. A cardboard box is a major prop. Even a piggy bank is a character.
In essence, the kids take whatever toys are at hand and create their own stories with them.
It seems we played like this a lot when we were little. My view of this isn’t (I hope) just the Grandpa Simpson in me saying, “Durn it, things were better in the good ol’ days!”; these scenes struck me so much because I wonder if our kids are being increasingly raised within prescribed narratives, largely living through other people’s stories and roles. Will this detract from their ability to do the great thing we all must do in our lives: Create our own stories?
Children today have gorgeous play sets, but does every toy in the game play the role the manufacturer assigned to it? They play video games that offer amazing screenscapes, but the action happens in a prescribed world created by game designers. They play organized sports in front of whistle-blowing, red-faced adults. They also watch appealing TV, and they watch a lot of it, seeing not only well-crafted shows but commercials as well (you know the one about how the kids pretend they’re doing their homework when dumb old dad strolls in, bumping his head as he enters…). None of these things is itself a problem (except maybe for that dumb old dad archetype), but the sheer amount of time kids spend in such prescribed activities and their shrinking opportunities to operate outside of these confined spaces might be.
Because these experiences collectively mean kids spend a lot of time living within someone’s view of how things happen. Despite the tantalizing graphical beauty, the stories are ultimately someone elses’. Sure, there have always been great tales that we modeled our own experiences on, but it seems clear that today’s kids are consuming these stories at a much higher rate than in the past (type [how much TV children watch] into Google Scholar for studies about TV viewing habits) and, more importantly, have less time and opportunity to create their own alternatives.
I wasn’t all weepy at the end of Toy Story 3 just because I was longing for my own lost childhood (actually, it was just something that was caught in my eye…). I was reminded by the beauty of kids’ imaginations. Employers and decision-makers of all kinds always say one thing they want most is people who can critically think outside the box. How do we get people to think outside the box if when they play with that cardboard container when they’re young, we throw it in the trash so we can set up the real toys that were within it?
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I am so with you on this! Legos have not been a prominent toy in our household because we hate that all the Legos are playsets. What happened to the big buckets of bumpy blocks in all shapes and sizes that you had to use your imagination to build something out of?!
My husband and I have made suggestions for general plots & scenarios to play out with their friends when they’re having trouble doing anything but arguing with eachother.
“How about you pretend you are archaeologists searching for a lost treasure?”
“…astronauts exploring space.”
“…make up your own superhero name and go fight the evil genius.”
They look at us like they can’t believe what great ideas they are, but continue to act out the latest “Indiana Jones” movie they watched. Not just some random archaeologist, but Indy looking for the grail.
It makes me sad and worried that their imaginations are not developing and blooming into an endless pit of ideas and creativity.
How many free-thinkers and pioneers of original, brilliant ideas does our future hold?
Great stuff, Dr. Warnock. There is definitely a standardization of thinking going on. The irony is that each generation of less-thinking adults do everything they can to set their children up for “success”. Just leave them alone with the cardboard box, folks!
Hey Grandpa Simpson, nice post.
The argument you make here is the argument that Waldorf Schools make about their curriculum: NO TV (or as close as you can get), only natural toys (wood, knitted stuff), lots of myths and stories told orally…
One Waldorf convert used a story about college freshman to advance her argument: that college kids often decorate their dorm rooms with stuffed animals and other images of childhood (along with beer bottles) because they feel like they’ve missed something. Waldorf kids are ‘deprived’ of homework, for instance, until 3rd grade and they get to the point (in 1st and 2nd grade) of almost begging for work to do…so when they get it, they’re ready to move on…
Shameless plug for Waldorf perhaps, but their approach is designed to address many of the issues you raise here…
Great piece, Scott, but don’t forget about the potentially dark, flip-side of improvisational play. The most, ahem, creative kids, by, say, 12 are often supplementing their imaginative scenarios with, for example, the illegally purchased firecrackers they picked up from that 17-year-old neighbor kid who, that past summer, possibly visited North Carolina with his parents, and was willing to sell his excess contraband to younger kids down the street willing to pay, and who were interested in using said explosives to, say, pretend their sister’s Ken doll was, oh, I don’t know, an astronaut whose space capsule experienced a horrible malfunction upon re-entry and who was, you know, badly, badly burned in the process. Just saying. This can happen. It even might have.
I am a vigorous opponent of overscheduling kids and I have always been susceptible to the appeal of empty boxes. But I question whether imitating existing narratives necessarily inhibits creativity. When I was young there was a time I insisited on role playing Mary Poppins (the book version) no matter what else the other kids were doing. My son fought a lot of forsythia pretending to be the prince from Sleeping Beauty and said “eat me” to everybody for weeks after he had seen Alice in Wonderland. You need to model off something when you’re young. Eventually the urge to spontaneously create will blossom.