MIND MOVES: Play is the work of childhood. Toys are its tools. The toy box is the children's workbox. It is the treasure trove of childhood development. Parents know this and are anxious to provide the best developmental implements and assistance to the mind, body and imagination of the child, writes Marie Murray.
It is this parental attention to the world of play that fuels the multimillion toy industry. Many parents spend masses of money on toys on the rationale that if they cannot be with their children because of work, work can at least provide the income for the best social, emotional and educational aids money can buy.
But how do you know if the toys you buy are value for money or merely pester power, need and greed, or the guilt that stalks most working parents? How do you know if the longed-for gift will be a delight or disappointment on Christmas day? That the baby will not touch, taste and discard it; that the toddler will not extract the toy and play with the box; that the older child will not provide a polite perceptibly forced 'thank you' and your hard-earned cash might have been better spent on something else?
Christmas is the penultimate toy time, a time to really think about the role of toys and play in your child's life. Santa has had to make major technological adjustments to accommodate the sophistication of toys now commonplace to children's wish lists - lists that have grown alarmingly long. Herein lies a problem.
Play is not beneficial if it is a series of demented demanding and then discarding of toys; if it is the experience of an excess of objects so overwhelming that the child cannot concentrate on one object because of the distraction of others. Play is not play if it is this agitated lunge from one toy to the next because there are too many. This "deprivation of excess" destroys the purpose of play.
Play is not play if it is always passive, if the doll's computer says what a child might otherwise have composed, if its phrases are not the projection of the child's imagination but manufactured, limited, repetitive, stifling the emotional imagination of the child. A child's doll should be of special simplicity: silent so that the child's inner voice can be heard, so it can become what the child wishes, not what others have pre-determined.
Play is not play if the child too often enters the creations of adult imaginations rather than its own: if the car is self-propelling so that a child's hands do not direct it on a journey that is child ordained. Play is not play if all costumes are custom made rather than the creative pilfering of household objects to create persona.
Symbolic play is crucial to development. A developmental leap is made when the young child uses an object as representative of another object: when the box becomes a car, tractor, boat, missile or TV. Play is symbolic when the rug becomes a cloak, when everyday objects are transformed into the world of pretend.
Make-believe is essential to social, psychological and emotional development: denied if all play objects are provided in fixed, functional ready-made reality. How do you pretend if you do not have to?
Play across the development ranges that promotes hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, pouring, measuring, classifying, categorising, making, timing, sorting, thinking, puzzling and finally grappling with abstract ideas is most productive. The work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget has been informative and a range of toys that are age appropriate and/or matched to developmental sequences work best.
The core toy kit should, therefore, comprise pictures; blocks; percussion instruments to learn sound sequences; kaleidoscopes for visual attention; CDs for auditory attention; card games such as snap for speed of visual processing and quick reaction time while 'pick a pair' enhances concentration and memory. There is throwing and catching for dexterity. Hopscotch, skipping, skating, scootering, skateboarding for motor skills. There are button, macramé, painting, bakery, building sets, jigsaws and tool kits for eye-hand proficiency and the sheer joy of making something.
Garden tools, packets of seeds, a place or pots to watch them grow, provide insight beyond the activity into the deeper questions of life's origins that lie beyond words. But words too are needed - books, more books, books of poetry, of adventure, of fantasy, of fact, of wild imagination: something a child unfolds at his or her pace to be read and re-read for new ideas and possibilities.
Toy purchases can be for posterity. What is precious need not be expensive. A present for each child in the house, each year, of an identical Christmas tree decoration guarantees identical future trees connecting siblings to each other at Christmas forever.
In the words of Montessori, our task for the child is "to touch his imagination and to enthuse him to his inmost core". Silence, patience, time, opportunity to explore and parental presence are part of that process. Because, at the end of the day, the greatest gift you can give your child is yourself, the greatest educational aid, your time and the greatest developmental aid, your love.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin.