Why do Kids play with the box and not the toy?

I am sure our experience is universal.  Our daughter loves to open presents and then immediately play with the box, not the toy.  How many times have you heard parents say, "I should have just gotten them the box!"?  If you think about a child as an explorer, their preference for the box is quite understandable.  As Tim Brown, the president and CEO of the design firm IDEO explains, a toy has only a certain number of prescribed uses.  It beeps the same way every time you hit that button or sings the same song when you turn that switch.  But the box, now there is something with infinite possibilities to explore!  The box could be a boat or a plane or a hat or a turtle's back or whatever else the child can conjure.  The context of the play will change every time the child plays with the box.  And the toy will always be, well, the toy.

In preparing for the holidays we had many wrapping paper tubes lying around the living room.  My wife and twenty-three month old daughter, Eve, colored several of them and they were a great source of amusement for her.  Usually, Eve would just blow into the tube as if she were a trumpeter announcing the king and queen's arrival.  That was the usual context for playing with the tube.  But she also used it as a telescope and a microphone and could easily switch back and forth from trumpet to banjo without it interrupting her play with the object.   But with toys with a prescribed context, Eve finds it more difficult to play with the toy differently.

Doris Pronin Fromberg, a leading expert on early childhood education explains that there are essentially three different forms that play takes.  There is "Construction play, pretend play, and sociodramatic pretend play" (20).  Construction play is anything that requires building; Legos, Lincoln Logs, etc.  Pretend play, also sometimes called transformational play, is imagining an object differently than it appears.  So, for example, using an orange as a baseball or a rocketship.  Lastly, there is sociodramatic pretend play.  This sort of play includes role playing and acting out events.  These three types of play lie at the heart of our imaginative growth and cognitive development as children (and adults).

This may explain why children tend to gravitate toward playing with the box - because it could contain two or more of the aforementioned forms of play.  A toy like "Tickle me, Elmo" can exist for the child in "sociodramatic pretend play," but its rules are fairly constrained.  Generally speaking, Elmo will always be Elmo.  Now there is not anything inherently wrong with this, but it limits the full range of play that a child could enjoy with a given toy.   Our daughter has a Dora the Explorer doll.  To the best of my knowledge, Eve has never seen a single episode of Dora.  She knows the doll's name is Dora, but she isn't constrained in her play with the doll by the limits of the character and her storyline.  Consequently, the doll can be an explorer, a soccer star, a mad scientist, or a guest at her tea party.  There is no delimitation of this doll since my daughter can fill in a new back story every time she plays with her.

Of course play is important and sophisticated.  According to educational specialists, the best sort of play is play that encourages the children to create the rules of the playing and not the toy.  So when considering toys for your child, think about construction play, pretend play and sociodramatic pretend play.  Can the toy satisfy two or three of these types of play?  Will the toy allow your child to create the rules of the playing or are there implicit rules connected with the toy?  That is not to say that such toys are bad and other toys are good.  But in order to foster a robust imagination, it is important to make sure that your child is provided opportunities to create the rules of playing as well as following them.  For if a child only follows the rules of the game, then we are foreclosing on not only their creativity, but their cognitive development as well.

Please share your favorite toys for your little ones and where you can find them.

"Tim Brown on Creativity and Play | Video on TED.com." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. Web. 10 Jan. 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play.html>.

Fromberg, Doris Pronin. Play and Meaning in Early Childhood Education. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002. Print.