Band of Slugs

Lego – Best of childrens toys?

I had a fair few toys when I was a kid – but there was one toy that it always came back to. Lego. I just couldn’t get enough of those little bricks – and the seemingly unending scenarios I could conjour up.

Lego childrens toys

When I look at the kind of childrens toys today, it seems that there is a missing element of imagination. I don’t mean the toys themselves are lacking in imagination – some are excellent – but I mean that there is limited capacity for the child themselves to be imaginative.

I think this is where those bricks were so good. It’s true, you got instructions to build a certain model – be it a house, car, boat, castle – whatever – but after you’d got tired of the model, you could simply take it apart and start building another completely different one.

And of course the best thing about Lego that makes it one of the best childrens toys (in my opinion) is that you could use the bricks from, say, a castle – and make them into something like a spaceship instead.

In terms of learning, I think that Lego must be responsible for many an engineer’s career. More than that, I think it probably inspired the storytelling element of childhood; you could come up with infinite variations of conflicts and situations. Admittedly, most of my stories involved laying siege to a castle and somehow destroying it.

You could get Lego on all sorts of themes – many of which are now long gone. Castle, Space, Pirate – something for every taste and imagination.

Video games now account for a great deal of childrens toys – and although they are often hugely impressive – do they stimulate the imagination of the child concerned? I would say it probably doesn’t – but nevertheless, they are great fun.

Still, it’s not like they don’t sell Lego anymore. And if you really can’t bring yourself to buy your child a box of Lego – just buy the latest Lego video game instead!