When I was a child in the late fifties, I just loved Lego. I must have been three or four years old when I got my first Lego. They were simple red and white bricks, two-by-two, three-by-two and four-by-two, counting the studs on the top. The bricks came in small boxes, containing 10 or 15 bricks, depending on the type and size of the bricks. The little boxes were affordable, they made popular presents at birthday parties. My grandmother often bought us a little box when she came by for tea.
I now have grandchildren. They started on Duplo, the twice-the-size version of Lego for toddlers. They love it. They have a large collection of Duplo animals, figurines, playground stuff like swings and slides, and what have you. And there’s one thing I notice in the Lego/Duplo offering in the stores. The sets on sale are much nicer, much more beautiful and more elaborate than the ones we had in the fifties and sixties. You can buy a zoo with all the animals, dinosaur sets, fire brigade, hospital sets, everything. But I see one drawback on those. With the old sets, consisting of just rectangular bricks of a few different sizes, you could build whatever you wanted. I would build little houses, towers, stairs, and cars.
A few months ago, the three year old grandson got a police-and-firetruck set for his birthday. It is more beautiful than whatever car I could build with the square bricks I had. But there is only one way to put the firetruck together, and most pieces serve one purpose: to be the hood or the top or the side of a firetruck. Where my sister and I could fantasize and make whatever we liked, my grandson can build a police car or a fire truck in the way Lego engineers think he should build them. So though he likes the few Lego cars he has, most of the time he turns back to the large crate of Duplo and builds a boat from two-by-four and two-by-two bricks. Last week, when I called the children for dinner, he says “wait, I need to put on a siren” and he frantically searches the crate for a yellow two-by-four that constitutes the siren. He then lets the boat fly through the air (it’s a space ship), then suddenly there’s a fire on the kitchen counter and his fire-spaceship goes extinguish the fire. The ship is full of figurines, like firemen and policemen and Santaclause. When a brick falls off and I put it back, he yells “no, that’s all wrong!”. To me, the thing is just 40 bricks put together in a random way. To him, it’s a space ship, or a fire truck, or something I didn’t even know existed.
As a responsible parent, you want to buy your children the Lego sets that stimulate their imagination. You buy them sets with simple bricks, the more bricks the better. However, when your child has a choice of a fancy set with a police car, a fire truck, a motorcycle and a thief running away with a bag full of money, or a set with 200 simple bricks, they will choose the first. They choose the set that was pre-imagined by Lego engineers and they will build it following detailed instructions, with your help. When grandparents buy a set, the dinosaur set looks a lot more appealing than 150 blue bricks. They buy the dinosaurs in a pre-imagined setting the child can build and then put on the table, play with it for a short while and then go back to their simple bricks.
Lego knows that it’s easier to sell firetrucks and dinosaurs than to sell sets of 100 square white bricks. I don’t think they even sell pure brick sets any more. They make more money selling pre-imagined sets to grandparents, aunts and uncles and everyone who buys Lego for children. They also know that selling plain bricks is better for teaching children how to build and create using their own imagination.
Next time you go shop for a present for a niece or grandson, or a neighbor child, or any child, look at the beautiful sets that are on sale, the star wars sets, the dinosaurs, jungle animals or fancy campers, then realize the camper can only ever be the same camper while the bricks can be anything the child wants them to be. Turn to those simple bricks and buy those. Little Sarah or Timmy will build a whatever-it-is-they-built and conquer the moon — or the kitchen counter — with dwarfs and nurses led by Santaclause. Teach them that they are free to use their imagination in whatever surrealist direction they want. And hope that later in life, they will not lose this freedom when school or work teaches them how things should be done.
