My Legos vs My Kids’ Legos
Let me start off with full disclosure:
I did not own ANY Legos when I was a kid.
My sister also did not own any, and we had no other siblings. We had a small erector set, a train set, a huge girder and panel set, Lincoln logs, and Tinkertoys. We had cardboard boxes and Styrofoam and scrap paper and the great outdoors. But no Legos.
This fact, however, positions me perfectly to be able to address the great Lego debate of our times: Do today’s Legos allow our kids enough creativity?
We loved going to Mrs. Snow’s house. She had a dalmatian. There was ping-pong and pinball in the basement. They had the Guinness World Book of Records game. And they had a toy chest — the kind with the shelves and the lift-up lid — FULL of Legos. Just a big bin. Legos dumped in together with no sense of propriety, blocks with plates with people with buried treasure. These had been Mrs. Snow’s sons’ Legos, and they were now mid-teens and up. As a result, there were no instructions or any indication of which might go with what.
This is where golden childhood purists shout: Imagination is all a kid needs!
We had imagination in spades. We’d build for hours, huge castles and boats, roadways and towns. We’d do all that without ever digging for a single mini-figure or people part. We were usually after the Holy Grail of Lego pieces: a full set of wheels. We didn't feel the need to act out a scene, or build to the detail the movie scene the set was originally configured to emulate — since it wasn't: it was a construction toy, not a pre-configured diorama.
Contrast that with the, to be conservative, dozens of Lego products my kids have acquired over the years. Each one is a miniature movie or TV scene. Even the new ones that look like the old ones the most are based on the (very good, I’ll throw in) recent Lego Movie. You can buy (and often do) just a single figure, for 4 bucks. Those and their accouterments get their own bucket, and are the new Holy Grail, if any little piece of the Joker or Gandalf or Vitruvius should go missing.
Everything gets built according to plan, brick upon brick, like the Israelites building the pyramids in Egypt. The primary colored bricks and generic Lego men (or women, depending solely upon hairstyle) languish in their bottom-row buckets, unsuitable for modern transportation or living arrangements. Everything is a recognizable piece of a greater whole, and must be placed just so.
So, my generation had so much more imagination, right?
I could make a fort, a castle, a house, a space station. Granted, they all looked essentially alike, right down to the white bricks I used because all the red and blue ones were taken, but I could call them whichever I wanted, because IMAGINATION! Whereas my kid has to make a hobbit hole, or the Millenium Falcon, or the Kragle machine, and it is what it is.
That’s a load of brown Play-Doh right there!
That’s like saying a kid with an 8 crayon box of Crayolas is more creative than a kid with a 64 crayon box that comes with a sharpener and a coloring book. It’s the kid that’s either creative or not, independent of the tools at his disposal. Creativity has nothing to do with the quantity or the quality of the tools.
On the other hand, my kid can create some WAY better things that I could even dream up. Know why? He’s followed the instructions and learned how the tools work. He has tools at his disposal that I had to pretend I had used because for me they didn't exist. He takes plans others have made and changes them in subtle or complete ways to make them better, and more than that, to make them his.
Do the new Lego sets stifle the imagination? I say no.
What they do is allow my kids to make in reality the things I could only dream of.
