Absolutely. My 5-year-old loves Lego. He also loves to play with classic crap like toy guns, weapons, whatever. There is a lot of video gaming going on though.
I did when I was a child. Usually with only a select toys and imagination. I have a 6 year old cousin, he plays w/ toys but loves the PC and Madden.
"These days?" I have a son in college and a daughter about to enter her second year of high school, but they certainly played with toys growing up. Hell, they played with toys all the time, and not simply with Legos (which are terrific, by the way). I can see how someone who isn't a parent could get that impression, but it wouldn't be accurate, in my opinion.
virtual toys duh. Haven't you ever played the legos game? you don't even have to clean up after yourself. And if you wantt to paint a picture theres a neat program with loads of colors and and erase feature!
True. Is playing with some Crayola software any different than an Etch and Sketch? Is it less of a toy because it's electronic?
Whenever I go over to somebody's house that has kids, it seems like toys are piled everywhere, way more when I was a kid and I had some serious toys. Kids do seem to get sucked into the computer at a younger and younger age, but isn't that true with any new technology? Heck, one could argue that kids, especially teenaged daughters, spend more and more time on the phone starting in the 70s and 80s, especially as households started carrying more than one line. I will admit that the advent of Nintendo probably sucked a huge amount of time into electronic stuff, but that started a generation ago.
I remember when I was young couch cushions were toys. Me and my sister Built a mean ass fort with broom stick supports and bed sheet awnings...
Hell yeah! I used to sleep on the frickin floore because I had that fort.. it made me feel safe and such. Also I had one of those tight ass GI Joe 3-story bases. I could spend hours playing on that thing. I had a thing for collecting different type of toy bases and command centers. Set it up all over the house, upstairs and downstairs, and could spend like 2-3 days just finishing one story. I don't know where all my toys went. It's like one day I was playing with them and the next they're just gone and I've moved on to computer games.
I met a woman a few months back who told me she and her husband gave their son 2 heavy-duty buckets, heavy-duty pulleys, and rope for his birthday, along with other, more expensive items. According to her, the kid plays with the buckets, rope, and pulleys more than anything, and the other neighborhood boys come over and do the same. Kids gonna wind up being some super-engineer or something.
I know kids these days hardly ride bikes. Its too hard to get their fat asses away from the video games long enough to go outdoors.
