LEGO is destroying creative play according to this article.

[Zerobricks]

If anything Lego encourages creativity, if the author would have simple googled Lego creations, or MOCs, or smillar he'd see how creative kids can be.

[MAB]

When I was a kid (late 1970s, early 80s), I thought nothing of using lego to build spaceships for my Kenner SW figures, often with toilet rolls attached using sticky tape or blu-tack, with lumps of plasticine for details. They landed on launch / landing pads made from painted cardboard boxes or any other junk we had around. My parents watched my play sometimes but didn't really join in or direct play.

These days, my kids are stopped from gluing things to lego, mainly by their dad. :-)

[Faefrost]

For the sake of pointing it out, the greatest cause of mortality and morbidity for children in the U.S. and Canada is unintentional injury. While it is still the largest contributor, the rates of unintentional injury have been on the decrease in the 20th century, with a significant contributor being preventative measures (and technological intervention being much less significant), and this includes safety during play. So, when you talk about child experts, I figure the CDC and WHO are pretty good experts - if people want to rail against all those other child experts who apparently just make things up I think it would be helpful if posters were specific about who they were talking about.

Yes but there is a balance to it. We have gotten so good at shielding kids from serious injury, that we more and more have started to shield them from pain or discomfort. And that is very very bad. Pain and discomfort can be key lessons for a child, teaching them boundaries and consequences. Evolving and improving safety standards leading to requirements for bicycle helmets are good and important. That is a major vector for debilitating or life changing injuries. But letting them learn to play and explore exclusively in foam padded rounded edged inflatable special safe environments leads to young adults with a grossly distorted sense of invulnerability and a poor ability to access risk. Immunizing and encapsulating a person from a perceived danger can and does in the long term lead to much greater danger. (Just ask any Firefighter of a certain age.)

[EvilTwin]

Pain and discomfort can be key lessons for a child, ....

A bit like the thread about Shell and Greenpeace, this thread seems to have jumped a Lego shark somewhere along the way

But, I think it is a good thing that Eurobricks allows this kind of discussion. it is providing a valuable service to society by giving people an outlet for this kind of warped opinion, when otherwise they might be getting into trouble out in the real world somewhere

[Faefrost]

A bit like the thread about Shell and Greenpeace, this thread seems to have jumped a Lego shark somewhere along the way

But, I think it is a good thing that Eurobricks allows this kind of discussion. it is providing a valuable service to society by giving people an outlet for this kind of warped opinion, when otherwise they might be getting into trouble out in the real world somewhere

Your missing the point. A cracked skull is a bad thing on every level. A skinned knee from falling down while running is a life lesson and a natural boundary of behavior. We should be actively preventing one, and while not encouraging the other should not be particularly shielding them from it.

To bring it back to Lego terms, we have too many experts seeking to shield our children from one type of play or another, or hyper analyzing things. Just stear them away from truly dangerous stuff, and otherwise let the kids play. Don't give the kid a real handgun. But don't worry about whether or not his or her Lego is imaginative enough. The kid is more than capable of working out the deep imaginative possibilities of even the smallest Lego Polybag all on their own without adult interference. Kids learn by doing things. Running into things. Falling down. Building a Lego set via the instructions. Building something different without the instructions. Carefully leaving the pieces randomly scattered outside the bathroom door so a parent steps on them at three am. They don't need experts studying this stuff and telling them how to do it.

[ummester]

I'm with Faefrost on this entirely - wrapping our offspring up in too much cotton wool can have adverse effects, like generating adults that think the world owes them something. There seems to be an expert on everything with children now - how they should eat, play, dress, what they should watch - a very 'cushioned' and overprotective environment.

Human's learn through pain, we only know how to get up again after we fall down. Parents/adults should reasonably protect children, though not to the degree that it is restrictive - children are their own people and should be able to define their own personal boundaries. They should be allowed to fall down every now and then.

I was a culprit of probably more bad than good LEGO parenting - I didn't want my kids to lose too many parts or mess the sets up too much. Mine are older than LEGO now - but you live and learn. All I would suggest to anyone who has young kids just getting into LEGO - play with them, they need that, they need to be inspired by how mum or dad can assemble the bricks but let them build entirely how they want.

As noted, I feel the LEGO movie sums up how parents and children should play with LEGO perfectly. My only concern is that it is no longer packaged as a product entirely in line with the film's philosophy.

[XAxles]

Ah, the old "Lego forces kids to follow instructions" argument. I would have thought The Lego Movie would have highlighted the idiocy of that mode of thinking, but I guess not. The instructions are there to get you started, and have been that way for decades. I've drawn more inspiration and learned more about building from official sets than I ever could have with an open-ended bucket of bricks. I think the only people who would consider the inclusion of one set of instructions to restrict creative play are those who are too small-minded to move past them.

The idea that established worlds and characters also restrict creative play is equally ludicrous. To say so is to deny the creativity of ALL works that derive from predecessors, including fanfiction and fan art, and, looking further, entire genres including science fiction and high fantasy that have built upon established tropes and motifs since their establishment.

I agree.

Some of the techniques builders use came either from a unique step in the booklet or a smorgasbord of steps, or popped out from seeing a connection.

For the sake of pointing it out, the greatest cause of mortality and morbidity for children in the U.S. and Canada is unintentional injury. While it is still the largest contributor, the rates of unintentional injury have been on the decrease in the 20th century, with a significant contributor being preventative measures (and technological intervention being much less significant), and this includes safety during play. So, when you talk about child experts, I figure the CDC and WHO are pretty good experts - if people want to rail against all those other child experts who apparently just make things up I think it would be helpful if posters were specific about who they were talking about.

Yes, there is such a thing as death by choking. I understand that.

But tell me, outside of Onion articles, when was the last time a kid died due to playing with LEGO outside of a piece lodged in the throat?

For the sake of pointing it out, the greatest cause of mortality and morbidity for children in the U.S. and Canada is unintentional injury. While it is still the largest contributor, the rates of unintentional injury have been on the decrease in the 20th century, with a significant contributor being preventative measures (and technological intervention being much less significant), and this includes safety during play. So, when you talk about child experts, I figure the CDC and WHO are pretty good experts - if people want to rail against all those other child experts who apparently just make things up I think it would be helpful if posters were specific about who they were talking about.

Yes, there is such a thing as death by choking. I understand that.

But tell me, outside of Onion articles, when was the last time a kid died due to playing with LEGO outside of a piece lodged in the throat?

[GregoryBrick]

Yes, there is such a thing as death by choking. I understand that.

But tell me, outside of Onion articles, when was the last time a kid died due to playing with LEGO outside of a piece lodged in the throat?

It's not about whether LEGO is physically harmful. One person with some expertise in child play said some things about recent changes to LEGO in the linked Guardian article. Posters decided to discredit 'child experts' as a whole (and by implication these specific comments on LEGO) based on the idea that playgrounds are now unnecessarily safe, or that while there are reasonable ways to protect children, child experts are unreasonable. There was no evidence offered in defence of this, just some stories about how children learn through exposure to risk/harm, therefore intuitions about what's optimal for children obviate any need to actually check to see if these intuitions are justified.

[Jared]

What an "interesting" article, thanks for sharing.

[Darth Punk]

What a bunch of baloney. Apparently this so called child expert cannot see beyond the tip of her nose. She seems to be the one lacking in imagination as if the sole idea of Legos is to build them. As if one can only follow the directions because there is obviously no other alternative. Kind of like those balls with the different shapes cutout in them and the matching pieces must be placed through them. Obviously that what is killing society.

She feeds this notion of blaming someone else like companies or society in general. As if they are responsible for raising your children. The blame need to be laid squarely where it belongs, at the feet of the parents. Despite what Legos may or not be its a parents responsibility to teach their children to be creative. To see that they learn to read and write, do math, etc. That is not to say a parent must do all this alone, that is why we have schools, why libraries have variety of programs, etc, etc. But no matter who teaches your child to read, you as a parent are still responsible to see that it happens. You are still responsible to engage your child and help guide them through life.

What child experts should be railing against is a general lack of responsibility that many have today. Who want to blame someone or something else for their problems. While expecting the same entities to create the solutions.

Sorry to rant, but as a parent of three issues like this really tick me off. Parenting is not easy, but my wife and me do everything in our power to see that are children are raised well. We take 100% responsibility for our children. Blaming a company for a product I buy for failing to do what I should be doing is absolutely ludicrous.

[LegoPanda]

the lego/shell partnership is as ancient as i can remember, and it making you uncreative, look at this forum

[Itaria No Shintaku]

Lol... it really pisses me off... like as if GREENPEACE is no business company... come on...

[LegoGunInstructions]

I agree how Lego is producing lots of sets, based on movies, dedicated to war, violence, killing, murdering, betrayal and slaughter. But they just adapted to what the real world is, because most people would be bored if there wasn't violence. It makes us feel good to see or cause violence. That is why when at school the children see 2 kids fighting they won't be able to get their eyes off of them.

[Lordofdragonss]

As a specialist in child development, I’ve had growing concerns that now even Lego has lost its way. Its new products veer further away from its innocent beginnings. Increasingly Lego churns out lucrative but unimaginative lines of “must-have” sets to promote new movies, games and videos. These little boxes, which come with instructive pictures on the front, unlike the traditional LEGO bricks, do not result in child-directed, open-ended “real play”. They do not promote imagination; they stifle it. They do not allow children to be creative and learn to think for themselves; they tell children what to think, instilling consumerist values that risk increasing rates of stress for parents and children alike.

Actualy this IS partialy true. More and more children just put their sets once. There is a lot of different explanations though. I work in toy store and I met many parents that DON'T allow combining sets toghether because "they lost in price" or "become a Lego bin". Just as someone said "I think parents have a greater influence on their children's creativity than a toy manufacturer." That's true. It's ALWAYS parents fault.

Edited February 15, 2015 by Lordofdragonss

[ummester]

Actualy this IS partialy true. More and more children just put their sets once. There is a lot of different explanations though. I work in toy store and I met many parents that DON'T allow combining sets toghether because "they lost in price" or "become a Lego bin". Just as someone said "I think parents have a greater influence on their children's creativity than a toy manufacturer." That's true. It's ALWAYS parents fault.

A big part of this is because (many) LEGO sets are now marketed and packaged as an action scene, with collectable characters. Though I agree it is primarily the parents job to lead the way their children play, neither parents, nor TLG, can battle to more overwhelming powers of consumerism and technology that are shaping our species.

This is where I find articles by child experts and the like kind of annoying. Why target LEGO? Just because it's popular. True, LEGO play isn't as creative as it once was. LEGO has adapted to broader social changes. No play is as creative as it once was, human imagination is being replaced by the quick fix across the board. It seems the child experts make these targeted judgements for controversy, or their own 5 seconds of fame, rather than addressing the broader problems.

[Karalora]

A big part of this is because (many) LEGO sets are now marketed and packaged as an action scene, with collectable characters.

This is especially true of the licensed themes, which mostly seem to replicate particular scenes from movies. Nothing prevents a child from running the scene differently than it happened in the movie, or for that matter putting the pieces together a different way...but nothing really encourages it either.

I wouldn't place any special blame on LEGO, however. It seems like most toys for children are based on licensed properties these days. At least LEGO still produces non-licensed themes like City, where sets may be based around a given scenario, but no specific outcome is indicated. It's up to the person playing whether the cops will catch the thieves or not.

[ummester]

This is especially true of the licensed themes, which mostly seem to replicate particular scenes from movies. Nothing prevents a child from running the scene differently than it happened in the movie, or for that matter putting the pieces together a different way...but nothing really encourages it either.

I wouldn't place any special blame on LEGO, however. It seems like most toys for children are based on licensed properties these days. At least LEGO still produces non-licensed themes like City, where sets may be based around a given scenario, but no specific outcome is indicated. It's up to the person playing whether the cops will catch the thieves or not.

Yea, that's what I was getting at - it's not solely a LEGO thing. Kid's are having their imaginations taken away by being sold franchises, just as the world is having it's creative diversity taken away by corporate entity. The child experts should be saying, 'watch Idiocracy' not 'Blame LEGO'.

I guess one could make the argument that as a premier toy product, LEGO has a responsibility to identify that certain issues exists and work to counteract them. It's hard to profit from going against the grain though and a toy company forfeiting integrity for profit is less a perversion of its function than all the governments of the world that have become oligarchy's. So, meh, though LEGO could possibly be accused of being a part of the problem, it can't ever be accused of causing it.

Edited February 16, 2015 by ummester

[MAB]

Actualy this IS partialy true. More and more children just put their sets once. There is a lot of different explanations though.

Another explanation is that they are not buying the more creative lego sets - there are still new ones being produced. In fact, six this year - the creative brick boxes.

[Erik Leppen]

I wouldn't place any special blame on LEGO, however.

Indeed.

You can't blame a commercial company for wanting to make a profit.

It's the buyers who take the decisions, eventually. If we all buy X, the company will produce more of X.

And those decisions are in turn influenced by governmental plans (that affect the purchasing power or free time that parents have).

[Karalora]

Consumer purchasing decisions are also heavily influenced by advertising. I certainly am not biting my handkerchief on account of those poor, poor corporations who are just shackled by the need to give the people what they want and have absolutely no control over what that might be.

What I meant is that LEGO is no guiltier of this than most other toy producers, and quite a bit less guilty of it than many. I don't think the mainstream public primarily associates LEGO with licensed sets--I think their reputation is still for the extraordinary versatility of their product in facilitating imaginative play.

I won't say I'm not a bit troubled by LEGO's increasing reliance on licenses, especially for really big franchises like Disney Princess and superheroes. It's like...don't these things have enough market share already?

Edited February 16, 2015 by Karalora

[Saberwing40k]

LEGO isn't destroying creative play - it's trying to hold onto it, in a world that is geared towards suppressing a child's imagination with consumption of franchises and products.

I could not agree more, what with the rise of pay to play games and figures like Skylanders. While the "Gotta Catch 'Em All" marketing ploy is as old as marketing itself, it has become far more pervasive now. Also, this person is an idiot, basically arguing that a massive corporation owes them to stay exactly as how the person remembered them. It's just a symptom of a society that teaches people that the world owes you something, and that nobody should ever feel discomfort or difficulty. We, as a society, are more entitled, and spoiled, and coddled than ever, and it's 100% the fault of the parents. Sure the companies may do advertising, but they come up with the marketing ploys based on what people think. No corporation can fabricate a public opinion from scratch, they must find something that already exists , and propagate it. Basically, it's this generation of parents thinking that any kind of discomfort is bad, including the discomfort of actually interacting with your children. Most people want to both be parents, and continue with living like they are in their twenties, and this has been endlessly glorified.

To summarize, it's not Lego's fault. It's the fault of all the stupid people.

[ummester]

Basically, it's this generation of parents thinking that any kind of discomfort is bad, including the discomfort of actually interacting with your children. Most people want to both be parents, and continue with living like they are in their twenties, and this has been endlessly glorified.

I agree, to an extent. It's a chicken/egg thing but society doesn't respect parents the way it used to, either.

Not too long ago, you were 'different' if you weren't married with 2 children. Being a couple in the burbs was the respected status quo. Now, you are 'different' if you remain married and focus on raising the children. And, in such a consumer oriented world, the DINKs often 'fit' better into the social environment, because they are primary consumers.

On top of this, there are too many 'experts' that lack real life experience. Too many people who have an opinion on how children should be raised that have never and will never try raising them themselves.

I do agree that parents are, generally, responding to this environment poorly. Listening too much to the 'experts', following the 'adverts' and trying to find the painless way out, as you say.

Edited February 16, 2015 by ummester

[owlbearsforall]

Actualy this IS partialy true. More and more children just put their sets once. There is a lot of different explanations though. I work in toy store and I met many parents that DON'T allow combining sets toghether because "they lost in price" or "become a Lego bin". Just as someone said "I think parents have a greater influence on their children's creativity than a toy manufacturer." That's true. It's ALWAYS parents fault.

So, when I was a child I was obsessed with my LEGO sets. As in, I would build the set, arrange everything perfectly, then just leave them there. It was kind of an obsessive behavior, and I did it with any toy (playmobil, Jurassic Park action figures, Barbies, etc). Even though my parents would try to encourage me to actually play with them, I was more content to just set up massive scenes with everything and just sit and stare at them.

I might have had some OCD issues as a child...

But regardless, I still thought of it as play, and I loved nothing more than to pull everything out and carefully set it all up. Some kids just have different (and slightly creepy) ways of playing.

[Iria]

Actualy this IS partialy true. More and more children just put their sets once. There is a lot of different explanations though. I work in toy store and I met many parents that DON'T allow combining sets toghether because "they lost in price" or "become a Lego bin". Just as someone said "I think parents have a greater influence on their children's creativity than a toy manufacturer." That's true. It's ALWAYS parents fault.

It's kind of ridiculous that a parent would consider a taking apart a set as a 'lost in price/ just becomes part of the Lego bin", because price per piece between a set and a generic tub of Lego is fairly similar. LEGO is pricey- a kid spending hours and hours modifying their set or rebuilding new things over and over seems like a better deal then just having it sit on a shelf. Although some kids do enjoy collecting things and keeping sets intact which is perfectly fine as well. I just think it's a shame when it's the adult making the decision instead of the child.

So, when I was a child I was obsessed with my LEGO sets. As in, I would build the set, arrange everything perfectly, then just leave them there. It was kind of an obsessive behavior, and I did it with any toy (playmobil, Jurassic Park action figures, Barbies, etc). Even though my parents would try to encourage me to actually play with them, I was more content to just set up massive scenes with everything and just sit and stare at them.

I might have had some OCD issues as a child...

But regardless, I still thought of it as play, and I loved nothing more than to pull everything out and carefully set it all up. Some kids just have different (and slightly creepy) ways of playing.

Hey! Scene design is not creepy! I was definitely one of those kids who would spend all day setting up a battle scene. Sometime I would create a storyline for it in my head, but I was not an act out kind of child, unless a friend was over and wanted to act out the story. And like you said, it is still considered play, just a different form of it.

[DuckBricks]

So, when I was a child I was obsessed with my LEGO sets. As in, I would build the set, arrange everything perfectly, then just leave them there. It was kind of an obsessive behavior, and I did it with any toy (playmobil, Jurassic Park action figures, Barbies, etc). Even though my parents would try to encourage me to actually play with them, I was more content to just set up massive scenes with everything and just sit and stare at them.

I might have had some OCD issues as a child...

But regardless, I still thought of it as play, and I loved nothing more than to pull everything out and carefully set it all up. Some kids just have different (and slightly creepy) ways of playing.

And I still make scenes and stare at them to this day.......