Our American children are loaded with toys and they are so very toy conscious and greedy for toys. They need to have new toys continuously in order to be satisfied and happy.
After holidays you see children visiting and playing with with each other and showing their toys with great pride – their machine-guns, rifles, hand guns, bombs, various war weapons, disfigured animals, dolls, and so on. And if new toys are not bought for them, they became resentful and unhappy for a long time.
In the communities I visited in Asia, they did not believe in such toys. There was no such shop that used to make or sell children’s toys.
I did not have a chance to make an inquiry about this, but throughout the years I observed children who had various roomfuls of toys and children without toys.
The children without toys made by others were more creative, artistic, sensitive, and had a spirit of gratitude – much more so than those who had plenty of toys.
The children without such toys were very social. They used to play with each other and create their own games to play with sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, and take part in all the labors at home. Children were also busy with their parents caring for the animals – the horses, donkeys, chickens, goats, cows, calves – or helped them in gardening, repairing, painting, building, working at home, or working with their fathers on vacation days from school.
Children without artificial toys had their toys too, but they made them.
Those who have toys made for them in some sense block their creativity, the spirit of adaptation and group work, and enter into a world of satisfaction, attachment, dependency, loneliness, and fantasy. Lazy boys, and those who used to wander on the streets, were looked at as failures and watched carefully by the authorities.
-Torkom Saraydarian
Autobiography
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