My sister was telling me about a very beautiful toy car she saw and would like to buy for her daughter. She said the toy car (emphasis on the ‘toy’) costs N180,000. Shuoooo…for a toy car? According to her, the car has a key to start it, steering wheels (I am not sure if it’s power steering) and the whole works…
Try as I might, I could not see a reason why a child’s toy should cost that much. A toy car that the child will outgrow in a short while, not even the rate at which children grow these days. What happened to all the fun games we played while growing up? Our games didn’t even cost any money, they were totally free!
All we needed was our imagination; you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention. We had so many fun games that didn’t require a dime. From ten-ten to suwe to tinko tinko to hide and seek; oh, what fun we had back then.
You had to play these games with at least one other child so we all mixed well together. It developed our social and imaginative skills.
And even when our parents decided to indulge us with computer games, they were not so expensive. You took turns to play the computer game and we were all happy.
But these days, the only games children seem to play are computer games and phone games. As soon as they see you, they start searching for your phone to play games. They know just where to look in any phone, no matter how sophisticated, to locate the games. Most children these days don’t even know what ‘rolling tyre’ is. Some can’t even kick a football. Chai!
To me, these computer games isolate children; siblings do not play together, friendships are not formed, instead their heads are buried into one game or the other.
It will be nice if we could teach our children those fun games that we played when we were younger so that they do not miss out in the fun we enjoyed. Can we still imbibe these games in our children so that they can learn to mix with other children and develop their social skills? What fun games did you play growing up? Anyone up for a game of ten-ten? #coversfaceandrunsaway
