For the past four decades, there’s been a controversial movement in German kindergartens to curb drug abuse later in life. The answer to this vexing issue: Take away the kids’ toys.
Studies dating back to the ‘80s have found that toys — like recreational drugs — provide children with an easy means of escape. Therefore, by removing this crutch, children are forced to develop important problem-solving competencies such as critical thinking, creativity, and social skills.
One Berlin daycare center recently took away its children’s toys for three months. The teachers gave them no instructions on what to do and simply supervised their interactions. The children soon learned to overcome their boredom and frustration by creating games out of what was lying about the classroom.
Without toys, the children would wear blankets on their backs and pretend to be animals. They’d organize their chairs into a train or go outside and collect sticks and make crafts out of nature.
“Without any toys, children have the time to develop their own ideas,” said Elisabeth Seifert, the managing director of Aktion Jugendschutz, a youth nonprofit that promotes this project. “In toy-free time, they don’t play with finished toys. They develop their own games. They play more together, so they can better develop psychosocial competencies.”
The toy-free studies align with research out of Johns Hopkins University that suggests scarcity improves creativity. “Contrary to common belief, abundant resources may have a negative effect on creativity,” the study's authors, Meng Zhu and Ravi Mehta, wrote. “We found that scarcity forces consumers to think beyond the traditional function of a given product and enhances creativity.”
The toy-free kindergarten movement has plenty of critics, with some going as far as to call it child abuse. “To give children no toys is toy deprivation,” Hans Mogel, a psychology professor from the University of Passau, said in an interview with Focus. “This is a form of child abuse. Deprivation comes at the expense of feeling secure and developing a healthy self-esteem.”
While toy-free kindergarten may be an extreme way to develop important coping skills in children, its basic message has a lot of merit. In today’s age of tablets, television, and passive activities, giving children the space to develop their own creative ideas is an undeniably wonderful way to encourage their growth.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.