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Is it possible for children to have too many toys? I think that there probably is a case against children having too many toys. I grew up with four younger brothers (about two years between every one of us) and our fairly large communal bedroom was lined on two walls with shelving from floor to ceiling with toys and every Christmas there were sacks full of even more playthings that we did not have any more space for.

I was the eldest, so you would think that I could pass my baby toys down the line once I had no use for them. That worked while my brothers were actually babies, but as their consciousness started to develop they wanted to play with what I was playing with and so all the toys that I used from, say three to eight years of age were ostracized by my brothers as they leap-frogged past those years and went directly to year eight and nine with me.

But we never got rid of those five years worth of overlooked toys or any other toys either. This would have been in the Fifties and Sixties and I do not think that recycling was quite the buzz word back then that it is nowadays.

My parents did not throw them away, we just squirreled them away on the top shelves, which we could not reach anyway. I suppose that after sitting up there for ten years they were eventually thrown away but I do not know as I had already left home by then.

The point is that those redundant toys were not doing anyone in our family any good and they were taking up space. It would have been far better to have given them away or not even to have bought some of them in the first place.

We always had to have ‘one each’ so that there would be less squabbling. So, we had items like five plastic trumpets, five tin xylophones, five plastic guns, five of this and five of that and we never used them after Christmas Day. We enjoyed playing together at board games like Monopoly, Risk and cards and although I, being the oldest, won nine times out of ten, my brothers never seemed to care.

We also had a train set, Scalectrix and a big box of Lego. We would spend all weekend developing various scenarios with combinations of the train set, a roadway and Lego houses and Lego railway platforms. OK, these three toys were almost certainly expensive, but they were quality, versatile, could be used in combination and, in a way, were educational. These were the toys that we stored on the lower shelves.

What I am saying is that more is not always better and in the case of toys, more can be simply a waste of money. Instead of all that junk on the top shelves, which was usually donated by aunties and uncles by the way, it would have been better to get us a new bridge for the railway set or a new chicane for the Scalectrix or another box of building bricks for our Lego collection.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with Lego Keyrings. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Lego UK.

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