Think Outside the Box, Then Play In It

The cardboard box is the greatest toy never sold.

Source: Photo Courtesy The Strong National Museum of Play

Not every perennially popular toy comes from a store. Take the cardboard box. No company advertises it. Parents don’t line up for it during the Christmas shopping season. No one sings its jingle. It costs nothing. In fact, it's not bought; it's rescued. Nobody complains much when rain turns it to pulp. Yet the cardboard box offers the imagination a feast. Arguably, the cardboard box is the greatest toy never sold.

First You Think Outside the Box, Then You Play In It

The toy has drawn endorsements from figures as different as Dr. Benjamin Spock and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The world-famous doctor reminded parents that with a little imagination, a cardboard box could become a farm, a town, or a doll’s house. As a young girl, the future Secretary of State decorated a cardboard box and made it the centerpiece of a fantasy kingdom that she built; mirrors stood in for lakes, twigs became trees.

For her, as for millions of others, this toy is pure improv. Yes, kids can climb on and in a large box. (The climbing is a reward in itself for sedentary children.) But kids have also staged a zillion plays from cardboard boxes. Crayons and finger paint can turn it into an ocean liner, a spaceship, a submarine, or a castle. The play narratives proceed apace. Draw wheels on it and it can become a dragster, a covered wagon, a fire truck, an ambulance. Draw wings on it and it can become a narrow body jet coming in for a landing.

In the process of playing and pretending, they learn more from this scrap than they do from most other toys.

Developmental Dividends of Pretend Play

Developmental psychologists, for their part, have identified “cognitive strategies” that emerge during the symbolic transformation of objects—as a stick turns into a light sabre or a towel transubstantiates into a cloak of invisibility. Or, indeed, as a cardboard box becomes a cargo plane, a pirate ship, a baby’s nursery, or a fire engine. Children will take on roles that fit as the object becomes an object of play.

Listen to children improvise a script during play, and you’ll hear how they negotiate as they develop a social dialog. And practicing negotiation itself provides bonuses to thinking and social understanding. And role-playing also delivers developmental rewards as pretense extends to planning and problem-solving. In the case of the decorated cardboard box children may perform heroic deeds as pilots or pirates, sailors or firefighters, parents or potentates. And here they imagine goals, to hide from the evil wizard, to fly to the magic mountain, to sail to the pirate island, or to extinguish the wildfire. “Goal seeking” in the parlance of developmental psychology, is both a kind of playing and evidence of progress.

“It is clear,” developmental psychologist Doris Bergen wrote, “that pretense plays a vital role in young children’s lives,” and that this period of “salience” extends “through the primary years.” Proof of a cause-and-effect integration of pretend play, language, and cognition awaits confirmation by functional magnetic imagery and other means of neuroscience research. But it is a good bet that because pretend play coincidentally recruits emotion, physical exertion, and imagination in a reciprocal relationship, developmental psychologists say, that pretense may spur on the development of a separate, integrated “mental workspace” important to the developing brain.

Back to the Box

Cut armholes in a smaller box, use a marker pen to sketch dials and video screens on its surface, walk stiffly, speak in a monotone, wave your arms franticly, and you’ve become a passable robot. The contraption will pass the value test by encouraging children to laugh and think and improvise and learn.

And when the cardboard box is dog-eared and trampled, perch it on a steep slope, climb aboard, and it will slide you down dry grass like a sled.

Who cares when this toy is used up? You rescued it from the recycler in the first place.

This disposable toy will be with us forever.