"Time to put away such childish things" - But should we ever stop playing? Today's #ReadItTorial

Today's #ReadItTorial starts out with an admission. I've always hated that bloody thing, the thing pictured above. It's "Barbie's Malibu Beach House" - and C has had this huge plastic monstrosity for quite a long time. Normally it languishes in a cupboard, oft forgotten - but still kept in fairly good condition along with its insidiously waspish cohort of plastic Barbie dolls who sometimes live in it.

The reason for this image adorning a #ReadItTorial hasn't really got anything to do with Barbies, or plastic, or even Malibu beach houses. It's to do with play.

If you're a parent or guardian, and your kids are rapidly approaching that age where your only interaction with them is the odd cursory 'grunt' or 'Where's my charger?' when their phone's battery begins to run out or "What's the WIFI password for this horrible place you've dragged us to" then you might sympathise with today's subject.

We've begun to notice that the closer C gets to the age mentioned above, the more she's actually beginning to play with toys and activities she normally wouldn't have touched. Normally in her (extremely limited - thanks to school / homework) spare time you can probably guess what she likes to do more than anything else. But lately, rather than reaching for a book she's been delving into her toy cupboards and hauling all her toys out, playing with them for hours (in fact one rain-soaked weekend when we didn't manage to escape the house, she spent a good solid 7 hours playing with them - which is pretty unprecedented tbh).

Now and again we'd look in on her. She was so happily wrapped up in playing with her toys that she scarcely noticed our presence. As we were cleaning the house top-to-bottom we happily let her get on with it but later on we all had a chat about what was going on.

C almost burst into tears. She told us that in her class at school, hardly any of the girls still played with toys (or at least this is what they told her, I'm sure the reality is quite different). She felt that she was somehow being led towards an inevitability - that she would have to leave toys and playing behind, replacing these child-like pursuits with...what? Obsessing over fashion? Boys? Sticking daft pictures of their food on Instagram for "likes" ?

Both of us really didn't know how to react to this at first. It was heartbreaking to hear someone who wasn't even in their teens talking about the forced necessity to 'grow up'.

Playing is vitally important for kids though - so why does it get left behind as soon as they cross the boundary of their tenth year. Why does society feel that kids should devote their entire time to learning, education, more 'worthwhile' pursuits - shoving toys and playing to the back of the wardrobe, like that heartbreaking scene in "Toy Story 2" Where poor Jesse ends up dumped in a charity donation box by the side of the road (I still can't bear to watch that scene in polite company, it reduces me to a blubbing mess every single sodding time, like a great many Pixar movies I guess - but that one in particular nails what I'm trying to get across in this ReadItTorial).

We both vowed to make sure she can carry on enjoying playing. Peer pressure aside (and who the hell, quite frankly, has ever benefitted from anything forced on them by peer pressure anyway) I'd love to think that she just bucks the trend and carries on doing things she enjoys rather than feeling the necessity to fit in with everyone else.

Both my wife and I sat down and reasoned out when we both stopped playing. My wife thought it was probably in her early teens. Me...well, I was a geek who fell in love with videogames, Dungeons and Dragons and christ knows how many other 'worthless pursuits' - so I realised I actually never had stopped playing (is this something that boys tend to get away with more than girls? That's worthy of further debate). Do we count our hobbies as 'play'? If building lego kits counts as playing, then both my wife and I technically still do (and I still probably spend more time than I should playing videogames, though it's taken a bit of a back seat to drawing and doodling in recent years).

Why do we feel this stupid need to make our kids grow up quicker and leave all that stuff behind? I just can't understand it at all.