In my review of Toy Story 5, I said it was the fifth-best Toy Story movie. Yet, it’s lingering longer than the others. There’s a theme, a message scratching at the back of my skull as my daughters navigate the social politics of preadolescence. Some of their friends are drifting away from the imaginative games they used to play together and turning more and more to screens. My family isn’t immune. Give my girls two minutes and the house becomes a toy-strewn mess, with an entire fantasy world unfolding in their heads. Still, like their friends, they’d rather be screening.
Video games can be fun and they certainly buy me a little extra time to cleverly s**t on HitPig!. But that easy solution comes with a risk that we see play out in Toy Story 5. Bonnie loves her toys. She feels left behind when her classmates embrace screens. Once she gets a tablet of her own, her imagination is forced to the back seat. I see it happening every day. Kids are trading in the cardboard-box spaceships they made to explore imaginary galaxies for button-mashing their way down digital pathways someone else designed.
A 2026 survey commissioned by Playmobil found that 86% of parents said screens had partly replaced at least one toy or play activity their children previously enjoyed. When asked what they do when they’re bored, 28% of children said they turn to screens, while only 12% invent a game, story, or imaginary world. No surprise – a PwC survey found that kids spend an average of 3.6 hours a day on recreational screens, more than twice the time they spend playing outdoors or reading.
I would preemptively apologize for overwhelming you with science, except that the science is overwhelming, so I’ll preemptively skip that apology. Let’s start with the brain. A 2026 analysis of 42 studies found a positive relationship between pretend play and executive function, which helps us focus, plan, control impulses, and adapt to change. Think about what goes into making a fort. The kids on your block pick a location, gather materials, agree on a design, and have to figure out why the roof keeps collapsing. Once it’s built, one kid says it’s a princess castle. Another, a pirate ship. A third says it’s a robot, and the kids are its mechanical innards. Look at what’s happening. Children are making decisions, negotiating, solving problems, and exercising their creativity. They’re creating something together, with each child bringing their own idea of what makes it fun.
The benefits of creative play extend to happiness and relationships. In a 2026 University of Oklahoma experiment, researchers gave 125 elementary school-aged children 45 minutes of self-directed play each week over 12 weeks. You know what happened. The children showed improvements in positive mood and prosocial behavior, meaning they were more inclined to cooperate and interact positively with others.
The American Academy of Pediatrics also preaches the importance of unstructured play for developing communication, negotiation, problem-solving, and emotional regulation. Think about the social politics involved in a game of make-believe. Let’s say there’s a fairy queen who kicked all of the farm animals out of the kingdom because they’re too delicious and she’s going vegan (inspired by one kid’s newly vegan mom). What happens? The kid playing the cow wants to lead a rebellion, the fairy queen refuses to surrender her throne, and the chicken is upset because she’s, well, she’s always the chicken. Everyone has an idea about what should happen next, and nobody wants to give in. If they want to keep playing, they’ll have to listen, compromise, and deal with the disappointment of being the chicken again.
Kids can exercise their imaginations on screens, too, building astonishing things in Minecraft, creating their own games in Roblox, or gleefully trapping their friends in a honey pit in Ultimate Chicken Horse (IYKYK). Watching a movie together can also strengthen bonds and inspire post-credits adventures. The concern is what happens when ready-made entertainment occupies so much of a child’s free time that there’s little opportunity to invent something from scratch. We don’t have to ban technology to preserve creative play. We do have to make room for it. Fortunately, encouraging creative play doesn’t require parents to become full-time activity directors. Try these science-backed solutions:
- Give kids time to make their own fun. Leave some empty space on the calendar. Back-to-back lessons, practices, and other activities leave little room for imagination. Kids should have time to play on their own terms. Let them decide how to fill it without a screen.
- Make storytelling a game. Let kids invent outrageous characters, impossible situations, and their own endings. Storytelling, improv, and thinking games can develop creativity.
- Cut back on screens as a family. Just two weeks of dramatically reduced recreational screen time can improve emotional well-being and social behavior. Don’t worry, you’ll survive not checking your fantasy score 73 times every Sunday.
- Join the game without taking over. Kids come up with more elaborate make-believe adventures when adults join in. Let your child invent the story, and play along. If the couch is suddenly a spaceship, ask what star system you’re heading to instead of pointing out the Millennium Falcon didn’t have granny-style throw blankets.
Or, basically, be Bluey’s dad. I jealously hate but also respect that cartoon dogman.
I know my daughters are growing up. Pretty soon they’ll be arguing over whose lip gloss is whose and fighting over some middle school dude named Lance who parts his slick hair with a switch-blade comb. New interests. New friends. Guys. These things all come with double-digit ages. Our kids’ toys will be retired. Their play sets will be replaced with vanity desks as their costume makeup becomes permanent. I get it. Change is an important part of childhood. But I hope, even as I start fielding Tin Can calls from Lance, I’ve helped them develop enough imagination that, for the rest of their lives, they will keep finding the extraordinary in ordinary things. And (this is important) they will keep seeking out people who do the same. Which means the Lances of the world will have to be impressive to impress them.
I want my girls to enjoy the technology available to them. I also want them to have memories of ridiculous games, cardboard castles, imaginary friends, and adventures that existed nowhere except in their heads. They’ll likely spend their adult lives staring at screens like their parents. There’s no reason to rush them into being the hunched-over, saggy-eyed humans we’ve all become…
😳
Oh no! I’m Woody from Toy Story 5!
