Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Sandrine of the Paris Ankara Express blog.

Put it this way: if the Buddha were to visit our home, he wouldn’t exactly be impressed by our Zen like attitude to worldly possessions. Matter of fact, he might think he accidentally teleported to the Covered Bazaar in Istanbul. That or a library. But we still think we know a thing or two about minimalism when it comes to children’s toys.

I can pretty much list what our kids have. We store most their toys in medium sized boxes. There’s a box of small cars, one for the tea set, one for Lego and one for doll house type toys. There’s a big box with the bigger cars and a couple of electronic toys. Then there’s the doll house we made for our son, a tin full of refillable bubble mixture pots, a box of wooden bricks, a couple of wheelie toys, a fold up play tent, a plastic garage, a Teletubbies house and a few musical instruments (mostly percussions). Add to that some cuddly toys on their beds, a cupboard full of board games and jigsaw puzzles and that’s it.

So it may sound like a lot, but I challenge any moderately affluent parent to list all of their children’s toys in one hundred words! Most people will have a room full of toys representing each year’s latest craze as advertised on tv. And I don’t mean extravagant people either. It just seems that for most families, it’s increasingly hard to keep a lid on how many toys the children end up with. There’s grandparents, for one thing. And birthday parties. And all the adverts on tv for new, more exciting toys. There’s the marketing that goes with every new film – you need to see the film, and you need to buy the toy that goes with it. And mostly, there’s the fact that kids tend to get bored with their toys and forget what they were good for in the first place. To be able to play, they need new ones.

How can parents deal with that? Well, for us, it’s easy to put limits to what grandparents bring: we live in another country from them and the postal service isn’t that reliable or cheap. So they have to be fairly selective in their present buying. As far as parties are concerned, we tend to celebrate our kids’ birthdays at the same time, mostly with local people who know what they’ve got, what they like and what they don’t like. So no huge plastic, vastly inappropriate toys usually find their ways to our house. (And if they do, they find their way out again very quickly!) But you can find excuses to tell parents not to buy something: say someone else has already bought it! And if you can get your kids on your side, all the better. Be a team – get them to work with you and to value quality over quantity.

We have had barbie dolls, inevitably, as friends gave them to our daughter. She was never that much into them (not even to cut their hair!) and ended up giving them out as a Christmas charity gift. That is something most kids like to do – sharing their surplus with less fortunate children. So you feel that a surplus of toys is on its way, why not start talking to your children about how they can help others? Children love to share – give them a chance.

Mostly what made a difference to how we related to toys as a family is that when we first arrived in Turkey with a 15 month old child, we had very few toys. And there weren’t many on sale at our local store. So we took great care of what we had, made sure we taught our daughter to make the most of it. We still had most of the toys we came with (except the baby toys which we gave away once our son had outgrown them). We still have the bricks, the percussions, the tea set. We have toys we were given when our children were very young, including our son’s teletubbies house set, with no piece missing. If you look after their toys, and encourage them to do the same, chances are they’ll treasure them.

Actually, we did lose Tinky-Winky a few weeks ago. We thought it would be the end of the world but it turned out a paper cut Tinky-Winky, roughly coloured with a purple pencil, and hence easily replaced, was perfectly acceptable. Which brings me to the next point. Our children love their toys, but they much prefer pencils, papers, glue and scissors. They both spend hours in imaginative and creative, and mostly silent play at our living room table, with just a few bits of papers and two pots of pencils. In fact, it’s so much part of who they are, that we never go anywhere without a small pouch containing drawing necessities. I can see it poking out of my bag now. And it’s not just our kids that like this. Very often we find ourselves sharing out the paper and pens with children we’ve never met before, at restaurants, the airport, anywhere where kids get bored and are likely to misbehave. So invest in plenty of scrap paper and coloured pencils, and have some ready at all times.

So I don’t want to give the impression that our kids are happy with a cardboard box and bit of string and that I could throw away all their toys if I wanted to, or that they spend their time in quiet, creative, imaginative play with hand crafted wooden organic toys from a Swedish village. I don’t think I’d want them to be like that. But they do seem to manage with a lot less toys than children their age they know in France or the UK.

Sometimes it doesn’t work: I often promise my son small gifts if he gets a number of sticker on his chart, something which the special educators at the autism centre encourage. A lot of the time he’ll ask for bubble mixture or pencils. One day I stupidly suggested he choose a little car in the toy section of the supermarket. So off we went to look at them. He picked a lime green one. As big as him. I think to this day he hasn’t forgiven me for saying no.

Sandrine who lives in Turkey, writes together with her sisters, who live in Paris at the Paris Ankara Express blog. Sandrine writes about her family’s life in Turkey, raising trilingual children, working, and travelling.