When Your Child Is Bored, Give Them Loose Parts: A Practical Guide to Raising Children Who Create, Build and Think

There is a particular kind of boredom I have started noticing in children. They can have rooms full of toys, shelves of games, and more entertainment available than any generation before them, yet the moment the screen goes off, they have no idea what to do. As parents, our natural response is often to look for something else to occupy them. We search for STEM kits, educational games, building sets, and new toys, hoping to find something interesting enough to compete with a screen. I think there is another possibility worth considering. Perhaps children don’t always need another thing to play with; it could just be that they need more opportunities to decide what the thing will become.

Give a child a toy cash register and many of the imaginative decisions have already been made. It is a cash register. It belongs in a shop. There are buttons to press and perhaps sounds to hear. Give that same child cardboard, bottle caps, markers, tape, scissors, and scraps of paper, and suddenly there is a problem to solve. How could I make a cash register? How will the drawer open? What could I use for money? Maybe it doesn’t become a cash register at all. Tomorrow those same materials might become a robot, restaurant, marble run, tiny house, or something an adult would never have thought to suggest. That difference is at the heart of loose parts play, and once you understand it, you may begin looking at children’s toys very differently.

What Is Loose Parts Play?

The term loose parts is generally traced to architect Simon Nicholson’s 1971 essay, How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts. Nicholson proposed that environments become richer in possibilities when people can interact with variables that can be moved, manipulated, combined, and changed. His argument was broader than children’s crafts. He was interested in creativity itself and in environments that allowed people, including children, to participate in shaping what happened within them.

More than fifty years later, the idea has become deeply influential in early childhood education. Loose parts can be natural or manufactured, bought or found, beautiful or completely ordinary. Cardboard, fabric, stones, sticks, lids, blocks, tubes, containers, string and pieces of wood can all become loose parts when children are free to move, combine, redesign and assign meaning to them. The important part is not the object. It is the possibility.

A stick can become a fishing rod, wand, bridge, flagpole or spoon. A cardboard box can become a house today and a vehicle tomorrow. Fabric can become a cape, river, roof, blanket or landscape. The child, rather than the manufacturer, determines what happens next.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children similarly encourages open-ended materials such as blocks, fabric, natural objects, paint, clay, and other materials that can be explored in multiple ways. The value lies partly in the absence of a predetermined outcome. Instead of reproducing an adult’s finished example, children can investigate their own ideas. That is why I would rather keep an abundant supply of simple and interesting found objects than continually add another single-purpose toy to the house. The materials themselves are inexpensive or free (yay nature). What matters is the intellectual work the child must contribute.

The Difference Between Receiving an Idea and Creating One

A great deal of children’s entertainment arrives complete. Even many products marketed as creative ask children to reproduce an adult’s predetermined result. Loose parts reverse that relationship. The adult supplies possibilities. The child supplies the plan. Imagine a child deciding to build a house for a toy animal. They select a cardboard box and discover that it is too shallow. They cut another piece of cardboard for a roof, but the roof collapses. Glue does not hold quickly enough, so they reach for tape. The doorway turns out to be too small for the animal, which means they have to enlarge it. Then the house needs furniture. A bottle cap becomes a bowl, craft sticks become a bed, and a scrap of fabric becomes a blanket.

To an adult walking past, they may simply look busy making a cardboard house. Cognitively, much more is happening. They have a goal in mind, planning, testing materials, encountering failure, changing strategies, estimating size, thinking spatially, and deciding whether what they have made matches the idea they began with. That is play, but it is also thinking. For young children, play is one of the important ways learning happens. Loose parts create particularly interesting conditions for this kind of thinking because there is rarely one correct answer.

Why This Matters in a Screen-Filled Childhood?

Screens solve boredom extraordinarily well. Images move, sounds change, stories continue, and someone else continually decides what happens next. A child does not have to invent the next scene because the next scene arrives automatically. Turn the screen off and ordinary life can initially feel very slow. This is where I think the home environment matters.

I would not introduce loose parts as a punishment for screen use, nor would I expect a basket of cardboard to compete with a highly stimulating game the first afternoon it appears. Instead, I would make creation part of the physical culture of the home. Children need something worthwhile to encounter when entertainment is not being supplied to them. A permanent creation station changes the question from “What can I watch?” to “What can I make?” You are creating an environment for making rather than scheduling a making activity.

Build a Creation Station, Not a Craft Cupboard

If I wanted this habit to take root in a home, I would make the materials visible and accessible enough that creating did not depend on an adult announcing that it was craft time.

You do not need an elaborate playroom. A rolling cart, low shelf, set of clear drawers can become a child’s workshop. What matters is that useful materials are consistently available and that the child knows where to find and return them. The aim is abundance of possibility, not uncontrolled clutter.

Organization matters because a child who can see and retrieve materials can think with them. Keep paper together, joining materials together, drawing supplies together, and recycled building materials in a larger basket or box. It does not need to look like a classroom supply catalogue. It needs to function. Most importantly, everyday materials should be within the child’s safe reach. If tape, paper, glue, scissors, and cardboard require an adult every time an idea appears, creation remains dependent on the adult. The goal is to reach the point where a child thinks, I want to build something, walks to the creation area, and begins. That independence is part of the point.

A Loose Parts Starter List for Home

You do not need to walk into a craft store and buy everything at once. Some of the best loose parts are probably already passing through your home and going into the bin. Begin there, then add a few basic materials that make those found objects easier to transform.

• For building, save cardboard sheets, boxes in different sizes, paper tubes, egg cartons, clean containers, corks, paper cups, and sturdy packaging. Add craft sticks and simple wooden pieces if you have them.

• For connecting, keep washable glue, glue sticks, masking or painter’s tape, child-friendly clear tape, string, yarn, ribbon and reusable fasteners. Tape is especially valuable because children can test an idea, pull it apart and try again without needing an adult to make every connection permanent.

• For transforming and creating, offer plain paper, construction paper, scrap paper, tissue paper, foil, fabric remnants, felt, washable markers, crayons, coloured pencils, paint and paintbrushes.

• For details, keep things such as googly eyes, pom-poms, feathers, stickers, pipe cleaners, large buttons and beads that are appropriate for your child’s age. These small materials become particularly useful when a cardboard construction suddenly needs wheels, eyes, hair, controls or decoration.

• From nature, children can collect sticks, leaves, seedpods, shells, smooth stones, flowers, and other safe materials from their own environment. A walk outside can quietly replenish the creation station without becoming another organized activity.

Then provide a few real tools appropriate to the child’s age, such as child-safe scissors, rulers, pencils, hole punches, and paintbrushes. For younger children, loose parts must always be selected with choking, cutting, ingestion, and strangulation risks in mind. Children who still mouth objects need pieces too large to become choking hazards. Magnets, button batteries, sharp scraps, long cords, and unsafe discarded materials do not belong in an unsupervised loose-parts collection.

Boundaries

This does not mean keeping every piece of packaging that enters the house. Give recycled materials a physical boundary. One basket, box, or shelf is enough. When it is full, something needs to be used or recycled before more is added. I like this because the collection itself becomes part of learning. Children discover that materials have properties and limitations. Corrugated cardboard behaves differently from paper. Fabric bends where a craft stick resists. Tape solves different problems from glue. A structure with a broad base behaves differently from one balanced precariously on a narrow point. These are small encounters with engineering, mathematics, design, and the physical world.

Stop Giving Them the Finished Idea

This may be the hardest part for adults. A child picks up a paper tube, and before they have had time to think, we say, “You could make a rocket!” Now the tube is a rocket. We meant to help, but we supplied the imaginative leap the child could have made. Try waiting. If your child asks, “What should I make?” resist immediately producing ten ideas. Look at the materials together. Ask what they have been thinking about lately. If they genuinely need help getting started, offer a problem rather than a finished product: “Your stuffed animal needs somewhere to sleep. I wonder what you could build.” Then let the solution belong to them.

This also means resisting the temptation to improve the finished product. The crooked cardboard house can remain crooked unless the child thinks it needs fixing. The creature can have seven eyes. The wheels do not need to be evenly spaced. A bridge that collapses presents an engineering problem before it presents an adult problem. When adults continually correct, beautify, and finish children’s work, we can accidentally remove the very thinking we hoped the activity would encourage. There is nothing wrong with teaching children specific techniques. Sometimes a child needs to learn how to fold cardboard, use a hole punch, attach two pieces, or mix paint. Adults have knowledge worth sharing.

The distinction is whether we are giving children a tool or giving them the answer. Show them how masking tape can form a hinge, then step away. Teach them how to use a ruler, then allow them to decide what needs measuring. Demonstrate how to safely make a hole in cardboard, then let the discovery travel somewhere you did not expect. That is a very different kind of help.

What to Do When Your Child Says “I’m Bored”

Expect it. A child accustomed to being entertained may not walk up to a basket of cardboard and immediately become an inventor. Creativity needs opportunity, but it also needs time. Children sometimes have to move through the first discomfort of not knowing what to do before an idea appears. I would allow that discomfort. The supplies remain available. Screens have clear boundaries. There are stretches of time when entertainment is not continually provided, and boredom is allowed to exist long enough for the child to respond to it.

Buy Fewer Toys and More Possibilities

I do not think children need to stop owning toys. The useful distinction is not simply toy versus no toy. The better question is how much room the object leaves for the child. When I am deciding whether something deserves space in a child’s environment, I would ask: Can it be used in several ways? Can it combine with things we already own? Does the child have to contribute imagination for it to become interesting? Could a six-year-old use it differently from a four-year-old? Will it still offer possibilities six months from now? Sometimes the answer will be a beautiful set of blocks. Sometimes it will be a doll. And surprisingly often, it will be the cardboard box the toy arrived in.

The Habit We Are Really Trying to Build

The deepest reason I want children to have access to loose parts has very little to do with crafts. I want a child to encounter an empty afternoon and have an idea. I want them to look at a problem and begin searching for materials. I want them to experience the small frustration of something falling apart, think for a moment, and try another way. I want them to know that boredom does not always require entertainment and that an unfinished idea does not always require an adult. Those habits reach far beyond childhood play.

Creativity involves generating possibilities. Critical thinking involves examining them.

Problem-solving requires trying something, discovering what happens, and adjusting. Executive function helps a child hold a goal in mind long enough to continue when the first attempt does not work. Play can bring these processes together around something as ordinary as a kitchen table covered in cardboard scraps and tape. So the next time you feel the urge to buy another toy or pass your child a tablet because your child is bored, pause. Give them possibilities. That is where loose parts meet creativity.

Sources and Further Reading

Nicholson, Simon. “How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts.” Landscape Architecture, 1971. Nicholson’s original essay introduced the theory of loose parts and argued for environments containing variables people can manipulate and transform.

Yogman, Michael, et al. “The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children.” Pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics, 2018. The clinical report reviews evidence on play and children’s cognitive, language, social-emotional and self-regulatory development.

National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Resources on open-ended materials and play-based learning. NAEYC provides practical guidance on selecting and using materials that allow children to investigate and create rather than reproduce predetermined outcomes.