I think one of the things I worry about is the amount of time kids now spend playing on a screen, computer games, wii, x-box and even mobile phone games. Some of my best moments of play were with the most unstructured materials, such as bits of palings for guns, cardboard boxes for cars, houses and boats and lids of tins for all sorts of things. I was not so unusual as one of the common stories is of parents buying their kid a large �something� and the kid spending more time playing with the box it came in!
This unstructured imaginative play is a really important thing I feel and various research seems to support this belief. Parents now seem to feel the need to organise kid�s lives to be �learning,or productive� every second of the day. Give me a cardboard box any day!