Exciting Childhood Hobbies

Raising the Next Generation of Antique Collectors

 

 

The Holiday Season is the perfect time to engage your child in an exciting hobby. Hobbies offer learning experiences that are fun, encourages your child's creativity, promotes problem solving, and decision making skills.


Children are natural collectors. 
A leisurely walk often results in a varied collection of weeds, pebbles, leaves, twigs, and bits of gum wrappers that sparkle in the sunlight, being gathered up.  And what mother has not shrieked with delight when her child returns from a walk in the woods with a critter found wiggling from under a rock!

                                            

  
A family day at the beach can yield buckets of collectible delights.  Seashells of varying shapes and colors, driftwood, and seaweed washed ashore, even the very sand of the beach if held tightly in tiny hands to show what treasures have been found.  If you are really lucky you may find a message in a bottle tossed into the ocean years before by an unknown friend.

 

Childhood Collecting in the 1900s

In the 1900s boys frequently collected buttons, books, stamps, pictures, pens and pencils, stones, marbles, railroad timetables, bats and balls, neckties, scarf-pins, tickets, tops, rulers, and shoe-laces.  Girls collected dolls, ribbons, shells and spoons  handkerchiefs, cups and saucers, calling cards and lace and sewing thimbles.

 

Free Choice Generation of Collectors

 

 

 

In today's world boys can collect dolls and girls can collect trains.  This free-choice collecting allows our children to experience a variety in collecting, handling, arranging and classifying their collected items.  When engaging in their collections children are animating and empathizing in make-believe adventures that encourages creativity, logical thought, and developing social relationships with peers.

 

 

 

When purchasing gifts for your child this holiday season remember- you may be sparking an interest that leads to the start of a hobby for your child. We have all heard or read stories of famous personalities who  relied professionally on their leisure collections for inspiration, knowledge, and skills.  Here are just a few examples.

 

• Notable scientist Charles Darwin became interested in studying nature when as a child he collected bugs. 

 

• Physics Nobel Prize winner, David Lee, collected bugs, railway time tables, and meteorological charts

• Acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov,  Lolita and many more books, collected butterflies

 

Encouraging Your Young Collector 

Visit museums, art galleries, zoos, living history sites 

 

Let your child accompany you on shopping trips, even better if they include antique shops

 

Read, watch, talk about books, videos, and movies you watch together as a family

 

Share your childhood experiences with collecting, better still if you have your collection to show your child

 

Start a collection  with your child, it can be of action figures, books, cards, anything your child finds interesting and is age appropriate 

 

 

Collections do not need to be large.  There is a saying among antique dealers that

" if you have two of something you have the start of a collection"  

 

 

 

 

 

Till next time, stay well, stay happy

 

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