Give it away: toy swaps teach Hong Kong kids valuable lessons

The problem is a familiar one in affluent consumer societies: winding up with too much stuff. With Irene Wong Wing-yee, it was a flat overflowing with her children's toys. For the past couple of years, it seemed as though there wasn't a single corner of their home where she wasn't tripping over their playthings.

"I seldom splurge on toys, but inevitably there are learning aids that we want to buy as the boys reach different stages of development," says Wong, a former teacher who writes a blog called My Delicious Wife.

"When they were babies, my boys loved musical toys, then walkers came in handy after they started learning to totter about, but they would become useless once they grow older."

Although her younger son, Damien, could take over some items that his older brother, three-year-old Boris, had outgrown, they had an ever-expanding toy collection as friends and family constantly showered them with gifts. What's more, they often wound up with duplications: the boys had building blocks of various designs and several xylophones.

So when Wong learned about an upcoming campaign to collect unwanted playthings for a community toy bank, she signed up immediately. How to dispose of the unwanted toys was becoming a headache.

The drive was being organised jointly by ohmykids, a family-oriented social enterprise, and storage service AirBox to benefit the YMCA's toy bank in Tung Chung.

Wong is glad the chore of transporting the surplus toys from her home (some of which were quite bulky) to the toy bank in Tung Chung is being undertaken by the storage service. More importantly, it helped her older son to learn to share.