Fatherly Fears Stoke the Imagination : Children: Toys that do it all leave little room for a child to explore the byways of the mind.

Dylan plays with his toys, and I fear for his imagination. He stares at Power Rangers, and I fear again. Or he gazes at 3-D picture books, and I wonder: What of his own creative fantasy life? Can it survive the charge of all the packaged fantasies that cram his consciousness? I’m a first-time, later-in-years-time and maybe a last-time parent. And he’s not yet 2. So, yes, I worry.

This fear for Dylan Lee’s imagination all started a few months ago when one of my father-friends, Joe, kindly offered me a small, plain, wooden truck to give to my son. “Gabriel has grown out of it,” he said, “and besides, children no longer seem to appreciate simple wooden toys. Not enough spark and sound, you know.” I really didn’t know; the thought never crossed my mind. I am, after all, a first-timer.

Here is the crux: Fancy toys, fictional TV characters and popup, sound-off books, they all seem to do everything. What, if anything, is left to Dylan’s imagination? True, in the parental scheme of things this is not one of those life or death, dry or wet, day or night Penelope Leach predicaments. There wasn’t even an index entry for my fears in the revised edition of “Your Baby & Child.”

Once upon a time, or so I recall, children played with hats, sticks and other things made of wood or whatever. Like little gods, they breathed imaginative life into these inanimate things. The result was a queen’s crown, a knight’s lance or a wizard’s wand. By and large, the script wasn’t written, the picture wasn’t drawn and the ending wasn’t in Technicolor. Oh, there were books, but their ordinary black print left much to the imagination.

Obviously, small children still wear crowns and wave lances and wands. Yet I wonder if their ability, their incentive to do so is being diminished. Television tends to “burn out the tender wiring of a child’s imagination because [it allows] no reworking.” So says art critic Robert Hughes. I fear he may be right, at least up to a very significant point. So many of today’s toys, picture books and TV shows encourage children to be passive and to value the eye over the mind’s eye. With each new technological step, the creative imaginative process is in greater peril.

What to do? I’m not really sure. I play with Dylan. I go to the zoo with him. I read to him. And certainly, I monitor his TV time. Still, deep down in my paternal gut I fear that whatever I do, the “technos” will win out. But maybe, before it’s too late, I can begin to explain to him that there is more to imagination than computer-generated vistas. Maybe, too, I can share the magical joy of a plain rhyme with him, and maybe then he will have “a dream of mind”--the kind imaginative poets tell tales about.

No simple task. It takes time, time with them and with their wooden trucks and ducks. Here, perchance, lurks part of the answer to our postmodern riddle. After all, the more automated and spectacular visions we steer their way, the less time we need to spend with them. We relax. They gaze. It is a curious exchange; we trade their imaginations for our leisure.

If there is any moral here, it may be this: Share more time. Time sharers, teach your children well. Teach them that the thrill is in the chase, in chasing wooden toy trucks down heretofore unimagined highways and byways and waterways and skyways.

Little Dylan plays with his wooden truck; he still likes it. My fatherly eyes track him, and during these precious moments-in-a-life I try to imagine his tomorrow. More important, I try to imagine him imagining it.