What toys were you not allowed to play with as a kid?

How can you not be allowed to play with toy? A toy is for playing with. No, my parents never bought me something I could not touch or play with.

Water pistols ._.

@JLeslie For me it was “certain” Barbies. A holiday one or a Ltd Ed one. Got the picture? Roo said in that thread it was a sweater, and LaChica had a doll.

Hmmm. So a doll is a toy? Still, I was allowed to play with everything.

Knives, bb guns, and other WMD.

I was given a set of old fire trucks that were my dads when he was young. So from about 1950. They were all metal and they actually had a little pump so you could spray water. I loved them but I was never really allowed to play with them. I could inspect them if someone was around.

I’m not sure what happened to them.

No one bought me anything I couldn’t play with. My grandmother did buy my sister a collectible doll series, I don’t know if she was specifically not allowed to play with them, or just chose not to. My parents also bought her a Linda Carter Wonder Woman doll, right before Linda Carter sued the makers and it was replaced with a non-Linda Carter version. They never gave it to her, went out and bought the new one and put the Linda Carter one on a shelf in its box. Wonder what happened to it?

Once someone buys something for you or gives something to you to keep, it’s yours. Otherwise they’re just letting you borrow it whether they want to admit it or not.

And no, I don’t believe anything like that ever happened. My parents would say stuff like “if you break it, we’re not getting another one”, but if they truly gave me something, it was mine.

A porcelain doll that my parents gave me for Christmas. She was worth some coin at the time, too, and had to sit on a self in my bedroom, not to be touched (other than a light dusting). I still have her.

The meat cleaver in the kitchen.

I don’t remember any toys we weren’t allowed to play with. We had plenty of toy guns, and played with those a lot. This was back before toy guns were a big no-no. And none of us grew up to be psycho killers or criminals.

The only thing I clearly remember as forbidden was candy cigarettes. My mom would go nuts if she caught us with those! We used to walk down to the local drugstore and buy candy, and if we got the cigarettes we had to eat them all before we got home so we wouldn’t get caught. It took some of the fun out of it, because when you’re tying to scarf them down you can’t stand around pretending to smoke. And it’s not like they really tasted good.

My Dad’s guns. Some parents are just so mean.

Other peoples’, unless I had permission.

All the toys I had were fair game. I wasn’t allowed to play with my dad’s toys, though, which mostly had sharp edges for cutting shrubs or sawing wood.

Water guns and Ouija boards

Toy guns.

My mom rationalized letting me play with Barbie dolls by getting me multicultural ones, otherwise they would have been banned.

I never had a video game system growing up. I recently got my first one and the girl who sold it to me was really excited for me. Anyway… My mom didn’t want to get me Barbie but I begged for one because I saw a girl playing with one on a plane.

Then my friend’s brother pulled her head off and my mom stuck her head down low and she forever had a squat little neck.

I guess everyone who read the thread already knows mine, but to clarify, my parents didn’t give me the doll, my great aunt did, and I think they really only stopped letting me play with it because she got really upset that the foot was broken.

@gussnarp Lurve for the pun “wonder” what happened to it. nice.

I don’t think you’re talking about toys.

where do I start? video games until about 8 or 9, guns, nerf guns, water guns, star trek collectibles.

I don’t smoke, but enjoyed those candy cigarettes when I was little…I even enjoyed the taste of them….that brought back some memories….I didn’t have any restrictions regarding toys, but just had trouble with balloons….I always had a problem with the surprise of when it would pop and the noise….I would be holding my ears…the same goes for fireworks, big drums, back firing antique cars and guns in parades…thunder, I am somewhat over it ,but will still sometimes hold my ears..its really embarrassing for my family

Guns and other weapons.

A TV, but that’s not really something you play “with”. There just wasn’t one in the house.

I also had/have several collectible items (Christmas Barbies etc) that were to be looked at, not played with.

(I grew out of Barbies at a really young age and moved onto books rather quickly; there were no off-limit books in the house (just uninteresting ones).)

@evegrimm – We didn’t have a TV for the longest time, either. Once we got one, we got to watch it one hour a day, and two hours on weekends.

People seem to be answering an additional question of what toys you weren’t allowed to have in the first place. I remember briefly mentioning a video game console and I remember my mom saying “oh, you don’t need that” and I kind of lost interest in it. My mom did a good job of keeping us uninterested in video games…haha. It wasn’t until my brother got a PS 2 that we even had 1 game console. My brother now has an Xbox 360 and we have a Wii in the family room. I’m still not too into video games. All I own is a Nintendo DS. Other than that, I don’t think there was anything I was interested in that I wasn’t allowed to have; I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to get a toy gun, but I never wanted one. I was more into innocent toys like board games, Lite Brite, K’nex, Legos, Hot Wheels, EasyBake ovens, electronics kits, and stuffed animals. :)

@evegrimm: I wasn’t allowed to read the books with explicit sex scenes in them. Considering my house has more books than some libraries smallish ones, but still there were a few books that were pretty damned explicit. I remember I had picked up Friday by Heinlein and had gotten maybe 50 pages or so into it and my mom came in and took it away from me and said I wasn’t allowed to read it. She intercepted during a rape scene in the book that hadn’t been bothering me I was too young to get the whole sex thing, 8 or so so I didn’t get why I couldn’t read it. An amusing irony is that it is the only Heinlein I remember liking.

I also wasn’t allowed to read Clan of the Cave Bear until I was in high school. my mom calls it cave porn. Now I know why.

@DominicX You just rattled of my favorite toys minus the Easy Bake Oven :)

@J0E

haha…cool. Too bad that after a few years I became embarrassed of having a “girls’ toy” and I got rid of the EasyBake oven. I regret that…but if they wouldn’t make it so pink! Boys can enjoy baking things too; it shouldn’t just be for girls.

Barbie

@KatawaGrey – In my parents’ house books were shelved successively higher the more adult they were. My parents figured that if I was smart enough to figure out how to get all the way up to the top shelf, I was smart enough to read them and ask questions about what I didn’t understand. By the time I was 9 I had figured out how to get up to the top, and I proceeded to read all sorts of stuff, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Lolita.

I decided that I preferred the books on the next shelf down, which were a lot of Lord Peter Wimsey novels, Nero Wolfe mysteries, assorted science fiction and histories of World War II.

@KatawaGrey: That’s a shame! I didn’t have any off-limits books, but I remember I wasn’t allowed to watch “The Graduate” when I was about…oh 13, and when I found out we had a movie I wasn’t supposed to watch, that was the first thing I did when I was left home alone. It was kind of thrilling, but on the whole I didn’t think it was that big of a deal in the end. Haha.

Tanks and heavy artillery. My parents didn’t believe in war toys.

My wife and I took it a step further. No toy guns for our kids. Yet my son was very creative solving the problem. He found a piece of wood and declared: this is my gun. He looked so joyful and proud.

@J0E I agree with you, lots of these items don’t fit my definition of toys.

mortal combat….
all of my friends had so much fun playing it together while I played mario alone…. lol