You might have seen a recent story in Fairfax media about expensive cubby houses becoming a new status symbol for parents. These can cost around $900 for a basic model from Bunnings, to well over $2000 for fancier versions. CHOICE is interested to hear your thoughts on this subject.
Have you bought a pre-fabricated cubby house for your kids (or grandkids), or had one installed? Or perhaps you took the old-fashioned route and made the cubby house yourself. Whichever way you went about it, were you happy with the result? Did you find any quality or safety problems? And how much is too much to spend on a cubby house for the kids?
This is a bit of a hijack although I did get a custom built 25 years ago. It was a cubby house atop a sandbox, an adjoining slide, and swing set all joined by an aerial walkway. It was $$$$, excellent quality and workmanship, the children were not nearly as enamoured with it as I, but it was in keeping with the norms of my neighbourhood in the USA.
Looking back and being older and wiser and in a better place to raise a family, as the affluent (or pretenders) install their own play houses, pools, and everything else, their children no longer go to community pools and playgrounds. It evolves into less social interaction with the wide variety of people in a community, and it reinforces an “it is mine” value system. Sports/clubs are mostly like-minded individuals so do not contribute to socialisation in the same way.
I don’t think my comment would stop a single person from going that route of continuing to isolate from the community with modern life what it is. It is certainly not a prevalent problem in most of Australia yet, but we follow the US more often than not, albeit trailing by years.
Thanks @PhilT. That’s an interesting and valid point; there’s an important social difference between a cubby house at home for personal use, and a communal cubby or club house such as kids might have built back in the day.
i’m waiting for the kids to be old enough to help build one - that way they’ll have some ownership in it and (hopefully) won’t be treated like their friends bunnings type which lasted a few days before the next novelty came along.
as an old fart we used to build our own as kids, but then again, i don’t see modern parents trusting their children with hammer and nails and bits of string
