What a remote island taught me about Aspen playrooms

Working with children in Aspen, I am no stranger to epic playrooms. Children here are surrounded by educational toys, motorized cars, iPads, and gear for every mountain sport imaginable.

But while sitting on a solo surf trip in the Mentawai Islands—a remote archipelago off the coast of Sumatra—I began thinking about what our children might lose by having so much.

At the place where I am staying, I met a local surfer named Zedri, who grew up on Siberut, the largest island in the Mentawai chain. It is a place of rainforests and traditional villages reached by a long ferry ride. His father was a fisherman, and his mother taught at the local elementary school.

During Zedri’s childhood, there were no toy stores, Amazon Prime deliveries, or dedicated playrooms. If you wanted a toy, you had to imagine it first—and then build it yourself.

No Toys? No Problem.

Zedri told me that some of his favorite childhood memories involved making toys from natural materials and repurposed objects found around the island.

One of his friends’ fathers was known throughout the village as the neighborhood’s “master toy builder.” After school, the children would gather at his house and ask what they needed for their next project. If they were building a toy car, he would send them out to find the materials themselves.

“Go get the wheels,” he would tell them.

The children would search for discarded rubber flip-flops and carve circles from the thick soles to use as tires.

When they wanted to make figurines, they hiked into the hills to collect mountain clay, known as tanah liat. They shaped it by hand and left their creations to dry in the sun.

They also made kites, called layang-layang in Indonesian. They collected bamboo from the jungle to build the frames. Instead of using store-bought glue, they extracted starch from sago palms and mixed it with water to create a natural paste.

What struck me was not only their ingenuity, but also their collaboration. They gathered materials, solved problems, and transformed ordinary objects into something they could enjoy together.

Ten Kids, One Broken Board

There is a strange irony in growing up surrounded by some of the best waves in the world while having no surfboard.

When Zedri was eight, one of his friends’ fathers found a broken surfboard floating in the ocean while fishing. Zedri and about ten of his friends shared that single board, paddling out together and waiting patiently for their turns to catch a wave.

Eventually, Zedri outgrew it. With no other board available, he stopped surfing for years.

He found his way back to the ocean after he began working at the place where I am staying. A visiting Australian surfer noticed Zedri’s love for the water and, before flying home, gave him his surfboard.

“Next time I come, we will surf together,” he promised.

Today, Zedri is an incredible local surfer.

Why Less Is More

What can an eight-year-old growing up on a remote Indonesian island teach those of us raising and caring for children in Aspen?

Zedri’s childhood, shaped by simplicity and resourcefulness, revealed a blind spot in our culture of abundance.

When we give children a prepackaged toy for every desire or buy the best equipment as soon as they show interest in a hobby, we may take away opportunities for them to create, improvise, and solve problems.

We can deprive them of the boredom that inspires invention, the frustration that builds problem-solving skills, and the anticipation that makes something feel valuable.

For Zedri and his friends, the joy was not simply in owning a toy. It was in imagining it, finding the materials, building it together, and finally getting to use it.

They learned patience while waiting for a shared surfboard. They learned resourcefulness by turning flip-flops into wheels, clay into figurines, and palm starch into glue. They learned that a broken object could still hold value—and that enjoyment did not require everyone to own one of their own.

We do not need to empty Aspen’s playrooms or move our children to a jungle island. But we can make more room for simplicity and less instant gratification.

We can let children experience boredom instead of immediately handing them a screen or a new toy. We can encourage them to share, wait their turn, build with what they have, and repair things instead of replacing them.

Sometimes, the most valuable thing we can give a child is the space to figure out what to do when they have nothing at all.