Joe's toys are staging a takeover. It's going to be Hitchcock's The Birds all over again. I see them conspiring and plotting and then looking bland and innocent if I pay too much attention. We're horribly outnumbered.

We have far too many toys, the vast majority of them gifts or hand-me-downs – some wholesome, like large wooden bricks and a railway track from Joe's cousin, but many of them hideous and noisy beyond belief.

I've noticed recently that when Joe's friends come round they don't want to play with him, they just want to disappear into toy heaven, especially those who have an ascetic collection of toys at home.

It's also remarkable how they rove – they fiddle with the people and extraordinary detail on the Playmobil toys (like loo roll holders that actually turn round) – but don't actually play with them.

Poor Joe finds himself at a loose end and looks to the adults for company. But that's not the deal – you get little friends round so the grown-ups can chat in peace.

So now I've started to put toys away when kids come to visit – it sounds a bit draconian, but it works.

One school of thought suggests the more toys you have, the less you play.  Of course, some children find it easier to play alone than others, and Joe is one to seek out company.

But I'm convinced our abundance of toys was paralysing for him.

Recently – probably just imitating me – Joe has said he has too many toys, so we've consigned some to the loft. First to go was a huge fire engine that you operate with a series of buttons, including extending its ladder. It beeped and roared and was unbelievably exciting at first, but once you'd done it all a few times there was nowhere much to go with it – no room left for the imagination.

What are toys for, after all? Getting kids out from under your feet so that you can attend to domestic chores that so fill your heart with joy...

But, other than that, they're the props in the child's endless imagination and invention, things and people that evolve and morph in seconds from digger to fairy to tree.

So it's no good having a huge fire engine that you can't even pick up, as everyone knows that fire engines fly.

When Joe was three, we were in a really wild place in central Asia beside a lake on a barren hillside dotted with livestock 11,000ft up.

Our host, a woman who had to work hard just to make ends meet, told us how all the kids had their little jobs. We asked what the two-year-old did. Very seriously, she said: "Her job is to play. She plays."

There wasn't a toy in sight, but the little girl played perfectly happily with whatever was there.

You can get some magical toys, but mostly, we surround our kids with tat – plastic, garish stuff that squeaks, simpers and requires no input.

They're not so much toys as little shows, and mesmerised kids hop from show to show, burying their instinctive inquisitiveness and inventiveness in a mound of branded gizmos.

Research shows how this passivity can undermine children who, by nature, need to be active and experimenting with how they can affect and control their world. 

So when it comes to toys, unlike chocolate, perhaps less is more.