Legos are awesome. Even The Lego Movie was awesome. The video games are even fun. “Everything is awesome.”

Like most kids, my kid loved Legos. He was into Star Wars and Lego made a mint off of him by creating Star Wars themed Lego sets. Every birthday and Christmas he would score a few new sets. He’d eagerly use any money or gift cards he got on even more sets.

His room was bulging with X-wings, Y-wings, two Millennium Falcons, Jabba’s pleasure barge, a drone transport, an AT-AT walker, etc. and a ton of mini-figures, I mean a ton. Admittedly, some of them are pretty impressive when put together.

The problem is, once assembled, my kid never liked taking them apart. In his defense, he did accomplish some pretty amazing construction projects for a seven year-old kid. One of the Millennium Falcons took months of him sitting on the floor meticulously following two telephone-book sized instruction brochures. So, his hesitation to tear it apart is understandable, but he had that attitude with set.

Essentially, in his mind, the kits were models without the glue. Ne’er to be touched again.

On the other hand, as a child, I spent hours and hours manipulating the plastic blocks. Rarely, were there instructions on how to build anything. There were some pictures of things you could build but mostly it was a box full of red and white pieces with different shapes. 4x2s, 2x2s, 1x2s. It was up to me to decide what I wanted to spend the afternoon building.

And I spent hours, creating, houses, ships, planes, hover cars, robots whatever my mind could come up with. Due to the limited shape choices, they were all like 8 bit blocky things. When I got a Lego kit with gears and wheels, man I was in heaven.

Legos for this generation are better for… uh … following instructions and fine motor skills. Legos from my generation were better for imagination and creativity. Okay, I try to stay away from this phrase, but “Things were better when I was a kid.”