Great question. We, for example, don’t buy any toys ourselves except legos. But they come in through different channels: gifts, included with something else, birthday parties (am sure you are aware that now at any birthday party all kids get small gift). Most toys last for the few days: it’s a plastic contraption which is not that appealing to repeatedly play with. So after few years of this there is no choice but to throw it away by the bag-full.
For my younger daughter, we started requesting restaurant gift cards to be donated. We gave them to the local Ronald McDonald house because she had a friend who was away from home, undergoing treatment at a special hospital in Minnesota. Her friend's parents had stayed in the Ronald McDonald house local to that hospital.
I'll admit that the circumstances were quite special but it seemed like a relief from the burden of all those toys we would have had instead.
