A stick was the only sword needed to battle the dragon of a willow tree in the backyard of childhood.

A bath towel knotted around the neck served as a cape.

An urn-shaped, Styrofoam cooler made a fine helmet.

If available, a frayed square of cardboard from an appliance box protected one as a shield.

A breeze shook the mighty green scales of the willow-tree dragon. Rustling leaves became the sound of fire-breathing exhalations as the stick sword hewed mightily at the corded trunk of the dragon.

Such battles were part of my childhood days.

Valiant contests waged between warrior and dragon in the spectacular realm of imagination. Valiant contests between a boy and a tree in the backyard of my childhood home.

As a child, I had plenty of toys, including a couple of toy swords. If a dragon arose from the tree in your backyard, though, who wasted time running inside for the toy swords when a fallen branch served the same purpose.

Though the toy box was full in my childhood, I have often marveled at the toys available for kids now.

Truthfully, watching kids play with an assortment of superhero action figures, zapping critters on video games, buzzing around with remote-control glee, I have felt twinges of jealousy that such things weren’t around in my childhood.

I made up for it by playing with my sons’ toys under the age-old justification of, “Hey, I’m just spending time with the boys.”

Yet, simultaneously, I watched my sons and other youngsters play and worry that perhaps there are too many toys available. Too many types of toys.

Why play with a stick when the local retail store has shelves full of plastic, three-foot swords, cast in true colors, which make sounds when you slash them through the air or land them upon a target?

Why read a comic book or a book when a video game allows a child to skip a plot and go straight for the action?

I fear that children may be losing some of the cognitive cogs in all of these toys.

I fear we may be supplementing their imaginations by giving them every toy they desire.

I fear we may be creating an odd status within the hierarchy of youngsters — who wants to be seen with a stick when all the other kids have one of those noisy, three-foot, plastic swords?

Growing up, many of my childhood friends read comic books. In comics, the mind has to fast-forward the action from panel to panel. Ask some adults today if they remember reading comics, and they don’t recall a still drawing of Superman. They remember Superman flying more vividly than anything created by a Hollywood special-effects studio because the imagination helped him fly from page to page.

Many kids haven’t had to connect these narrative dots because they are connected for them by cartoons, movies and video games.

So, my jealousy has turned into thankfulness that all of these toys weren’t around when I was a kid and worry that they are all around, everywhere, now that I have kids.

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times.