AFOLs with Kids: Tips For Building LEGO Together

Best of BrickNerd — Article originally published December 18, 2022.

Being an AFOL can be a big commitment—you have LEGO deals to be found, a collection to sort, LUGs to attend, and conventions to go to. But what happens when you are an AFOL with kids?

If you’re an adult collector of LEGO, sharing your hobby with young children can be a frightening experience. I have three young boys (2, 4, & 6) and their typically destructive tendencies are NOT compatible with my collection. Yet as an AFOL, I realize that I’m essentially playing with a toy (or a “highly sophisticated interlocking brick system” if you like to justify it that way) and toys are primarily meant for children.

Image via LEGO Builder App

I still want my kids to enjoy my hobby with me, but short of maintaining separate collections in different rooms of the house under lock and key, what are some of the best ways an AFOL can build together with kids? I’ve learned some tips the hard way about how to get creative with my kids—without pulling my hair out when playtime is almost over.

Preparing for Battle… Um, I Mean… Getting Ready to Build 

Playing with LEGO means something totally different to an AFOL than it does to kids, so the first thing I find helpful is to throw my LEGO jargon out the door and pretend I’m a kid again. That means rolling up my sleeves, getting down on the floor and building stuff—crooked towers, rainbow castles, figbarf armies and more. I have to put my phone down and enjoy the moment sharing an activity. The bigger epiphany I ever had about building with kids is that they don’t just want to just play LEGO—they want to play with you.

I’ve noticed that different kids play in different ways and you’ll need to figure out which kind of builder your child is and work around it. My oldest son only enjoys putting together the set from the instructions and then moving on pretty quickly after he completes the set. I try to cycle a few sets in and out so he always has something to build from the instructions. My middle child likes to ‘remix’ the instructions, putting the pieces wherever he wants—so I just let him go wild, even if it means we never actually finish a set. My youngest, well, we’re still working on not putting the pieces in his mouth, so he sticks to Duplo.

I’ve also learned that LEGO sets have age suggestions for a reason. Thrusting a complex set on a kid seems like it could be a fun challenge, but it can also test their patience and delayed gratification beyond their abilities. There is a reason why 4+ sets have bigger pieces and no stickers. Regardless of the child’s age, my recommendation is to start small. LEGO can be intimidating and unintuitive to little hands. As excited as you may be about a Fire Station, start with a fire vehicle first. If anything, it helps them build something they can play with instantly as the rest of the build progresses.

If your kids will let you, I find that sorting the pieces by color ahead of time is a great way to involve them in the building process, showing how effort now will pay off later when it is easier to build. Personally, my own little LEGO Masters are too impatient and just want to dive in. When I’m assisting them to build a set, they let me gather the pieces for the next step while they’re on the previous one. This fights boredom and helps them flow naturally from one step to the other and helps lengthen the total time they build.

Instructions for Fun

Speaking of building, I highly recommend the LEGO Builder app when you play LEGO with kids. Most new kid-oriented sets are included in its 3D building feature. When I build with my kids, I use this app to help them visualize the build as we go. First, the app will give you a zoomed-in picture of the next pieces needed, which is great when kids are still getting used to the many different LEGO pieces that exist. While you may know every mold variation of every piece that has ever existed, a kid discovering the difference between a 2x2 and a 2x3 brick can make them feel like an expert!

After tapping “next” in the app, it shows an animation of where the piece goes. This animation can even be scrubbed forward and backward and it can be a lot of fun to see the pieces fly through the air. I use a tablet for this because the screen is bigger than a phone and easier for my kids to navigate. Lastly, you can spin the model in any direction to get a better view of where a piece goes. This feature is great for new builders as well as anyone else for whom the instructions booklet isn’t enough (not to mention it may or may not be part of a nefarious plan by LEGO to go completely free of printed instructions).

A few years ago, one of my boys destroyed a built set for the first time. I watched as the Creator Expert Ferris Wheel tumbled to the ground and shattered. Another time, I had to disassemble half of another set because I had let one of my sons “help” put the set together and I didn’t realize he had done it wrong. The point is that kids make mistakes, and they should be allowed to make mistakes.

Abandoned Park by Kevin and Amy Bergstresser via Beyond the Brick

It’s helpful to establish early on how your kids want you to handle a situation where they make a mistake. Do they want me to correct them right away or let them figure it out? Discovering a mistake and then fixing it is another confidence-building tool to get them ready for more complicated sets. And I have to remind them that even I still make mistakes when building sets—and then it becomes a mystery to solve about where I used that extra piece, why that wall doesn’t connect, or how that clip is supposed to be rotated and why.

Speaking of mistakes… we need to talk about stickers. As an AFOL, I used to insist that I apply all the stickers. That way, they would all be perfectly aligned and if the pieces ever made it to my personal collection I wouldn’t have an aneurysm. But you know what? When I was laying on the ground playing LEGO with my kids, I noticed a crooked sticker doesn’t bother them as much. Their imaginations are so much more powerful, they barely even notice them. As hard as it might be to let go, let your kids do the stickers! Each time they do, they get a little bit better, it builds confidence, and now my kids are pros. (If you need some suggestions, here’s a guide from BrickNerd on how best to apply stickers.)

Learning from Your Kids

As a full-time dad, most of my time and energy go into my kids. For that reason, I mostly only build sets from instructions instead of designing and building MOCs. I didn’t realize that this preference was affecting my kids until my wife pointed out that our big bucket of bulk LEGO had mostly gone unused for a few months. When I ask my kids if they want to free build a spaceship or a house, they almost always say no. On my wife’s suggestion, I took out the loose pieces and just started building o my own. Without fail, within a few minutes, my kids were in the mix with me, and we were building together.

Similarly, I pretty much ignored the LEGO Dots line until my oldest asked for some for his birthday. We picked up the Creative Party Pack and the Bag Tags. Not only are these sets a really fun way to bring color and LEGO into the rest of your house, but the simplicity is Dots’ superpower. My kids create patterns, work on spelling, and the set even helped teach generosity as he ended up giving away the cupcakes as party favors to his friends.

My kids have really opened my eyes to what you can do with LEGO sets that I might have otherwise passed up. As you build a LEGO relationship with your kids as an AFOL, I’d suggest being open to new ideas about LEGO that come from their creative little minds—you may be surprised by what you learn.

How to Wrap Things Up

Congrats! You just built a LEGO set with a child–that’s no easy feat as an AFOL. But what happens when you’re done? Well, I like to point out how much effort my kids put into the creation and praise them for how far they’ve come in building LEGO. Unlike build-and-display AFOLs where their precious 18+ “Adults Welcome” sets are meant to sit on a shelf and be admired for years at a time, kids actually play with their toys. This means that often they destroy the sets after putting them together, leaving all their sets to commingle in one big bucket. That’s the beauty of LEGO though—a set can always be rebuilt.

Yes, pieces will get lost and stickers will come off, but all of that is okay! We’re here to play together and spark the imagination. If it bothers you to sacrifice a set to your children, you could rescue the set when they’re not looking, disassemble it, and save it for a rainy day. But be prepared because disassembled LEGO tends to inexplicable grow into piles of bulk. In general (especially for younger kids), you probably have too many pieces in your “bucket” as an AFOL for a kid to get the most use out of. That many pieces can be intimidating so I like to have a reasonable amount available at any one time.

Cleaning up after a play session can be overwhelming too, but think of it this way… you don’t even have to sort! All you have to do is pick it up into a bin, bag or container and the pieces are ready for next time. Playing on a blanket can make cleaning up even quicker. These buckets are a little pricey but they include a play mat that you can use as a chute to put all the pieces back when you are done.

It’s about time for us to wrap up things in this article too, so the last thing I want to mention is displaying LEGO. If you’re lucky enough to have display space or a specific room for your AFOL creations, you have to establish what your kids can look at vs. what they can touch. They’re not going to always follow the rules, but I find it helps if there is a clear consequence. For us, it is that the LEGO room is done for the day and they can try again tomorrow. Thankfully that hasn’t been implemented that often. I’m at the point where I can leave my older two kids in my office alone for small stretches of time with complete trust.

And, if they do knock something over, we like to say, “You can’t break LEGO, you just get to put it back together again” and this whole process starts again from the top. So hopefully this article has given you a few ideas about how AFOLs with kids can build and play LEGO together. But remember, the most important thing is to have fun!

As an AFOL, how do you share your hobby with the kids in your life? Let us know in the comments below.

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