The toy-free kindergarten is not a new idea in Germany. It grew out of an addiction study group in the Bavarian district of Weilheim-Schongau that started meeting in the 1980s. The group included people who had worked directly with adult addicts and determined that, for many, habit-forming behavior had roots in childhood. To prevent these potential seeds of addiction from ever being planted, the researchers ultimately decided to create a project for kitas and kindergartens, which in Germany typically serve children ages 3 to 6, and remove the things children sometimes use to distract themselves from their negative feelings: toys.

The rules of the toy-free kindergarten are simple: For a period of three months, all the toys are removed, leaving only furniture and things like blankets and pillows. The teachers meet with the children and the parents before the toy-free time starts so they know what to expect, but once the project begins the teachers observe, rather than direct, the children’s play. They let the children learn how to deal with their own boredom and frustration.

A kindergarten in the Bavarian city of Penzberg was the first to try out a toy-free time in 1992. Aktion Jugendschutz published information about the project shortly thereafter, and the project quickly spread. Today, toy-free projects can be found in hundreds of kindergartens throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Other countries have also shown interest. In an article marking the project’s 25th anniversary, the Mercur newspaper reported that the Penzberg kindergarten had received calls from interested groups as far away as China.

The project has not, however, made much headway in the U.S. In the 1990s, while toy-free time was gaining momentum in Germany, American drug abuse-prevention programs were still dominated by the “just say no” message first introduced by Nancy Reagan in 1986. One of the most popular programs was Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E., which brings police officers into schools to educate students on the dangers of drugs. Yet, despite strong backing and widespread implementation, D.A.R.E. has produced no measurable impact on drug use. “There’s been a tremendous amount of research done on D.A.R.E. None of it has found positive effects, and some of it has found deleterious effects,” said Elizabeth Robertson, the professor and associate dean of the College of Human Environmental Sciences at the University of Alabama.

Robertson, who authored an early-childhood substance-abuse prevention guide for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), said that most “information-only” programs do not work. “Explaining, for example, what drugs do to the body or the brain, gives people information but it doesn’t deter them,” she said. “In fact, a lot of children who are given that kind of information get more interested in drugs.”