Today's dolls can talk and walk and pee on their own (ew) and are hideously expensive! The Hot Wheels tracks my boys are playing with have complex links with motors that make the cars crash,fly,spin, AND blow bubbles...not to mention some of them change colors with hot/cold water! Baseball sets for toddlers will actually shoot the ball up so the kid can hit it. Books have been replaced with kid-size e-readers complete with sound and movies! My pretend cameras have been replaced with actual tiny digital cameras for kids! And now kids can start learning on their very own toddler laptops. RIDICULOUS!!!
I bought for M2's birthday a couple of the new Transformer robots-in-disguise from an online site. Granted, they were supposed to be for 5 year olds, but we've bought plenty of toys that were supposed to be for older kids and they've loved them. When I had Transformers growing up, they were big, made out of metal and only needed 3 or 4 maneuvers to change car to robot. The ones I bought were cheap plastic, small and required 15 "easy" steps to change. FIFTEEN. And it was the "easy" level!!! What freaking 5 year old is going to be able to move teeny parts in a 3 dimensional axis? After I broke the fourth part off Bumblebee I was ready to get the hammer and go Godzilla on the damn thing. The Transformers have suddenly decided they'd rather stay as cars since being robots targeted them to social discrimination and possible deportation to the dumpster.
To make matters worse, the toy companies have exploited every parent's psychotic need to provide educational stimulation for their child. DVDs like Your Baby Can Read and the de-bunked Baby Einstein Series, as well as video game products like Leapster and VTech promises an edge in your child's education - what parent WOULDN'T jump at the chance to give their kid every advantage to be head of the class? And all for the low, low price equivalent to your mortgage. An article published in babycenter.com featured a psychologist who found that kids get on average of 70 new toys a year (a low estimate in our household thanks to hubby!) but the kids who were the most creative and resourceful were the ones with the fewest toys. Having fewer toys encouraged kids to use their minds to entertain themselves, although I'm sure I'll never see a parent give their child only one toy to play with ("Here Timmy, play with this spoon until you're 16"). The book Freakonomics found that many of the things parents do to increase their child's success (from moving to a better neighborhood to exposing them to classical music) did absolutely NOTHING.
Hubby and I aren't buying the "educational" toys because we believe the boys learn more just by playing, whether at home with their damned complicated toys or with sticks at the park. Their vocabulary is advanced simply because we're constantly talking with them. You want your kids to be smart? Spend time with them and TEACH them while you love them. No video game that makes you spell is going to be as good as that. And while I'm swearing at the freaking Transformer robot-in-disguise that only someone with a PhD in engineering can play with, I convince myself that the boys are learning spatial abilities simply by seeing what NOT to do.
Stupid toys.
Amen. When I was a kid, my mother had a general rule about toy-buying, and she managed to stick to it most of the time: "no toys that need batteries or make their own noises." Her motivations seemed selfish to us kids at the time, but it's worth noting that the toys you best remember playing with are the Barbies and a soccer ball, and for me it was a ball, Legos and building plastic models. And mud/dirt/sand. Granted, toys like Barbie and Legos are also obscenely costly, but they don't do any of the work FOR the kids and they don't pressure the kids to use them the way they're 'supposed' to use them in order to gain some alleged educational benefit.
ReplyDeleteThe simpler toys don't insult our kids that way. Kids like 'em better because they show the kids that we trust our childrens' minds to come up with the most entertaining and important ingredient themselves: Life. Oh, and noise.