But to say "toys are a scam" is to blame the manufacturers and sellers of toys. They're out to trick parents into buying things that are not needed and might be actively bad. But this puts the blame/"blame" with the parents:
Suzanne Gaskins, a cultural developmental psychologist, says it’s only in the past 50 years that we’ve started accumulating piles of toys. As she compared families in America with those in other societies, a couple of observations stood out. One is that our kids are less engaged in the adult world — regularly helping prepare food, say, or care for a household — and more focused on the kid-centric universe we’ve constructed to “maximize their development.”
“The first goal for American parents is to let their kids be happy,” Gaskins says. “And not just happy in a contented sense, but happy in an active, almost hysterically happy sense.”
For Mayan parents, by contrast, the “primary goal is that the kid is even-keeled — not particularly happy, not particularly sad.”
Hysterically happy — that's something that can only persist for a moment, perhaps on Christmas morning. But one must revert to feeling normal. The keel will even. Imagine if your kids stayed Christmas-happy for months — gaga over new toys for days on end. You wouldn't think, great, they are maximizing their development.
Posts
54 comments:
At the time Cortez conquered Mexico, the natives regularly engaged in child sacrifice; both the Aztecs and Mayans. Cortez and the Spanish were appalled. Bet those kids all lived in fear. Thankfully, the Spanish won and brought civilization to Mexico. And maybe some toys.
BTW, WaPo knows scams as it pushes the CAGW scam.
"...my daughter spent weeks yearning for a doll she’d seen at Target."
There's your mistake.
And after enjoying the doll for 20 minutes, the girl wants to give her gently used toy to a charity. Boy, journalists search for anything to complain about in an article.
My 8 year old asked for walkie talkies for Christmas. Earlier this week, my 8, 10, and 13 yeah old were gone after school until dinner with them all around the neighborhood. It was great. My kids only get gifts on their birthday and on Christmas. Seems like it helps to not have too many..
Cultural developmental psychologists aren’t interested in observations outside their lane are they? By their own reports it is reasonable to observe other cultures don’t have piles of toys because they are per capita poorer, have no disposable income and must rely on their children for contribution of labor.
…but if you want to see deliriously happy toss a soccer ball into a crowd of these kids and watch some magic…
The box that large toys come in is entertaining for months.
The main function of a child's toy is to teach about adult skills and needs. This includes pots and pans (endlessly entertaining to kids), tools and machines, old computers, and dolls (i.e., illustrate types of work, and/or motherhood as future mommies). The cost of sharing your stuff with kids is $0.00, but we live in a consumer economy where people pay billions for greeting cards and holiday cards too.
Adult 'toys' are hobbies, and an interactive learning and usage process, or an interactive collection.
Also, gifts are valued less by those who receive them than those who give them. Instant 30% depreciation, or a full loss when donated to a thrift store.
Suzanne Gaskin sounds a little hysterical herself.
Just look at the success of the Mayan culture today.
Hedonic adaptation.
Maybe it's just the ones they choose to quote, but why do psychologists always sound so out of touch with how actual people live? Specifically, such broad sweeping statements like that ridiculous "hysterically happy" one? Do any of you actually think that's true for a substantial portion of the population? Parents in my experience are interested primarily in safety, then the other normal caretaker concerns with happiness being the normal childhood state of being.
Has someone repealed Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
Exactly! Does this alleged doctor really believe supplying toys would create happiness in and of themselves? Has she never seen an '70s or '80s sitcom plot involving this very subject?
I get the impression Gaskin has never experienced nor understood this. I still hoard "good" boxes and I haven't built a fort in decades!
++ my first out-loud chuckle of the day!
That little voice in my head just said "it depends on what you are developing." It's like waiting for a photo in the developer tank to show its image (there's a 20th century thought, eh?).
You may not like what you see in the end. Pay attention.
What the hell is wrong with these kids? When we were kids, once you got bored with the toy, the next step was to figure out how to take it apart, or smash it. (especially if your brother wanted it), and then play war games with the disfigured figures and machines.
Looking back, the images on the box that the toy came in was the greatest source of wonderment, the bridge between fantasy and the reality inside.
The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls are worthwhile gifts for younger kids. If nothing else, it will implant the idea that the limits imposed upon them by parents teachers neighborhood scolds and other control freaks are imaginary. And after that, the Merck Catalog and a gift card, for some real fun!
That was truly the experience at our house. The four year old made a fort out of a large appliance cardboard box, and the kids played in it for hours. The expensive "educational" toys, unused on the side.
Birches said...
“My 8 year old asked for walkie talkies for Christmas. Earlier this week, my 8, 10, and 13 yeah old were gone after school until dinner with them all around the neighborhood. It was great. My kids only get gifts on their birthday and on Christmas. Seems like it helps to not have too many.”
Reading your post brought back memories of the 70s, which is when I was the age your three kids are.
That describes my childhood and childhood expectations to a T.
Mike (MJB Wolf)
“I get the impression Gaskin has never experienced nor understood this. I still hoard "good" boxes and I haven't built a fort in decades!”
Fort MJB Wolf is a really cool name.
If you want to make it realistic, though, you would have to play at getting building permits and doing environmental impact statements first.
I feel lucky and blessed that I started receiving "adult" and educational toys like firearms, mini-bikes, legos and computers from a young age. I'll be doing the same thing with my boys but they're still a bit too young.
Legos especially. I cannot emphasize the value of constructive toys like that. My kids love them and I love that they love legos.
“And not just happy in a contented sense, but happy in an active, almost hysterically happy sense.”
Why does that statement remind me of Elmer Gantry?
We used to play a game with legos. (there were lots of them). We would make cars. Each car had a flat block with some cylinders on it, which was the "engine." We would construct the cars around the engine, and then smash them into each other. If your engine got damaged you were out. Last one with an intact engine was the winner. It got very sophisticated; we would use wooden blocks to pound the pieces together more firmly. Great fun!
I'm not sure I ever went shopping with my Mom so that I'd see toys at a store. But I grew up when most stores didn't show toys, except for the few weeks before Christmas.
Or blow it up with firecrackers.
I'm too old for Legos maybe we were too poor, I don't know when they became available). But Tinker Toys! YES! I spent hours building with them.
Also, I still recall the joy I found when Dad had a 2x12 left over from some project of his. It was my aircraft carrier. It was the ramp that my toy truck rolled down. It was...
Toys provide a training ground for the adult experience. Also a gay moment to enjoy childish innocence. Other cultures (e.g. Aztec, Chinese communist, German socialist, liberal democracy) practice human rites in protracted indulgence of wicked solutions in juvenile delinquency with hope of social, clinical, criminal, political, and climate progress, shared responsibility, and therapeutic escapism.
More advice from experts. Hard pass.How about this? Golden rule. MYOB. 10 commandments. All things in moderation. Time tested, historically confirmed.
A female child who abuses her doll, a male child who abuses a stuffed animal, are signals of a person who is prone to entertain abortive ideation and other wicked form of adult juvenile delinquency that modern psychiatrists will joyfully bray in a catastrophic anthropogenic climate.
Re: abortive ideation. It's better for mom and dad to detect and correct this queer orientation earlier rather than later when there are potentially diverse human lives at stake.
By comparison to the United States and its lavish bestowing of gifts on its children, the rest of the world practices variations of "Festivus," the airing of grievances. I dunno. I like our hysterically happy kids that somehow manage to survive our excesses of love for them and continue to maintain the greatest country in the world.
For Mayan parents, by contrast, the “primary goal is that the kid is even-keeled — not particularly happy, not particularly sad.”
Should we be taking advice from the people who put wheels on their children's toys but couldn't find any other uses for the wheel?
It's a shame people don't know the difference between happiness as a feeling an as a quality of life. Aristotle calls happiness an action, action in accord with virtue.
Is it still like that, though? How much "playtime" do kids really get now? They aren't outside playing with them. Are they playing with them inside? Get them phones and laptops and they don't want anything else. They'll have other problems, but lots of toys isn't one of them.
.
.
.
Sorry. When I wrote this, I forgot about my sister's kids and their 10,000 Lego models.
Gaskins is toying with us. Read Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga.
"The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys."
Toyland, Toyland, little girl and boy land. We just had a zillion dollar movie about Barbie - a doll. But y'know no one cares about Toys. My impression is that "Toys and Dolls" have become much less important for kids. Video games are more their style.
‘For Mayan parents, by contrast, the “primary goal is that the kid is even-keeled — not particularly happy, not particularly sad.” ‘
Yes. And when they get too happy, just sacrifice a dozen of them as a ritual offering to teh gods to bring ‘em back in line!
I see that happening every time my 3 1/2 year old grandson visits us. We have a large number of Brio train tracks, and he likes to put the boxes the Bullet Train and Bridge we've bought for him next to the actual things.
I saw Davy Crockett bash a Mexican with the butt of his rifle in the "Alamo" movie, so I banged my plastic toy rifle against a tree, and that was the -- unexpected -- end of that.
I had not realized that there were contemporary people who consider themselves to be Mayans. It sounds a bit contrived and artificial to me.
The toys my grandson got the most out of were blocks, Lincoln logs and such, because he and I would sit down and make different things out of them. Same with games: pickup stix, a deck of cards, chess set, board games, anything that I could teach him to play and play with him when he came over. I think he loved interacting with an adult, competing, more than anything else. Toys that didn't involve that kind of relationship, bored him quickly.
While I think there is some validity to the charge that cell phones and social media have made a significant impact on children exposed to them, I always twitch a little when inanimate objects or technology seem to be the target of blame for human failings. Just getting rid of the toys is unlikely to make a change in kids without addressing what is likely the root cause of current parenting styles ... the perceived need for a two-income family to support them.
I used to watch some of the new home searches on cable &, in every instance I saw rooms full of child's toys. Back in 40's/early 50's of my childhood you could fit my brother's I my toys in drawer. Back then we had erector sets, paint by numbers, board games (usually played with adults), gyroscopes and, my full cowboy get up with cap guns & all. We also built model aircraft, first balsa & paper later plastic.
My son had his own room and a lot of toys, but his favorite was Log, from Blammo(tm).
Walkie-talkies? What's wrong with smartphones?
We saved firecrackers from NYD and July 4 for demolition of unwanted toys later. Dodging the plastic shrapnel from that model B-29 is an especially precious memory.
"Mayan parents..." Universally recognized parenting lodestar.
Somewhere I have a picture of me about 4 years old. My Dad was enlisted in the USAF, and they had sent him to Petersen Field in Colorado Springs. There was a not a lot of money around. My Dad built me a tiny helicopter out of packing crates and leftover paint from work. There never were a lot of real toys in our house. So.ehow, we turned out OK.
Legos are part of the problem now. They mostly come in kits with instructions, and create the expectation that the child will build the kit within the bounds of the design. This limits (at least initially) the imagination required to build creations ad lib. Some kids never move past the unspoken assumption that the kit is The Thing and all other configurations and designs are not The Thing.
Legos... fly me to the moon, dive under the sea, to the limits of imagination and innovation.
I do love living in a country where some of our biggest problems stem from poor people that have too much food and kids that have too many toys. May we continue to be cursed thusly.
Post a Comment