Nicolas Vittoria plays with Fisher-Price Littler People City Skyway toy at The Canadian Toy Association's Hot Toys for the Holidays event at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto on Tuesday, Nov., 4, 2014.Matthew Sherwood/The Globe and Mail
One of the more dispiriting experiences of being a parent today is finding yourself, in moments of desperation, scanning anonymous message boards full of mothers (why is it always mothers?) offering highly subjective advice on how you – and everybody else in the world – really ought to be raising small children.
It was in one of these anxiety-inducing echo chambers that I recently found myself reading a comment strand in which a mother dared to ask the rather fascinating and just-in-time-for-Christmas question: "Do kids really need toys?"
Caroline227, as she was called, said she'd recently been asked about her current "toy rotation" for her 10-month-old-son. "We don't really have many toys and he isn't all that interested in them anyway," she confessed. "He has a few things but certainly not enough that anything would need to be rotated … Then someone said that they felt bad for my little guy, and that babies 'need' toys. So are toys necessary? Do children really need them for an enriching childhood?"
Did the Mummysphere open up and rain down on her head? Well not exactly. Most people (by which I mean Queenofmyhouse, Marebear2010 and Buttercup+4, etc.) weighed in to vehemently agree that "to a child, anything is a toy," and that their little ones are just as happy fooling around with spatulas, blanket capes and Tupperware as they are with the latest all-singing, all-dancing, Frozen-themed, kid-sized private jet.
It's a familiar conversation theme, parents sitting around complaining about overpriced plastic crap – the expense, lack of quality and the fact that their kids beg for stuff and then instantly forget about it. But if so many of us feel this way, why is the toy industry continuing to thrive, especially since people are having fewer children? According to figures published in the U.S. edition of the Economist last year, while overall profits at Mattel and Hasbro were down globally, sales of traditional toys were up five per cent, as was average spending per toy and per child.
And why, for instance, does the average household spend more per child at Christmas each year (according to stats in both North America and Britain), despite the fact that middle-class incomes are not keeping pace with cost of living? Why are we generally less willing to scrimp on non-necessities, such as kids' toys at Christmas, than we are on more sustaining and sharable pleasures, such as quality food and family outings?
The answer, of course, is guilt. We can pay all the lip service we like to principles such as frugality, practicality and environmental consciousness, but when your seven-year-old has been begging for a portable Nintendo game console for a third of his life, it's difficult not to break down. To hold to one's principles in the face of abject consumer longing seems downright Grinchy.
And then there all those confusing studies that seem to imply that, without the correct "educational" and/or "active" toys, your kid will basically end up a mouth-breathing sofa ornament. My favourite one was a much-reported 2012 study out of the University of Buffalo that found children offered a range of toys that included "exergames" such as Wii or mini-hockey were much more likely to engage in active play. It sounds great, but not if you read the fine print, which found that, while children spent far more time playing Wii or other artificial versions of sports, such as hockey, soccer, basketball or tennis, when you compared the two forms of play (exergame versus gadget-free exercise), they ended up burning far fewer calories.
More recently, a study from the University of Pennsylvania found that children who have an early childhood surrounded by "brain-stimulating" educational toys showed better intellectual capacity in their teens. But it's important to note that what researchers also looked at (in addition to books and toys) was the presence of "parental nuturance," or the sheer amount of kindness, encouragement and attention lavished on children during the formative preschool years. And it follows that parents who were most likely to lavish their kids with attention were also likely to lavish them with educational toys.
I am not one of those toy-lavishing mothers. Modern playthings are, for the most part, ugly and noisy and clutter up the house. The gamey ones have pieces kids can choke on or later lose and cry over, and the stuffy ones absorb viruses and need regular washing. The complicated ones require a degree in engineering and two hours of assembly. And the ones that look nice – "traditional toys" – are guaranteed to be of no interest to your child.
This time of year, I get particularly cranky about toys – I can feel the tidal wave of plastic crap rising up and preparing to launch itself (festively!) through my front door. So, I called up Esther Lutman, a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood and an expert in the history of playthings, just to put my feelings in perspective.
A mother of four-year-old twins herself, she told me that she shares my toy resistance ("Our flat is too small!"), but also that children have been playing with – and likely demanding – toys since ancient times. "Ever since the Middle Ages and the rise of travelling fairs, there have cheap trinkets for children," she said. "Parents probably resented them then, too."