Saturday, May 12, 2007

Overstimulating Baby Toys

When I was a wee tot, we had fun toys. Wooden blocks, multi-coloured plastic rings (unfortunately made of polyvinylchoride [PVC] I'm sure), animals and various other simple toys kindled our imaginations with their simplicity and unprescriptiveness (is that a word?). I should also mention that those multi-coloured rings of ascending sizes that sit around a pole are most righteously called a"Rock-a-Stack."Anyhow, my toys were relatively simple; undoubtedly more fancy that what my parents had but relatively simple compared to what exists at present. Toys are now "designed," engineered and geared toward the functional and intellectual "development" of children. They are designed to be "stimulating" and build up certain skills important to the developmental progression of an infant or child into whatever standardized developmental stage comes next. A child cannot simply be but most continually move toward what is next. Yes, that's right, even infant toys are insidiously pedagogical in a strangely overstimulating and attention grabbing way. From the moment of birth the gods of telos conspire to marshall the budding intentionality of our youth.

Let me furnish you with an example of what constitutes a modern "toy."

A dear friend of ours bought a toy for our boy John. She came across a toy of meticulous design known as a "Whoozit." As modern psychology and thousands of years of unspoken and unarticulated experience has shown us, babies are powerfully attracted to a few things: faces, dark and light colour constrasts, intricate patterns, crackly sounds and bright lights or shiny objects. The designers of the Whoozit understand this and have designed a toy in a state of constant developmental explosion. BRIGHT COLOURS! BLACK AND WHITE! FACES! CRACKLY SOUNDS! LITTLE BRIGHTLY COLOURED TABS BABIES LIKE TO PULL! COLD TEETHING RING! ALL AT ONCE!

The first time I held the Whoozit I almost had a seizure but instead felt and acted on an uncontrollable urge to put the toy in my mouth.

Maybe I'm not saying so much about the Whoozit as about my own sensitivity to stimulus. However, stimulation through arresting the senses or forcing open the gates of perception is an aggressive and perhaps counterproductive exercise in encouraging our children to develop or mature.

I think about the other kinds of common toys such as PS3, little hand-held electronic games, laptops for toddlers and the like and it all seems like too much powerful stimulation and plastic. A stimulus capable of arresting attention strikes me a bit violent and ultimately counter-productive due to the undeniable fact that humans quickly build tolerance to almost any stimulus and eventually require a more powerful stimulus to achieve the same arresting result. In short, reliance on powerful attention grabbing objects results in decreased attention spans. Why? Because true attention begins from within and radiates out into creativity where as modern toys seize the attention from without and thrust a "precreated" system onto the child, thus diffusing locus of attention into the environment. The internal state of the child is at the mercy of the environment rather than within him or herself.

I like old toys. Boxes full of old clothes and musty smelling hats, shovels, buckets, balls, sticks, trees, pieces of cloth suddenly transformed into monsters from the murky deeps, cushion fortresses and on goes the list.

Some of these new toys are good too, but not too many.

So, I'm old fashioned. A Montessori advocate without even knowing it. A children's toy Luddite.

I like it that way and I hope John does too.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

that whosit or whatever ya call it gives me a seizure too!

Happy Belated Mother's day to Cheryl!!!

Emily

elizabeth said...

agreed!

Amy said...

I like the old-style toys too. Although Owen does love his little electric keyboard. And ther is no way I will let him have video games (at least not for a long time). Some of Owens little friends have laptops - their own REAL laptops with kids games on them. These kids aren't even one. It;s a little crazy.

Rhiannon Gascoigne said...

Unfortunately Theo's daddy is already addicted to video games, so I'm still working on how we'll avoid infecting our son with the habit. But I'm SUPER picky about what toys he's allowed. Mainly because I'm selfish and I hate the idea of these baby-toy eyesores in my house. It's hard to find anything simple and tasteful for babies-- but I've found that Theo really likes looking at books...good for him.

tamie marie said...

yes! i agree! and lots of parents do too. do you know about mothering.com? it's a lovely site, though i guess it's ironic to suggest a website, after reading this post...

:)

Kassianni said...

you know what else I really despise?
(sorry if you have one)
are those 'leap-frog' reader things.
all they are, are an excuse not to sit down yourself with your kids and read to them.

Roboseyo said...

i put the computer in my mouth when i looked at that picture.

Anonymous said...

As a mother myself, I very much agree with what you've said here. The difficulty, I've found, is finding toys that are "old-fashioned" in a world of computer games and whosits... Sometimes I find them on www.grandrivertoys.com, if you are ever interested.
I don't know if you remember me, btw. I went to school with you, and lived in 2B. :)

jhon said...

nursery changing pad along with you for quick and comfortable changes for you and baby. No room in the back and need to use public restroom changing stations? Check out disposable changing pad liners. mickey mouse toys for 2 year old boy