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.