Commentaries : Toys for Tots in a Time of Troubles : Gifts: Some thoughts on pricey ‘educational’ toys during a Yule season when many poor families and children have little to be cheerful about.
Among the catalogues that clog the mailbox each pre-holiday evening arrives one that shows an enticing redheaded toddler pushing a giant ball.
Within is a collection of inviting, colorful toys. A little pricey, most of them, but nice sturdy toys that any child would love to get for Christmas or Hanukkah. Then you read the product descriptions.
The catalogue describes how a $127 puppet theater promotes “interactive entertainment.” The toy cash register “rings up math skills practice,” and wooden blocks “encourage eye-hand coordination.”
A toddler baseball set is great for “developing balance and coordination and improving gross motor skills,” and a tent gives a “wonderful sense of security and independence” while a pottery wheel “molds fine motor, perceptual and creative skills.”
But my all-time favorite is the “recycled collage kit” composed entirely of old bits of stuff, in which kids can use old washers and scraps of material to make toys and art. Buying these recycled tidbits (in other words, somebody’s used junk) for $14.95 “helps develop eye-hand coordination, imagination and environmental awareness,” the catalogue informs us.
And all these years I had the idea that toys were for fun.
In fairness, the company seems to sell good wares that are indeed fun. But the hyperbole and jargon in the descriptions, the emphasis on making children learn at every moment--and at a sizable price--instead of celebrating them for what they are, gives us reason to ponder what we hope to get out of the holiday shopping season that just started.
Baby-boomer parents this holiday season face some of the toughest challenges they have ever seen in their relatively privileged lives. At the same time that the economy disintegrates around us, we try to look for a sense of well-being and fulfillment, and a sense of the fun of life that full-time schedules of work and child care often seem to preclude.
At a time when our state no longer can afford to give our children the education we had planned on having for them through college, we try to give our children all the tools they need to succeed despite those lacks--including, perhaps, a house-crowding collection of high-priced educational toys?
The presidential debate brought talk about the meaning of “family values” at a time when children in many families do without food or shelter, let alone a $49.95 tool for what the catalogue calls “exercising muscles, fostering balance and coordination” (the uninitiated call this a vinyl ball).
This might be a good year to promote a little environmental awareness ourselves to remember a few important things about the world around us and the children within our midst--and what they really need from us, that any of us can afford.
Children are just children. And play, while it can have many wonderful learning experiences attached, is play. Let’s allow the two to go together and let our children be children this year; let’s show them the love that this season calls for by letting them be, rather than having to create and learn and develop their fine motor and math skills. They give up fun for the yoke all too soon.
Let’s keep it simple this year.
And rather than spend 15 bucks to develop their eye-hand coordination with expensive toys, let’s save some of that money to plan ways we and our children can give to the people truly in need.
We have a chance to realize true family values by helping our children learn the all-important lesson, especially in bad times and in this season, of, as the catalogue might say it, “promoting community awareness skills”--otherwise known as giving of ourselves to others.
