Educational Toys

(originally posted somewhere else March 16, 2007)

So, I was thinking.

It was 12:30 AM, I was in my baby's room feeding him, and I was thinking. Couldn't do much of anything else, really, as I stood over a crib feeding the little guy and hoping that he would actually fall back to sleep so that I could sleep more as well. I was thinking about how there was nothing on his walls, no mirrored activity set on his crib. He had a couple of bright toys in his crib that I got from someone in our Freecycle group, but he isn't quite big enough to play with them yet. His current favorite activity is to knead and chew on his spit up rags (diapers) - they fold around easily, aren't too big for his hands to grab, and it doesn't really matter where he grabs them - always works. But as for things to look at in his room, he doesn't really have anything except a sage wall and white ceiling.

For a few seconds, I thought about how I need to make sure to get out and get him some stuff to look at, except that he really doesn't like laying on his playmat downstairs anyway, nor does he care for the mobile like animals that hang over his swing. What he really likes to look at are our faces and flashy things on the TV.
I figured it was probably wasted money.

But then the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if ALL of that stuff isn't wasted money. It seems to me that parents are constantly barraged with advertisements for infant/toddler toys that make our little bundles of joy more intelligent, more inquisitive, more tactile, more more MORE of everything. The ads are hard to resist - there is a built in guilt factor if you don't. Do you not want your child to be able to be smart? Then by all means, don't spend a few bucks on flash cards or DVD's or brightly colored brain stimulating toys.

The problem is that we're also constantly seeing that kids these days just aren't that smart. Our kids aren't keeping up with other nations educationally, and they probably aren't even keeping up with kids of the past in true education (I just read something about this yesterday but can't find it now).

The thing is, we're spending hundreds of dollars on these toys for kids, and then we undo it all by the time the kid enters junior high. We plop the kids in front of the TV instead of having them help us with chores, thereby preventing them from learning responsibility, dexterity, cause and effect (dishes don't just clean themselves after you eat!), and socialization. We give them snacks in the grocery store to distract them so we can do the shopping - some of us do, anyway - instead of showing them how to choose produce, how to figure out a bargain, how to read nutritional labels. We put them in sports to get them moving so they won’t be fat because they spend hours watching TV and playing video games instead of just kicking them outside and telling them to find something to amuse themselves until dinner time. We have them watch the movie instead of reading the book.

Thomas Jefferson probably didn't have brightly colored mobiles. Leonardo Da Vinci likely wasn't shown flash cards obsessively as a toddler. Einstein didn't have Baby Einstein.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s time to step back in time a bit. Let babies absorb the world as it is, not some overly bright, perfectly shaped, scientifically created view. Instead of spending that money on dubiously beneficial toys and mobiles, let’s put it into a 529 so Jr. can go to college. And after we’ve gotten over our media created guilt for not buying that stuff, let’s address the real guilt we know comes from not spending enough time with the little boogers - let’s go to the library, go outside and play in the mud, open up the cupboards while we’re putting away dishes and bang some pots.

Just a thought.