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When shopping for toys this holiday season, keep these five things in mind…
Adapted from Dr. David Elkind’s The Power of Play
1. Young children are heavily oriented to the senses. Natural materials like cotton and wool elicit a sense of comfort and warmth that synthetics do not. Touch is a powerful sensory experience.
2. High-tech isn’t always better. For example: The electronic version of Etch A Sketch makes the whole experience more artificial than the regular version, which allowed children to see the physical results of their actions on the board and adjust their actions accordingly. The electronic version takes away the child’s sense of control over what he is doing. A good set of wooden blocks is one of the best toys you can buy a young child. They leave room for the imagination and are used differently as the child grows older.
3. Happiness is often stimulated by the simplest things. For example: A bar of lavender soap made a special gift for Dr. Elkind’s two-year-old cousin. When she opened the package, her eyes widened and she shouted with delight. Her own bar of soap! For her, the bar of soap was precious because it was so different, and so much more personal, than the other gifts she got at the holidays. A gift that reflects the child’s individual interests and abilities such as a book, or a piece of sports equipment, is appreciated and valued more than one that is expensive but commonplace.
4. Leave room for imagination. In every society, children play with dolls and tools as props to their imagination and fantasy. Such play anticipates at lease one potential aspect of their adult roles. In this way, children nourish their capacity for make-believe- and also gain a sense of comfort with grown-ups skills. Children’s toy play continues to serve as both a stimulus for imagination and a means of socialization into adult culture. Toys such as battery-opperated cars and boats don’t leave much to the imagination, and have little or no personal or socialization value. On the other hand, toys such as puppets, and miniature stages allow children to create and act out their own stories.
5. Character toys should instill positive values. Character toys originated in children’s need for adult role models to help them fashion their sense of self. In the past, these toys reflect the attitudes and values of the larger adult society. Mickey Mouse was fantastical, but also represented positive values of friendship, kindness and generosity. Superheroes were positive in that they were human, lived in the real world, and represented the forces of good as opposed to evil. Now, Character toys like Barbie, G.I. Joe, and Pokemon are created not to instill positive attitudes and values but to imprint children with a brand name. There are few character toys today that serve as healthy role models. They can still be found in books like Harry Potter and others in which an admirable character overcomes insurmountable obstacles to attain a worthwhile goal.
From David Elkind’s book The Power of Play: “In modern childhood, free, unstructured play time is being replaced more and more by academics, lessons, competitive sports, and passive, electronic entertainment. While parents may worry that their children will be at a disadvantage if they are not engaged in constant, explicit learning or using the latest “educational” games, David Elkind’s The Power of Play reassures us that unscheduled imaginative play goes far in preparing children for academic and social success. Through expert analysis of the research and powerful situational examples, Elkind shows that, indeed, creative spontaneous activity best sets the stage for academic learning in the first place: Children learn mutual respect and cooperation through role-playing and the negotiation of rules, which in turn prepare them for successful classroom learning; in simply playing with rocks, for example, a child could discover properties of counting and shapes that are the underpinnings of math; even a toddler’s babbling is a necessary precursor to the acquisition of language. An important contribution to the literature about how children learn, The Power of Play suggests ways to restore play’s respected place in children’s lives, at home, at school, and in the larger community. In defense of unstructured “down time,” it encourages parents to trust their instincts and resist the promise of the wide and dubious array of educational products on the market geared to youngsters.”
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