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| CHILD CARING 2. If you can buy only one toy for your toddler or
preschooler, go for blocks of various textures and sizes.
3. Consider this before you buy a talking toy: Most
of them don't have volume control.
4. If you're traveling with a young child over the
holidays, arm yourself with a variety of toys, including small
puppets (all ages), books, markers and paper, soft dolls, or
plush toys.
5. Avoid books containing food; they hook young
children to read for a reward, and a junk food reward at that.
6. Electronic toys can be disruptive in day care;
they typically can be played with only by passing them around.
Tip for teachers: Toys brought from home can come out for a
short time, then stay in the cubby. There are two ways to interpret this. If a baby literally can
find those cute little toes, she'll be able to amuse herself for
long stretches of time, long enough, maybe, for mom or dad to get a
bathroom break.
Think of it also as a metaphor. The best toys allow children to
shape their own play so they make their own discoveries.
Push-button rattles, talking stuffed animals, play houses with
computer chips - these are some of the new toys tempting parents of
infants and toddlers this holiday season, and they definitely won't
help your baby find her toes, warn professionals who study how
children develop.
Early childhood educator Diane Levin doesn't blame us for wanting
to buy them, though.
''As parents, we all want the best for our children, and these
are cutting edge,'' she says. ''The problem is, instead of meeting
developmental needs, they interfere with them.'' Levin is a
professor at Wheelock College and author of ''Remote Control
Childhood.''
At a session this month in Atlanta at the annual conference of
the National Association for the Education of Young Children, she
demonstrated a toy sure to bring a smile to any toddler: Rock 'n
Roll Ernie by Tyco. It's an unbendable plush doll holding a plastic
guitar: You push a button and he sings.
''It will bring initial excitement, sure, but this is a toy for
watching, not for doing,'' says Levin. When toddlers are observed
playing with it, they get bored and move on. You can't even cuddle
Ernie: The guitar is in the way.
When it comes to programmed toys, Ernie unfortunately is the tip
of the iceberg. In a press release last week, the Alliance for
Childhood, a national nonprofit group devoted to healthy childhood,
lists robotic dolls as the worst toys of the year. eSpecially My
Barney by Hasbro, for instance, can be programmed to say a
paragraph's worth of information about a child, potentially
encouraging a toddler to bond with a machine instead of with people,
and feeding into an already-tenuous grasp on the difference between
fantasy and reality.
Toys like these turn toddlers into observers instead of doers.
''Observe your toddler play for 20 minutes on her own,'' suggests
early childhood educator Bobbi Rosenquest, an assistant professor at
Wheelock who gave a presentation with Levin at NAEYC in Atlanta.
Here's what you'll probably see:
''Carrying objects back and forth, back and forth, from one room
to another, first carrying with one hand, then with both,'' she
says. ''Then maybe she'll fill a waste basket or box with the
objects and dump them out and start all over again. Maybe she'll
play peekaboo with the curtain, or roll a ball around the floor, or
roll around the floor herself. Maybe the whole time, she's talking
to herself.''
Nothing passive here, and Rosenquest ticks off all the discovery
and learning going on: large motor coordination, physical balance,
cause and effect, object permanence, hand-eye coordination,
sequencing, and language development.
Good toys can do all that and more. ''Toddlers learn through
sensory experiences so you want toys that integrate the senses and
motor skills at the same time,'' not ones that limit play to one
sense or skill, says early childhood educator Joanne Oppenheim.
Toys don't teach
She tells parents to stay away from toys that promise to teach
toddlers the alphabet, numbers, colors, or animals. ''These are
better learned informally in interactions with people, as you go up
the steps and count, or as you admire grandma's red hat,'' she says.
Oppenheim is co-author of the ''Oppenheim Toy Portfolio'' (Oppenheim
Toy Portfolio), a guide to toys and media in its eighth
edition.
Toys she dislikes most are toys she calls ''bossy'' and
manufacturers usually call ''smart.'' High on her list are ''Let's
Pretend Elmo'' by Fisher Price (bend his arms and he says, ''Look at
me, I'm flying!'') and the ImagineSounds Interactive Playhouse by
Little Tikes that tells toddlers, ''Close the window, it's raining''
to the sound of electronic rain.
''Play is supposed to foster imagination. Toys are supposed to be
props,'' Oppenheim says. ''These toys direct the play and do the
pretending for the child.'' They also potentially impede language
development: ''A toy giving you words is very different from using
your brain to come up with words yourself.''
When toys change the child's role in play as these do, there is
potential for long-term repercussions.
''We run the risk of altering brain development,'' says child
developmentalist Stevanne Auerbach of San Francisco, also known as
Dr. Toy. Because children's development is sequential, each skill
building on the one that came before, ''you can't shortchange
development with software or technology and expect anything good to
come of it,'' she says.
One of the more serious implications Auerbach sees is shortened
attention span. ''When all the toy requires is pushing a button to
be entertained, you get bored quickly. You want to move on,'' she
says. With a more appropriately stimulating toy - finger puppets or
finger paints, for instance - a toddler easily can be engaged for up
to 20 minutes.
Hooked on the screen
Levin worries about infants getting hooked on watching a screen
from a toy called Teletubby Musical Dream Scenes by Playskool. A toy
that attaches to the crib, it projects an image of teletubbies onto
the ceiling.
Talk about not discovering your toes.
''This teaches babies to expect comfort from an outside source,
specifically a screen,'' she says. ''When you discover your toes,
you feel the power that comes from learning you can satisfy your own
needs, and that carries over into attitudes toward problem-solving.
This toy undermines that.'' Not to mention, she adds, that it gives
parents false reassurance that TV, especially watching ''Teletubbies,''
is OK for infants.
Perhaps what most troubles Levin is how ''smart'' toys bypass
cause and effect.
''Give a 3- or 4-month old an old-fashioned rattle, and you see
him making connections: He shakes it and listens. Then he stops.
Then he shakes and listens again: `Oh, when I shake it like this, it
gets louder, and when I shake it like this, it's soft. I can make
this noise happen!''' In contrast, new rattles typically have a
button to push to produce sound, and the sound is always the same.
Rosenquest has a similar complaint about another traditional toy,
the xylophone. Remember the one Fisher Price always had, with
different colored bars of differing lengths? Its newest version,
Sparkling Symphony Xylophone, has an off and on button. Push a key,
and it lights up and plays four bars of a song.
''The opportunity to explore sounds from different shapes has
been removed,'' she says. ''There's an engaging auditory and visual
display, but the play value that made it interesting to a
24-month-old and a 4-year-old is gone.''
There's an inescapable point here.
Like Rock 'n Roll Ernie, many of these toys are engaging and
undoubtedly will capture the interest of some adult giftgiver in
your family as well as your toddler, if only briefly. It's not the
end of the world if a toddler has a few of these, Levin and
Rosenquest agree, but there's a caveat: An adult needs to play with
the child to transform the play into something worthwhile.
Creative play
With Rock 'n Roll Ernie, for instance, Rosenquest suggests
building a stage out of blocks for Ernie. That works on motor
skills. Get a few playmates to join in and the solitary play this
kind of toy encourages turns into a cooperative, social experience.
It's even better if they become an audience, dancing and singing
while Ernie plays, and then take turns on a pretend stage,
dancing and singing themselves.
''This takes some thinking,'' Rosenquest acknowledges. Her trick:
''Think about how you'd play with it if it wasn't programmed.''
Auerbach's advice is to look for updated versions of classics
that don't distort the original play value, like unadorned,
low-tech, nesting and stacking toys for babies, or Duplo and Lincoln
Logs for toddlers. Two new toys that made her holiday list are
Gymini Deluxe (by Tiny Love), which has soft shapes a baby can
manipulate, for birth to 12 months; and Alphabet Blocks (by Uncle
Goose), for 18 months and up.
For babies, Oppenheim's favorite choice is parent-as-toy.
''Nothing takes the place of that,'' she says. Other than that,
she recommends a fabric ball that's soft enough for a baby to mouth
but can be rolled back and forth as his first social game. She also
likes Beanstix (Gund), a rattle with floaters in its cylinder that a
baby can track with her eyes.
What about boxes and wrapping paper from gifts, pots and pans and
plastic measuring cups, wooden spoons and all those things we think
of fondly from our own childhood?
When it comes to discovering toes, there's nothing like those old
standbys. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Barbara F. Meltz's Child Caring appears every Thursday in Life
at Home. She is the author of ''Put Yourself in Their Shoes:
Understanding How Your Children See the World'' (Dell). Write to her
at the Globe or via e-mail at meltz@globe.com.
This story ran on page 1 of the Boston Globe's
City Weekly on 11/30/2000. |
efore
you buy a toy for your baby this holiday season, ask yourself this
question: Will it help her discover her toes?
