Toys are Indeed Us
Presents under the Christmas tree have been changing over the years, reflecting and marketing the incursion of digital technology in our lives. Toys now have “media content.” They can access or store digital entertainment. We have coined the oxymoron edutainment.
The toys of our own childhood were usually gadgets or objects of affection: stuffed bears, Lionel trains, model airplanes, rockets, puzzles, Erector sets, sleds, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, dollhouses, working scale steam engines, and, of course, books. “What’s the difference?” you might ask. Our choice of toys reflects us and affects our children.
In one of my children’s favorite childhood games, I would be asked to list all the things that didn’t exist when I was their age: TV (it existed, but we were late getting it), cell phones, camcorders, portable diskplayers, computers, ATV’s, ATM’s, computer games, iPods, Bit Torrent, arcade games, fast food, GPS, microwaves, snowboards, disposable cameras and snowmobiles. There was radio, our neighbor’s snowy green TV and the torn, roll-down screen on which we would periodically watch our family’s 8-mm movies.
The game ended with my children always asking, “But what did you do?” To them, I grew up in a silent, medieval village (Morrisville) surrounded by ducks and mud, with little to do but walk to school or watch Mr. Farr milk his cows. The closest we got to media entertainment was picking up the party-line phone and listening to Gladys Farr gossip.
My younger children are growing up in a digital swarm. My emails to them share an inbox rife with graphic offers for anatomical enlargements, vicarious sex, pain killers, effortless college degrees and letters from entrepreneurial Nigerians. As kids seeking titillation, we spent cold, flashlit hours in the attic combing through hundreds of National Geographic magazines in the hope of glimpsing the withered breasts of an African matron.
Reading is a worthwhile vicarious experience because it calls on the imagination to visualize faces, places and landscapes described in text and to feel emotions the action elicits in us. Music can be the same. As a student, I remember listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos while reading Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. Later in life, when I hear them, all the images of the Terror, Sidney Carton and the relentless Madame La Guillotine come back to me vividly. They were my images of the French Revolution, not Hollywood’s or those of some electronic game designer.
Technology has introduced access and ubiquity. Content is here and now with few, if any, arbiters of quality. Children don’t have to shiver in an attic or spend hours in library stacks, they simply doubleclick.
The problem lies in the relative amounts of actual to vicarious living our children do and the cognitive dissonance between real-life and the vicarious experiences of the Internet, serial television and video games. Real-life experience and vicarious media experience differ markedly in their impact on us.
Imagine a child watching six-hours of Ozzie and Harriet or Seinfeld reruns and then walking outside to see his peers hawking or consuming drugs. Imagine trying to rationalize these different worlds, reconciling and accommodating such divergent realities. Media toys often become addictive anodynes, assuaging the pain and sadness of actual life experience.
Playing with imaginary toys, playing with traditional toys or being played with by consumer electronic toys, all call on children differently. Many children in the world play by improvising with sticks, spoons and mud. This play calls on their imagination to create the world in which they are playing. Playing with traditional toys requires imagination following instructions and exploration. Playing a video game requires hand-eye coordination, but little else, and the context is often violence and faux sexuality.
Our favorite toys were quite often mundane things like a box of bandages, a jack knife or a flashlight. We would head off to Mr. Farr’s pasture, equipped with some boards, nails and a hammer to make a tree house or to dam up his small brook to make a wading pond. At school, we played marbles on the dirt playground.
This Christmas let’s be judicious and creative in what we offer our children as toys. And, more importantly, let’s make time to play with them ourselves.
Bill Schubart
Bill Schubart is President of Resolution in South Burlington and Williston and Chairman of Fletcher Allen Health Care
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