Today I’m going to approach this question by stepping back and asking a slightly broader one, namely: where did this tech toy craze came from in the first place? What’s really behind the toy industry’s rush towards computerized, electronic gadgets? One possibility, the one that I suspect the toy industry itself would like parents to believe, is that kids today are just “different from the way we were” (as a Mom quoted in the Times story put it). The sub-text here seems to be that because today’s kids are being raised in a more wired world, they need more sophisticated, “grown-up” toys to keep them happy and cognitively engaged.

I don’t think that’s the case at all. For my part, I think it’s more accurate to say that the popularity of tech toys is just a new face on a familiar truth: namely that children are predisposed to find imitating adults highly engaging and rewarding. Modern kids are imitative creatures immersed in a world where adults are constantly tapping at keyboards and talking on cell phones, so its quite natural that they wind up wanting to do these same things. It’s not at all different from what children in countless prior generations have done, nor is it inherently less healthy simply because the objects that are now the targets of this imitative propensity are electronic gizmos. The desire to imitate is actually extremely healthy — it’s one of kids’ most powerful tools for learning. The thing that can be unhealthy, however, is the way we as adults respond to children’s imitative wishes.

There was a delightful reader comment in the Times article that I think captures this incredibly well. A reader named Greg from New York said simply:

“My son would also prefer using the real lawn mower to the toy one has. That doesn’t mean I let him.”

I think Greg is right on here. The toy and electronics industries would both like parents to believe that there is something special about children’s wish to imitate the use of things like cell phones or laptops — that depriving them of the “genuine article” in these cases is tantamount to standing in the way of their education. For example, the Times article quotes the chief executive of Kajeet, a cell phone maker that is now marketing a phone for children ages 8 and up, as saying:

“When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness they’re much less interested. They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they’re smart enough to use it better than you do.”

My response to this is: so what? When I was a kid I loved to pretend that I was a “big helper” (as I called them when I was little) — someone who got to wear a really cool official uniform like a fireman or a policeman. And it goes without saying that when my Mom found a real police uniform at a second hand store, I absolutely adored wearing it. As soon as it appeared in the dress-up box, I couldn’t have cared less about the “pretend” kid-sized uniforms that had preceded it. If one of the fundamental social desires underlying imitation is kid’s wish to “be just like” an adult, then of course a real uniform (or cell phone or laptop) is infinitely preferable to one that is clearly just a pretend stand-in.

But just as my Mom didn’t sign me up for the police academy because I loved the real uniform, there’s no necessity to give kids real techie gadgets just because they’d prefer them. I think that in many cases doing so actually subverts what kids imitative desire is really all about. No matter what the CEO of Kajeet says, eight year olds don’t really want to be making business calls on their cell phones during snack time. They want to play, to pretend, and too imagine–all things that a real cell phone, laptop, or iPod makes harder, not easier.

In my next post I’m going to come back to this theme by examining more closely what play is really all about — and what kinds of toys are thus the best for facilitating it. There will be a short hiatus before that post appears, as I’ll be traveling this week to head home for the holidays. You can look for a minor update around Wednesday (one that will hopefully get some discussion going around these themes), to be followed by a more substantive bit of writing this weekend.

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Not that I normally have cause to doubt the Times fact checkers, but this got me sufficiently curious that I decided to do a bit of informal investigating myself. Naturally the Times story is accurate – the remarkable thing though is that, if anything, it seems to under-report the trend. As of today, 4 out of 12 of the most popular gifts on Amazon for 2- to 4-year-old children were high tech gadgets. This means that a lot of kids who were just barely walking last holiday season are going to be spending the New Year surfing the web with LeapFrog’s ClickStart My First Computer, pedaling furiously on Fisher-Price’s Smart Cycle (a tiny exercise bike connected to a video game), or doing some social networking with the latest member of the Webkinz family (a reindeer, naturally).

All of this is a bit surprising, certainly, but is it bad? It’s a tricky question. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically bad or harmful about techie toys; there’s no reason that toys with screens or keypads should necessarily be less fortifying for a child’s mind and imagination than blocks or Legos. And these kinds of toys do serve a very useful function that more traditional toys don’t, namely giving kids a head-start with the kind of abstract symbolic manipulation and information processing that are a part of life in the wired world.

At the same time, however, I also think its hard to dispute that the rising popularity of high tech kid gizmos is a trend that runs afoul of some very real problems, not the least of which is childhood obesity. (This criticism does not apply, of course, to the previously mentioned Fisher-Price Smart Cycle, a toy that would probably allow three-year-olds to significantly reduce our fossil fuel dependency if the power of all those tiny pedal strokes could be collectively harnessed). The term that the toy industry uses as shorthand for the tech trend should also give parent’s pause. According to the Times, toy makers call it “Kids Getting Older Younger.” I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.

All of this has inspired me to kick off a multi-part blog series that I’m going to dub Play: Today. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be using this space to think about these issues, and what impact high tech toys really have on kids imagination and learning. If you’re interested in following along you might take a minute to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. I’ll be adding new posts to the series in regular succession, and the newsfeed is a great way to tell at a glance when new content has been added. Not RSS inclined? You can check back for the next Play: Today post on Monday.

(The New York Times article on tech toys is available here)

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