With Hello Felix now off the ground and my overimitation research in print, I’ve been spending some time doing a bit of catching up on reading. Among the things in the backlog was a really excellent article that recently appeared in the New York Times about kids and high tech toys. The article opens with what I found to be a surprising fact, namely that the majority of the gifts on Amazon.com’s “hot list” for young children this year bear a greater resemblance to adult cell phones or PDAs than they do to… well, toys. Tickle Me Elmo and his ilk seem to be taking a back seat this year to kid gizmos that look like they should be able to hot sync with your Blackberry.

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)

Tags: child development, children, cognitive development, high-tech toys, imagination, Parenting, play, Play: Today, psychology, toys

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