This is my second post in the Play: Today blog series, where I’m thinking about what the surging popularity of “tech toys” means for children’s imagination and creativity. Are toys like the LeapFrog Clickstart and Fisher-Price Launchpad, things that are basically pint-sized versions of adult consumer electronics, doing less for children’s cognitive development than more traditional toys like blocks and Legos?

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.

Tags: children, high-tech toys, imagination, Kajeet, Parenting, play, Play: Today, toy industry

Related posts

• Are High Tech Toys Bad for Children's Imagination? (0)