Educational toys

Maybe it's just me, but lately, toys seem to fall into one of two categories: either they're educational, or they teach restrictive gender roles. The fact that we now have "girl Legos," called Clickits (because the second X chromosome prevents Lego use? or what?), is a topic for another post.

Parents buy educational toys not because they fear that without them their child will never read or never learn to add and subtract, but because they want to give their child a competitive edge in school. No one believes that an alphabet puzzle, an alphabet book, and sundry battery-powered alphabet toys are necessary to learning reading, but perhaps if you buy more than the next parent, your child will be in a higher reading group than theirs.

This is an industry which depends on formal schooling systems (and in this case, private schools probably contribute more than public schools do, as testing is sometimes required for admission). Knowing that our kids are tracked (college, vocational, warehousing), what yuppie parent would buy a toy that wasn't educational? Thus, a simple box of colored wooden blocks is now printed with sentences like "Teaches colors and shapes, while developing fine motor skills!"

The language now used to sell toys sounds a lot like the language used to describe the educational environment at my daughter's preschool. The preschool handbook (26 pages) mentioned the sand table, the water table, the painting easels, etc as developing "an intuitive understanding of the physical world" and "fine motor skills". (You could just take your kid to a sandbox or play in the bathtub, but I guess that doesn't seem as educational.)

The reason I feel this connection between the toy industry, higher-priced day care, preschools and so forth is important is that it conspires to make parents believe that props, research, and professionally designed materials are necessary for a child to learn. This benefits both Fisher Price and the local school system. It is a crucial myth, on which millions of dollars in profits and the third largest government spending program in part depend.

If a parent taught their child to read using only regular books, newspapers, and adult materials, and their own ingenuity and enthusiasm, they might question whether it really requires certified professionals and specialized educational materials to continue to teach reading. If, on the other hand, they used ten different alphabet and phonics products and sent the child to a highly regarded preschool, they might merely feel they had bought their child a head start in school (and want to keep on buying-- products and housing in better school districts).

I do value the educational toys and materials we have: the software, the LeapPad, our letter blocks, the "Let's Read!" primer. But I consider most of them to be luxuries; they are not ultimately necessary for learning. But then, I do not have the stress of worrying about when A will learn something, and whether that will be ahead of the majority of her classmates.

Baby books are full of developmental timelines from infancy on. Websites are full of them too. And I find they are becoming increasingly optimistic, saying for instance that "most babies can sit up unassisted by 6 months" though I have books upstairs suggesting 6 months is merely the average. (I also happen to know that while babies in Japan do not, on average, learn to walk until well after 12 months, babies in parts of Africa and South America learn to walk at 9 months on the average, and no one is worried about Japanese babies.) Language acquisition milestones are the worst, as many of them are based on samples comprised not only of high socioeconomic status children, but actually the children of college professors. (These are the children living in the neighborhoods around universities, after all.) Thus the stress of keeping your child "up to speed" and "ahead of the game" begins as early as a few weeks old. Inevitably your child fails to do something which "most babies" can supposedly do at their age, and the anxiety plays into the baby gear industry. This anxiety is reinforced by the age-segregated, assembly-line system of most formal schools; parents do not question that it will hurt their child to fall behind others, because they can see the tracking system before their eyes.

All of this disempowers parents by creating baseless anxieties about developmental timelines, and by attempting (through the sheer accumulation of advertising and marketing) to define good parenting as making smart product purchases.