Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
It’s tough out there for toy-sellers. Mastermind Toys, a Canadian company whose store I once walked in and out of, was “granted protection from its creditors,” which is business-speak for flailing. Maybe toys themselves – the knick-knacks children traditionally demand, and that are ceremonially given to them for purposes an anthropologist could illuminate better than I could – are so last season. Blame the cost of living, the lure of screens or – here’s my theory – the staying power of minimalism among the fashionable and well-to-do.
Is there a hot new toy of the season? If there is, the hot new thing (okay, not that new) is ostentatious indifference to that fact. There is nothing more chic than the no-gift birthday-party invitation. It announces that your kids already have plenty, and that yours is not a home that values material goods for their novelty factor. Guests will still bring gifts, but there will be a bit of awkwardness around this.
For children too young to have much of a say in what’s bought on their behalf, toys are a way for parents to demonstrate values. Do you hold progressive ideas about gender? Then you’ve got to be quick and Instagram it when your toddler son expresses even the slightest interest in a doll. More of a traditionalist? You can post to Facebook about how much of a budding hostess your daughter is, and leave out the part where she’s hurling the toy teapot at her brother, who’s just trying to play with his dolls in peace.
Speaking of dolls, Slate has run at least two separate advice column letters from white parents who struggle with what a good anti-racist approach is to the phenomenon of Black dolls. It is important to hand-wring about the meaning of a white person owning or gifting one, if you’re white, because it absolves you from thinking about the fact that the neighbourhood you live in, which has boutiques selling dolls in all hues, is a bit short on people of all hues.
As with all consumption-centric signalling, hypocrisy abounds. Consistency is not as important as giving off the vibe of having read the room. We are, after all, living in an era when people with a 6,000-square-foot vacation home can be profiled in a New York Times column called “Living Small,” because, you see, it is an eco-friendly vacation home. Thanks to the Barbie movie, and all the buzz surrounding director Greta Gerwig, you can now frame the purchasing of Barbie dolls – plastic dolls made to look like conventionally beautiful women – as a feminist act.
One anti-materialist route – should you be sitting in your 6,000-square-foot cottage, contemplating how to teach your children that less is more – is to have your kids do a book exchange in lieu of getting toys as birthday presents. Books are, by some mechanism, exempt from status as material objects, for kids and adults alike. (One is either a stuff-liker or a book-reader, allegedly.)
For reasons I can’t entirely explain to myself, I think books are among the best gifts, for kids or anyone, but find the book exchange concept – at least unless instigated by an actual child – somewhat bleak. Is there no room for frivolity? Can one never offer up a shiny object? It’s not as if blood diamonds enter into it when you’re giving a child a rhinestone tiara.
Toys for infants especially can feel more like showing other parents that you’re on top of things than about entertaining a baby. The very young aren’t too bothered about whether the thing they’re holding is a spatula or a silicone brain-development toy for which you paid $25 at one of the boutiques that caters to anxious first-time parents. But if there isn’t something affixed to the stroller, dangling and educating the baby, then you’re announcing that you don’t care about whether they’re hitting their milestones. It is crucial to care about milestones, but to do so without employing any ableist terminology, and also to spell out that you disagree in principle with a system in which the children of well-to-do parents have an edge in life.
The high-end teething toy Sophie the Giraffe has a tendency to develop mould inside, but at least it’s French mould, and they invented Roquefort, so.
While I do not aim for minimalism, I am impressed with – which is to say, envious of – the households that have figured out where to actually put the toys, like in a Montessori school. If you have this sorted, you don’t end up with an ever-overflowing set of mismatched IKEA bins. The stakes are high, even if you are not an aspiring momfluencer. Part of raising children properly is teaching them to clean up their toys after playtime. For that to work, everything needs to have a spot where it belongs, or else you’re just indiscriminately throwing things into bins. And even if you’re iffy on the centrality of cleanup to childhood (or, uh, adulthood), there are hygienic implications. Surfaces need to be reasonably toy-free in order to be wiped down, which is necessary if you don’t want your floors varnished with a thin layer of yogurt.
But whenever I think I have a system in place, that I know which bin is for which sort of toy, both of my children are suddenly at different developmental stages than they were when these toys were acquired. I will realize that half of a bin is taken up by something meant to encourage one’s precocious two-week-old to stack blocks, thereby foreshadowing a brilliant career in (say) home organization, but of no particular interest to a toddler or kindergartener. I will notice a puzzle piece in one bin, and wonder where the rest of it is, and if we even need this one that’s for a 10-month-old (to chew on). I will tell myself that bin organization is on the agenda, but laundry, dishwasher, diaper changes and doctor’s appointments intervene.
Oh, and you’re meant to rotate different toys in and out of circulation, so your kids don’t get bored of what they’ve got. It’s an appealing notion, but not one I have found compatible with such things as getting children to school and daycare and using the time they’re there to work. Toy rotation also has a way of happening naturally, as toys resurface at unexpected times from under the couch.
If I seem less than enthralled by the minimalist-chic approach to toys, it’s not because I want to be overrun with them, like the “before” in one of those decluttering shows. I don’t believe I need to run out and get my kids whatever other kids have, but also don’t want to be the kind of parent who makes a whole thing about what my kids are not allowed. I’m fine with letting my own and my kids’ specificity assert itself in less overt ways. I am not interested in the preciousness of being the we do things differently household.
The fashionable asceticism puts me off, and seems at odds with my own values, which allow for liking, and enjoying the use of, material objects. If grown-ups can like stuff without becoming pathologically acquisitive, and indeed without necessarily owning more than the self-proclaimed stuff-indifferent, why not kids? I think of the children I knew growing up who weren’t allowed sugar or television, and who would binge on both when on playdates in the giant bowl of sugar lined with TV sets I apparently grew up in. (Hardly, but these things are relative.) Why not everything in moderation, including the welcoming of brightly coloured plastic into one’s home?
I’m also not convinced that children can only learn if their toys just happen to go with a greige décor. Spend five minutes watching little kids play with plastic toys and one does start to wonder if wooden toys are essential to the encouragement of creativity, or if this is what the marketers at Big Wooden Toy (that came out more adult than I meant it to) would like you to believe. I see on the wooden-toy websites that studies have shown, but I’m sure you get whichever correlation-or-causation thing, wherein the sort of parents who have the money and inclination to get their toys at the natural-materials-only boutique and not the big-box plastic-toy emporium wind up having more generally advantaged children.
Insofar as I have a philosophy about toy acquisition, it’s that you should accept your kids’ thematic toy preferences, whatever they turn out to be. The best you can do is not pigeonhole anyone’s interests – the very same toddler might find a toy car and a tutu interesting, and this need not be interpreted as any kind of grand statement about who they’ll be at 15 or 50, or even what they’ll feel like playing with in five minutes. This is an argument in favour of having lots of toys around and accessible, perhaps at the cost of tidiness.
There is, I’m sure, a point at which children – or only the ones not properly instilled by that point in minimalist-chic – start demanding expensive toys. The hyper-realistic dolls that come with backstories and need to be taken out for high-end meals. The child-proportioned motorized SUVs. (The latter, broken down, wind up in my local playgrounds on a semi-regular basis.) I am savouring every moment of my children not being that age.
That said, the perfect toy for a young kid is hard to find. Anything with a tube of glitter is out, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who’s ever allowed one in their home. It can’t be too sticky or ink-emitting (a little is okay; one must foster artistic development) or make loud sounds. (A xylophone is acceptable. Anything with a bunch of buttons that creates incessant all-hours BOING! – perhaps not.)
People speak of young children preferring the wrapping to the toy itself. This I haven’t found, but I will say that the biggest hits often seem to be bits of plastic of mysterious origin. The most popular toy in my home these days is a rubbery dragon finger puppet. We think it’s a dragon, although “monster” is another possibility; this is a source of debates in my household. The puppet is mostly orange, but has black googly eyes and tiny white teeth. Its claim to fame is that it stretches in interesting ways, and looks like it has a tongue if you put your finger in it the right way.
I have absolutely no idea where the finger-dragon came from. A prize for cleaning up at aftercare? A birthday-party loot bag item, from Dollarama, or maybe even Mastermind Toys, which is now being snapped up by a group of Canadian businessmen? Actual garbage? All I know is that it’s not something I bought, and I wouldn’t begin to know where to find one. It’s exactly the sort of thing one shouldn’t want to see in one’s home. Dirt clings to it, and its BPA content is unknown, but it is, I have to admit, fantastic.
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