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HIGH-TECH TOYS FOR TOTS

By Beth Weinhouse

It's hard to miss them in toy stores. They talk, blink, whistle, light up, and practically sing and dance by themselves. No, we're not talking about computer and video games for big kids, but toys for the very tiniest youngsters. Good old stuffed animals have become "interactive plush toys" that move and talk back. Keyboards play music by themselves, or prompt babies with flashing lights. Activity boards that used to simply rely on babies' hands to move levers, turn dials, and ring bells now have "modes" for emitting voices, lively melodies or bedtime lullabies. Even that old standard, nesting boxes, may now have an electronic base that makes animal sounds and states their corresponding names.

All this is undoubtedly appealing to new parents. After all, many of us love buying high-tech gadgets for ourselves. But beneath all the seductive bells and whistles lies a crucial question: Are high-tech toys good for babies?

Surprisingly, many experts think not. "What you're basically doing with these toys is taking the thinking out of the child's brain and putting it into a computer chip," says Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., an educational psychologist in Vail, Colorado, and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds -- and What We Can Do About It (Touchstone Books). Healy says that babies don't learn from complicated gadgets, but from the world around them.

She explains that one of the earliest developmental tasks for children is to get their senses -- touch, sight, sound -- working in synchrony with each other. Children learn, for instance, that if they pick up a spoon and bang it on a box, it makes a sound, caused by the impact of the banging. But if a toy makes sounds on its own, or if pushing buttons produces noises and flashing lights, that can be very confusing. Healy says that these toys may overstimulate young children and distract their brains from making sense of the world. "And children who can't make sense of their world are children who get in the habit of not using their own minds. They may even have learning problems later on," she says.

If you can't eliminate these toys from the nursery, you can at least limit them in favor of toys that foster exploration and creativity. "When children play with toys, they're really doing little experiments to see how the world works," says Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (Harper Perennial Library). "The things that seem to be babies' favorite toys today have been babies' favorite toys forever -- everyday objects that they can explore and find out about. For example, they play with mixing bowls and learn how the little mixing bowl fits into the big mixing bowl, how things fall down instead of up."

Surround your child with simple, old-fashioned, hands-on toys such as drums, bells, keyboards, nesting cups and bowls, rattles, etc. And remember that the best children's toys don't always come from stores. If you spend a lot of money on a high-tech toy, you run the risk that your child might prefer playing with the box and wrapping paper instead!

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