Products and Pointers
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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About The Author
Beth Weinhouse specializes in women's and children's health
issues and lives in Oxford, Mississippi with her husband and 6-year-old
son.
