Plastic beepy toys distract momentarily; toy manufacturers hope parents buy into this con. Discuss.

[hub2dee]

Babies and children have as much fun with everyday objects.

IMHO, plastic beepy toys are foul, homogenous, annoying beasts. They occupy children for relatively short amounts of time, before kids (of whatever age) move on to the next piece of similarly garish, sterile crap. These toys have no soul and do not allow true exploration nor the development of much in the way of imagination.

Crafted around a Pavolvian trigger and response concept, these toys serve up their rewards as blasts of noise, flashes of light or moments of fast movement. Their limited ability to sustain interest means that us parents need to relentlessly offer up the next toy to play with in a conveyor belt of stilted interaction.

We hope that by spending £10 or £20 on A Toy it will please and occupy our darlings, but ironically they tend to get the most fun out of the mundane and ordinary: The bunch of keys, the remote control, a dowel of wood. The toy industry is one giant con.

Or am I wrong ?

This rant has been inspired by revelations concerning Heuristic Play and things like FaZ's reference to treasure baskets etc.

Franny - can you make wnaky baskets for older kids? DSs are 2 and 4 and it seems like a cool thing to do in school hols.

hub2dee, your opening post is brilliantly worded and totally reflects how I feel.

Plastic beepy toys interest my dd for about 7 seconds before she moves off and starts to raid real objects from the bookcases.

Also she loves her treasure basket as suggested by Franny on previous thread (although she does have a mobile phone and a remote in there).

The other thing that bugs me is:

I've noticed lots of the v-tech flashy/beepy type stuff seems to be marketted as teaching kids words and numbers and colours via an odd robot woman voice.

Thats wrong isnt it? Surely you teach kids words by talking to them and interacting with them. And they should learn numbers and colours by looking at items in the real world and their parents discussing them and pointing things out of interest.

The marketting plays on our insecurities and our aspirations as parents, and at times seems to over-ride what we actually know from observing what interests our own child.

Sorry I have not been keeping up with this thread - I have been playing with HC and her gorgeous dds who adore my treasure baskets

Fourjays, yes, certainly you can make treasure baskets for older children. I don't have a lot of experience in this myself, but I think themed baskets are most interesting for older ones and they can help to select and hunt for the objects themselves.

A few suggestions would be: try a natural basket filled with shells, stones, pine cones, seeds, fruit, dried flowers, conkers, driftwood, natural sponge, interesting twigs, etc etc. This would be particularly lovely if the children could gather the items themselves on walks or visits to the beach and so on.

How about a visual treasure basket? Could include mirrors, different coloured cellophane to look through, sequined material, a sparkly notebook or purse, those decorative crystals that diffract light, or even a prism if you can get your hands on one.

Other themes could include a noisy basket (small instruments, rustly paper, bells, rattles, shakers, crinkly material etc), a bathroom themed basket, or a basket based around one colour eg all red items. I am sure you can think of your own and they could reflect your child's own interests.

Cheers Franny.
DS1 has had hours of fun in last day making treasure maps with scrap paper, stickers and crayons. He keeps hiding biscuits around the house and I have to follow him on his "treasure hunt". It's so cute and he came up with it all on his own!

And what's bark sucking? I don't get it.

Just the straights taking the micky out of the hippies, 4jays.

Ah that's nice.
My friends just roll their eyes and say "you're such a f*ing hippy!". Less nice.

LOL.

Although I remember as a kid in the health food shop you could buy unprocessed licroice which came in the form of a thick twig which you chewed to clean your teeth / for the flavour etc. No doubt my leader would approve of that example of bark sucking...

Oooh yes. I approve too. As budding homoeopath - no mint!

My god hub can you still get that? That would be stonking to put in the baskets.

I think the bit I chewed was thrown out, FaZ...

Actually, I had a good google and couldn't find any UK shops selling it, but I bet there are some out there...