The alphabet and counting? Read them books, count things with them.
Also: building things out of pillows, blankets, cooking pots and utensils, etc.
Videogames have become a bit of an issue with my oldest one (8). But he seems to spend a lot less time on them than most other boys that age. But he's not happy about it.
I should put in a base case and one child test. Eh, I'll do it later.
So, author would complain about your kids toys too.
I don’t much care about what the article says. I care about my sanity and my kids playing nicely.
I fail to see how is electronic piano not imaginative. I thought also about buying digital microscope, but kids are not interested (yet).
But yeah, my kids play most of the time with blocks/Lego or they use whatever they find to play instead of using toys how they are intended to be used.
After watching kids play with more than 100 different types of toy, the researchers concluded that simple, open-ended, non-realistic toys with multiple parts, like a random assortment of Lego, inspired the highest-quality play. While engaged with such toys, children were “more likely to be creative, engage in problem solving, interact with their peers, and use language,” the researchers wrote. Electronic toys, however, tended to limit kids’ play: “A simple wooden cash register in our study inspired children to engage in lots of conversations related to buying and selling – but a plastic cash register that produced sounds when buttons were pushed mostly inspired children to just push the buttons repeatedly.”
In my opinion this text does not respect the reader. It seems more like mental masturbation for the author while trickle feeding the reader with the information they are looking for.
> Can any headline that ends in a question mark be answered by the word no?
This was one of the things that really surprised me when becoming a parent. If you take the time to just observe very small children doing their thing, they are surprisingly methodical, consistent, and hypothesis-driven. It looks like chaos at first, but then I've sort of come to realise that it's really about performing actions that are likely to trigger a response with high information content.
My favorite metaphor about children: to them, life is a science experiment, and parents are the guinea pigs.
I think middle-class parents are driven to keep-up-with-the-Joneses, and unfortunately the main drivers are the children themselves. Children are spoiled and exposed to all sorts of advertising in the guise of children's programming. Children's media is geared 100% to monetizing and productizing things and then having the children yelp at their parents in the grocery stores, in the toy stores, at home, at school, wherever, to please please please get me the new GI Joe or I won't be cool enough.
Yet like a cat, a child can take an emptied out cardboard box on Christmas and have it be the most wondrous source of joy for that entire year.
Encourage kids' creativity, encourage the magic of youth, encourage their innocence.
Banana: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yPI1_gVmp54
Banana: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/irJcWiFI-8s
Avocado: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-BNIiKiflRA
Banana: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RyM-8yUpP5s
Banana: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HfYg7UBs-RY
Conclusion: Small children are clueless and grateful.
While it was somewhat fun it was best in combination with a cassette deck to record the random noise to make an even worse cacophony.
I learned nothing from it and at some point it disappeared, probably due to my annoyed parents and/or the many note bricks i had lost over time.
I had a Glockenspiel as well and tried to make something from Lego to play it automatically when i was a bit older.
The sound of these "instruments" is still ingrained in my ears and they bleed a little from the memories.
Are there better toys? Sure! But "All wrong"? The clickbait is strong with this one.
More importantly, they're getting children wrong. In the US, since the 60s, children (teens) have been treated as a market demographic. Since the 80s even pre-teen children have been. Children should not be marketed to. Period.
I'm not only complaining about makeup sales or frivolous things like frisbees. I'm not only complaining about Transformers: more than meets the eye, because it's a bunch of media starring dolls you can buy.
Beyond those things, rather than target adults directly, for many decades now we have what is effectively corporate-funded psyops aimed at people's children.
We somehow care about the relative non-issues of drunk driving, child abduction and "stranger danger!", drugs, and more. Yet we don't seem concerned at all about children's desires being subverted to coopt their parents. We don't care about highly effective, efficient mechanisms of market capitalism pointed directly at our kids!
Thanks, the Guardian, for trying to raise the alarm while also raising a smokescreen.
Also:
> The history of toys is the history of teaching children to preoccupy themselves usefully and solitarily
WTF? No. The history of toys is largely the history of children creating play (where adults didn't intend it) and then sharing it. Humans are social. We make and use toys. We use toys other folks invented, too, and often in new ways. Toys are not anti-social.
That quote reads like someone who's only ever heard about vibrators and has heard that they're only used alone! (Out of touch, as it were.)
