Laro Tayo: Let's talk about toys

Blogger's Note: Toys, toys, toys! This is what my son always ask me to bring every weekend when I arrived at home after working during the whole week in Metro Manila. I try to buy toys that encourage him to think and allow him to tinker. But there are times I buy those "commercial" toys out of whim and strong advertising. With this article, I now think twice before buying something for him.

Toys: more than play
Posted 11:53pm (Mla time) Mar 01, 2005
By Michael L. Tan, Inquirer News Service

SOME of you may have seen one of the Lego toys that allow children to assemble their own robots. My sister, who works with children as an occupational therapist, loves these toys but was aghast to find out recently that local distributors sometimes offer to assemble the robots for the kids!

This offer to pre-assemble the robot defeats the whole purpose of the toy, which is to help with a child's physical and mental development. It's not just Lego toys that have this function. Generally, toys are tools for a child to interact, through fun and play, with the world and with people.

Nature has built this play mode into the early life of animals to prepare them for survival. Watch puppies and kittens at play and it's hard to miss the parallels with human martial arts designed to hone motor skills as well as the brain's ability to detect threats and opportunities.

Animals have "toys," too. Again, we've seen our pets totally engrossed with a crumpled piece of paper, or a stick, or a ball-nature's way of sharpening mind-body coordination. Humans have gone a step further to create all kinds of toys that have made play even more exciting-and educational.

Unfortunately, toys have taken on a new function in our consumerist, class-conscious society. Toys have become status symbols, children demanding them because their classmates have them, too. A pre-assembled Lego robot becomes a trophy ("My parents are rich enough to buy this!") rather than a tool for play and for education.

Making sense of the world
In early childhood, toys are important mainly for developing visual and cognitive skills, for helping the child to make sense of the bewildering but exciting world out there. You don't need expensive fancy toys for this. String together different objects, hang them from the ceiling and your infant will be kept busy all day, cooing away as she watches the mobile twirling around.

Lego toys build on a child's natural curiosity, the need to assemble and disassemble, without any rules except to let imagination run free. But good toys don't always have to come from stores. Watch urban poor kids transform a discarded rubber slipper into a little boat, to be floated down a canal. An empty alcohol bottle, or a powder container, becomes a car or a truck, with wheels cut out of old rubber slippers and connected with “walis tingting” [thin sticks]. Simply making these toys sharpens the mind and fine-tunes manual skills.

Toys are in a sense simulators that help children to learn to solve problems. Go to your kitchen and get a glass or cup, and find little objects -- pebbles, clips, trinkets -- to use for a little hide-and-seek game with your infant. Point to an object and then cover it with the cup. The child begins to wonder what happened to the trinkets. Take away the cup and they rediscover the trinkets. A silly game? Not at all. The child begins to figure out presence and absence. (A modification on this, without any toys needed, is for you to play hide and seek behind a door, a chair-those of us raising children know this can just go on endlessly.)

Older children are more sophisticated. You can tell which kids are going to be particularly sharp, the ones who are always assembling and disassembling stuff at home, from clocks to cell phones. Exasperated with all the stuff they've disassembled and can't get back together? Then give them mechanical objects that have broken down, and let them play to their heart's content. (Do be careful though: young children shouldn't be allowed to play with objects that have small parts. They might put these in their mouths and choke.)

Social values
Toys converge with games for another important problem-solving function: figuring out one's place in society, and the norms for being a social being. Values of sharing, of self-esteem and mastery in accomplishments, of humility when one's less successful, of winning and losing graciously -- all these come as children handle toys and games with other children (and adults). If you only have one or two children, make sure they get to play with other relatives, or with the neighbor's children.

Toys are "loaded" with value messages. Toy guns glorify violence and aggression, while that imported Barbie doll is telling your little girl that to be pretty is to be Caucasian, dressed in a certain way, with a particular hairstyle, a particular demeanor, and to have certain physical attributes that are actually impossible to replicate in real life. (Barbie's "vital statistics" are too top-heavy -- a real woman with her figure would fall flat on her face every time she tried to walk.)

I started out complaining about how a pre-assembled Lego robot reflects a distorted value: that of looking at objects as possessions and trophies. Likewise, if we buy toys simply because they're the latest, then we encourage children to be superficial and trendy. Don't be surprised later in life if they insist on the latest models of cell phones, or electronic gadgets, or cars.

Children can sense, too, when parents use toys (and television) as a substitute for nurturing, a way of distancing themselves from the responsibilities of childrearing. Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman rightly warned recently about how television is dumbing down young Filipinos. I'd agree, and warn too that the dangers come with both television and toys becoming substitutes for parenting, a way for adults to distance themselves from the responsibilities of childrearing. Toys are only as good as the social interaction that is provided by playmates, caregivers and parents. And if your child proclaims that he or she's bored with a roomful of toys, it just may be a distress signal. The child needs simpler but more fulfilling pleasures that come with reading, or a walk, or just time together.

We might want to ask ourselves, too, about how we respond to children at play. When they bombard you with questions, when they insist on exploring every shape, every hue, every smell of every object in a room, we scold them, "Kulit!" and "Likot!" It's time for a paradigm shift here. "Galing!" in praise of inquisitiveness and innovation, tenacity and agility become appropriate for a child who has exuberantly discovered the joys of learning in toys and games.

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