Christmas, the season of goodwill, is also the season of tyranny. It is the season when little children blackmail their parents to buy the toy that is all the rage this season. Toys are drugs. Like drugs, they function as artificial stimulants of children’s consciousness. They are addictive. Children just can’t have enough toys. And like drugs they turn our children into zombies, insatiable consumers who will for ever hunger for the latest craze, and destroy their imagination and well-being.
So don’t buy any toys for the little blighters. Instead, wrap up a huge empty cardboard box and watch how much fun they have with it. When I did that last year, it became a ship that went “Poop, poop” and sailed across the ocean of our living room carpet. Unfortunately, this would probably make you the most unpopular parent of the century. Children have been hypnotised by television advertisements into little demons whose desires must be fulfilled. When this is translated into peer-group pressure it makes children hypersensitive to the number, sophistication and therefore the cost of the toys they receive. How could they tell their friends, hold up their heads in the schoolyard, if they got an empty cardboard box for Christmas – even if it did provide them with hours and hours of fun? Children and parents who cannot afford the latest craze feel inadequate and alienated.
One of the most evocative places I know is the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, an interesting title since it is a museum of toys. What is so evocative about this museum is the ease with which you can tell the social, military and economic history of the country from looking at the toys. Now that is not a function of childhood, it’s a function of adults wanting to imprint their ideas, aspirations and ideals on children. In one sense, passing on our culture to children is the job of every generation, the task of continuity. But there is something limited and limiting when toys are our agency of transmission.
Of course, “children” are not just persons below some critical age. “Childhood” is a social construction with its own history. To understand how the toy game is played nowadays, it is worth seeing it in the context of how it developed as a part of childhood.
For a glimpse of the Good Old Days, we needn’t look further than the traditional Dutch winter solstice celebrations. There we find the original Santa Claus, who comes every year early in December, with his big bag of toys. Santa first interrogates children about their behaviour: “have you been good this year?” Santa’s assistant, Black Peter, whips those who fail; those who have been good get the goodies. This quaint narrative takes us back to the days when there was little sentimentality about children, when they were simply small people who had to be trained to do their future job.
Although the notion of childhood began to change with the Enlightenment sentimentality, which came to full commercial flower in Victorian times, the function of toys has remained more or less the same. Now, as then, toys are used to prepare children for crucial social roles.
Today, toys are designed to slot children into the dominant role of affluent societies: consumption. The function of modern toys is to turn children into impulsive buyers of tomorrow. Toys are little ideological bundles that inculcate a totally materialistic understanding of desire and satisfaction. It is the task of children to get mum and dad to divert an extraordinary amount of their income into buying toys.
Conventionally, toys were a way of marking distance between children and adults. The principle used to be: “When I was a child I thought as a child . . . When I became a man I put away childish things.” Now children think through concepts constructed by obnoxious marketing men and grow up to acquire childish addictions to adult “toys” with no transition period or space to think for themselves. There is a continuous and seamless movement from “baby’s first toy” to toys for toddlers, infants, juniors, adolescents and adults. Each toy, and each step, is an elaborate marketing scheme that demands follow-up buying. Once you have bought Barbie you need to buy a couple of wardrobes for her, not forgetting her boyfriend, Ken. Both children and adults are locked into a feedback loop of ideas and experiences that leads nowhere but to more and more toys. Hence, the hype, the hysteria over the toys that are sold out, with parents and grandparents flying across continents to queue for some ephemeral junk.
So toys have little to do with play, and everything to do with possession. This is my first reason for keeping children away from modern toys.
My second reason for rejecting toys is that they seriously limit children’s imagination. Most modern toys have one assigned function. A Teletubby, for example, is a Teletubby: a stupid person who lives in tellyland. Batman lives in Gotham City and all the details of his miserable world are provided – nothing is left to the imagination. And as for the Sindies, Barbies, Cabbage Patch dolls or Bonnies: they are not toys but concepts; one cannot play with them in the conventional sense of using one’s imagination to create a world because the world is created for you, all the details are already filled in. Children have little to do but follow the conceptual grid laid out for them.
The limitations placed on the imagination of children are not abstract. They always promote certain world views, such as that of Hollywood in the case of movie-based toys, or that of western middle-class computer culture in the case of PlayStation and other computer toys. Consider, for example, the message projected by Barbie. If only you looked like Barbie, little girl, you could marry Ken and live happily ever after – that is, be loved and protected, unconditionally and for ever (by the ultimate daddy-person). Or if you look like the princess, “someday, my prince will come”, and then you will have the guarantee of growing up just like mummy (the all-powerful), have daddy (the even more powerful), and make babies (your destiny). This picture not only denies them a more complex view of their potential but also creates serious confusions. When the stakes for becoming just like mummy get very high, in puberty and adolescence, they end up with distorted body images. It is hardly surprising that so many girls in our society grow up hating their bodies and faces, which are going through all kinds of untoward changes. Some of them settle for self-loathing, while the worst afflicted try to starve themselves to death (“eating disorders”) or see fat in the mirror (“body dismorphic disorder”). Others simply dumb themselves down to make themselves more attractive to boys.
Not surprisingly, boys are growing up expecting Barbie-type bodies and compliance in every girl they meet. And their own toys reflect the most extreme manifestation of their gender – Action Man, He-Man, GI Joe and other big and powerful masculine, macho, well-built and violent figurines. Most toys for boys are based on the idea that war, mayhem, destruction and domination are all there in the world. Control, being the total master of your universe, is the basic ingredient of all electronic games. What matters is winning, “scoring”, how many points you put up on the board. You are up against every user who has played the game. All life becomes a contest not just against a combatant you can see, but also against anonymous combatants – real, virtual and enemies from the future.
There is a direct and unbroken line between spending your childhood shooting, kicking, stabbing, punching, hitting and playing war games, kung fu fighting games and dragon-slaying games and the ability or lack thereof to manage aggression and testosterone poisoning in adolescence. From there the step to a full adult who is unable to control his rage and manage aggression is a short one. Witness how many young adults drive on the road as though they were playing a racing video game.
This brings me to my third reason for rejecting toys. By turning today’s little angels into social misfits of tomorrow, toys are seriously damaging our future.
In so far as play is an opportunity to create, toys best serve play when they leave most room for creation. When toys belonged to the realm of crafts, they were made of simple materials such as wood, clay and paper. This allowed for the greatest flexibility and the application of the player’s imagination. Craft toys demanded the involvement of children and their very nature promoted socialisation and co-operation. They assisted children not just in becoming members of society in creative and flexible ways but also in seeing the future as full of potential: the world need not be the way the adults have shaped it. It could be improved.
Today, toys embody the qualities of the automaton, the robot-like machine. They promote a monolithic notion of the future. The future has only one possibility – the continuation of the war-like present. There is no option for children to imagine alternative possibilities in the future. It is thus; and it will always remain so. In other words, modern toys increasingly embody a reductionist, one-dimensional view of the world where exploitation is the norm and there is no place for improvement.
Moreover, exploitation is central to the way toys are actually manufactured – my last argument against toys. An overwhelming proportion of all the world’s toys are made in China and South-east Asia, manufactured by a handful of giant corporations, and made at the expense of children (as young as five and six) and women who work in appalling conditions and are paid pennies for their labour. I have visited Thai and Indonesian toy factories where teenage girls, working nightshifts, stitch Barbie’s frilly dresses in crammed conditions; their fingers and palms are often cut to shreds and their eyes are always watery owing to the strain of the work. There is a prison-like atmosphere inside these factories: workers are denied breaks, work perilously close to the hot plastic used for making all varieties of dolls and breathe its poisonous fumes. They often sleep and eat in overcrowded “hostels” next to the factories.
Fires and poisonings are common in these factories. Since 1993 there has been a string of reports of fires and death by toxic fumes in toy factories in China, Indonesia, Thailand and Hong Kong. In 1993, a fire at the Kader Industrial Toy Company in Bangkok killed 118 workers, all but 14 of them women and children. A recent study by the Hong Kong-based groups, Asian Monitoring Resource Centre and the Coalition for the Charter on the Safe Production of Toys, reports that the main ingredients of plastic toys – high- and low-density polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene and polystyrene – are all highly toxic. Workers constantly exposed to these chemicals experience headaches and skin rashes as immediate effects. Later, they experience disorders of the nervous system. Exposure to spray paints used in the manufacture of plastic toys results in the loss of white blood cells, weakens the immune system within a few months and frequently causes leukaemia. They are seldom compensated for industrial accidents.
Breaking out of the tyranny of modern toys is not easy. A parent is not a good parent if he or she cannot provide the toys demanded by their children. No one wants their children to think of them as miserly, killjoy mummies and daddies. We want them to think of us as friends. Which reminds me, since we all have been indoctrinated with the idea of being a friend to our kids, what happened to all those games you could play with your kids? What about running around the house, screaming in joy, crying with pain, hiding and seeking, climbing a tree, using the innate imagination and creativity to see things, interpret things, make things? I’d better wrap that cardboard box and pretend it’s a boat crossing the carpet sea.
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