For decades we've been using games to squeeze learning into playtime – and games are marketed as tools that turn kids into thriving, high-achieving adults. Is it time for a rethink?
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The week my oldest son finished kindergarten, I decided to clean out the playroom where he had spent much of his young life bonding with inanimate objects. The games they had kept him company whenever other duties or distractions occupied his mother and me, and over the years we had amassed a truly vast number of them. As I sifted through stacks upon stacks, I felt like I was in the pit of a huge archaeological dig. I didn't think we were particularly pushy or indulgent parents. Most of all, I wanted my children to grow up to be financially independent and live a life of nothing worse than shared misery. But the toys and structures in our Midden playground told another story.
Here's a partial inventory of what I found: 13 floor puzzles, including several intended to teach the alphabet. Two sets of magnetic tiles, along with dozens of figurines and matchbox cars, for constructive and imaginative play. Xylophones and tambourines to enhance musical ability and a range of finger paints to inspire artistic creativity. Four logic games and a set of dice for math practice. A speaker that could play Mozart or children's versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Endless Duplo. And, to teach our children how to relax after the intense afternoon of pedagogy, these other things were meant to facilitate, the Fisher-Price Meditation Mouse™ , an electronic plush toy that offers guided stretching and relaxation exercises (I copy the advertising slogan: “help your little one learn how to nama-stay relaxed”).
Our toy pile may have been extreme, but it was by no means atypical. American families spend, on average, about 600 $ per year on toys. A typical 10-year-old in the UK may have owned 238 toys in their short life, totaling around £6,500. This abundance speaks to an entire world – a postwar boom in plastics, babies and disposable income, of people in Chinese factories and Madison Avenue marketing agencies, of the not-always-benign neglect of parents with relentless careers or hangovers or a aversion to spending time with other emotionally volatile beings. Above all, perhaps, the abundance of play reveals a particular vision of what play and childhood are.
Over the past two centuries, educators, psychologists, toy companies, and parents like us have acted, implicitly or otherwise, as if the purpose of play is to optimize children for adulthood. The dominant model for how to do this was the schoolhouse, with its reading, ritual, and "reason." The more educational books we could gift and then cram into our children, the better. Then, with the rise of neuroscience in the latter half of the 20th century, toys were increasingly commercialized and purchased for the purpose of building better brains in order to create more competitive and successful adults – to become the Homo sapiens a little wiser.
The pressure to do this has been felt most acutely with younger children, aged five and under, and in recent decades the market has given us brands such as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius and Fat Brain (tagline: “Toys that affect Fat substance"). By 2020, the broad category of educational games generated nearly $65 billion worldwide, a number that is projected to double within the decade. Educational games – from Speak & Spell and See 'n Say to a whole team of robots learning to code – now permeate many young lives. "This generation of parents is asking games to provide an end product, and that end product is well-being," Richard Gottlieb, a prominent toy industry consultant, told me. "They want games to get their kids to Harvard."
But the "bath your child in ABC and 123" version of child development has recently come under threat. In its place, a vision of childhood and its games emerges that is more archaic and even anarchic. "The model was, 'If I have toys that do school things, then that's good,'" Alison Gopnik, a leading developmental psychologist, told me. "But that really goes against what developmental science tells us." The effect of Christmas and birthdays is that young children are much more cognitively sophisticated than many toys on the Amazon results page or on the shelves of Hamleys assume. For decades, we've been getting our kids and their toys wrong.
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This summer, I visited the western New York headquarters of Fisher-Price, the world's largest maker of toys for children under six, to see how beliefs about child development are embodied in specific toys. In the atrium of the main building, I watched an employee guide a giant spiral red cherry tree down from an upper level to the ground floor. Scattered along the aisles were examples of the company's best-known and best-selling toys, from the classic Rock-a-Stack ring stacker, on the market since 1960, to 4-in-1 Ultimate Learning Bot .
Creating a series of games often takes a few years. At Fisher-Price, which has been part of the $6 billion Mattel toy group since the early 1990s, commercial concerns naturally come first. The planning process begins with a sheet from the marketing department that identifies how many different products are needed for an upcoming season, at what prices, and for which stores and licensing franchise. Then comes the trend reports, which help define design directions, from the color palette to the personality of each game. Each offer should be "toy", which translates into English as "cute" and easy to buy.
In the late 2010s, when designing Linkimals, a wildly popular line of educational toys in the shape of quirky mammals that purported to teach basic literacy, numeracy and the colors of the rainbow, Fisher-Price considered many types of characters. "Forests and weird creatures are really starting to trend," said Dom Gubitosi, who oversees the company's infant and toddler toy design. "Parents were tired of elephants and tigers." Today, the range includes A to Z Otter, Boppin' Beaver and Lights & Colors Llama – but sadly no Patterns & Prepositions Pangolin. "No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't make the pangolin cute enough," said Kevin Crane, Linkimals' lead product designer.
Even in the age of electronic delivery, the defining moment in the life of many mass-market toys happens in the store aisle. The children they begin to make their own purchasing decisions when they enter elementary school, but for childhood toys, adults are still primarily the ones making the purchase. To get adults to open their wallets – or to get kids to hit, beg, laugh and then rage until the adults open their wallets – a game's "shelf experience" is crucial.
"We think a lot about what 'Try Me' is going to be," an independent toy designer who licenses ideas to Fisher-Price told me. Linkimals are designed to engage children and parents by using radio frequencies to chat back and forth and sing ABC songs together. "The holy grail has always been games talking to each other, and that's what we did," Crane told me. "The consumer who bought it with faith, because he experienced the learning, the magic."
A critical element in this "magic" is the content loaded onto the games' silicon microchips. Some of the Linkimals come with more than 125 "songs, sounds, melodies and phrases" to educate the baby. "I can't tell you how many 'count to 10' songs I've written," said Cheralyn Paul, a Fisher-Price producer who described her job as "writing the entire online experience" for preschool consumers.
The catchy little songs that stick in your head that came out of a tiny speaker on the back of one of the Linkimals – “Hell-ooh friends, how are you to-day? Are you ready to play? Let friendship light the way!” – was largely the brainchild of Paul and a sound designer named Glen Tarachow, who performs as a techno DJ named Euphoreum and, under his own name, as a composer of minimalist music – an antidote, perhaps, to the carnivalesque sound he makes at Fisher-Price .
"We bring the energy," Tarachow said of his game lineups. "We always say this – more energy!" Six months later, one of his homegrown children's songs – inspired, he said, by Belgian nightclubs – still haunted me: “All I see are colors, colors all around. All I see is colors, colors when I bounce. LEAP!" (“All I see are colors, colors all around. All I see are colors, colors when I bounce. BOUNCE!”).
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In different times and places, and often in the same place at the same time, the years between birth and adolescence have been seen as a spring of innocence and discovery, a mine of cheap and ready labor, or a spell of reckless sin that needed to be broken by catechism and the rod. These beliefs brought conflicting feelings about play, that characteristic childhood activity, and its common materials, toys. Fisher-Price toys were in many ways the epitome of a vision of youth that began to take shape several hundred years ago, but which became truly mainstream during the last century.
A remarkable range of species, from elephant fish to Komodo dragons, have been observed having fun with objects such as twigs, rings and plastic balls. In our species, play is ubiquitous, and there is possible evidence of play dating back at least to the Late Upper Paleolithic period, from 20,000 to 10,000 BC, although the most common toys, such as stick dolls and small wooden spears, probably disappeared entirely from the early archaeological record. From the Bronze Age onwards, toys appear frequently, and often in tombs and other settings that suggest how closely they were associated with what it means to be a child. An Attic flask of the fifth century BC. in the Metropolitan Museum of Art depicts a small boy preparing to cross the River Styx into the underworld. He reaches out one hand to his living mother, grabs the handle of a toy cart.
Although the explicit didacticism of modern games is relatively new in human history, games have always seemed to provide a foothold on the climb to maturity. A ram-shaped toy from the 3rd millennium BC city of Tell Asmar. in the Kalahari Desert, the child-sized bow and arrow still help prepare the child for his eventual role in the hunt. After the spread of capitalism and the Protestant ethic beginning in the 16th century, play in much of the Western world was frowned upon unless interpreted as a form of physical, intellectual, and morally productive labor. Educational toys like the ones that filled my son's playroom grew more or less directly out of that kind of moralistic and hardworking zeal.
In the mid-20th century, this zeal acquired a dubious neuroscientific rationale. Beginning in the 1960s, researchers studying laboratory rats, cats, and monkeys found that mammals needed relative stimulation early in life in order to develop critical abilities such as vision. They also found that the young creatures had an overabundance of synaptic connections that "pruned" dramatically as they grew. Animals raised in environments where they could interact with toys and other members of their species had more synapses than those raised in isolation.
On their own terms, these were ground-breaking ideas for what is now known as neuroplasticity, the study of how the brain changes over time. But the results were quickly gathered and extrapolated to people in scientifically unsound ways. Over the next 30 years, the belief took root that we need to stimulate young children's brains through play, bilingualism, and intrauterine Bach in order to ensure that these brains form and maintain the maximum number of synapses so that children can reach to the best possible level and to avoid a lifetime of drudgery, misery or even crime. In the late 1990s, neuroscience writer and research funder John T Bruer called this the "myth of the first three years."
All the talk about synapses gave a biological investment to the already widespread doctrine of "infantile determinism" – the idea that early experiences irreversibly shape a person's behavior and abilities. This idea was already present to a greater or lesser degree in many psychological systems, from Freudianism and John Bowlby's attachment theory to the gradual developmental phases advocated by Jean Piaget. As a Harvard child psychiatrist told journalist Ronald Kotulak in 1996, “There's this shaping process that goes on early, and then at the end of that process, whether it's two, three, or four years old, basically a brain is designed that probably isn't going to to change much more". Use games to smuggle learning early on, otherwise the window for maximum growth will close forever.
It is true that major trauma and extreme deprivation can cause lasting, sometimes irreparable damage to young children. It also turns out that positive early experiences – such as parenting – can moderate this damage. But despite the best efforts of millions of die-hard parents, you can't seem to turn three-year-olds into geniuses by giving them plastic ukuleles for their birthdays or even teaching them violin scales. (You may well be able to instill in these children a crippling perfectionism and profound sense of inadequacy.) Likewise, you don't need to grow up with hundreds of toys or speak three languages to be super bright. (In fact, you can still learn many languages with a high degree of fluency in later childhood and beyond.)
Not all of this perspective has been passed on to parents. As early as the mid-1980s, Brian Sutton-Smith, probably the most prolific theater scholar in history, could write: “We have little convincing evidence for a link between games, per se, and achievement. What is most obvious is that… we have steadily and progressively developed the belief that there is a connection between games and achievements.”
By the late 1990s, when the myth of the first three years had fully permeated American culture, the educational games segment was growing faster than any other segment of the industry and at more than twice the rate of the US economy as a whole. The purchase of educational toys had become "a form of ritual magic whose practice is believed to ensure optimal development of that fertile site, the infant brain," wrote communication scholar Majia Nadesan in the early 2000s. By that time, the myth had taken over society at almost every level, from government policy to the Toys 'R' Us aisle.
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At Fisher-Price headquarters, it was hard not to feel that an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and alkaline batteries—not to mention a few synapses—was wasted on making Rube Goldberg machines for the alphabet song. On the day I visited, a researcher in a black surgical mask was sliding an eye-tracking device over the head of an 18-month-old boy. We were in a part of Fisher-Price called the Play Lab, where early childhood education experts use new technologies, such as face reader emotion-analysis software, to help design games that meet children's "physical, cognitive, social and emotional needs development". (One of the company's recent slogans has been "Best Possible Start," which seems like a good way to inject the urgency of the first three years directly into the ready veins of insecure parents.)
Once the eye tracker was in place, the little boy was ready to begin his encounter with the Smooth Moves Sloth™ , an eight-inch electronic light and noise box in the Linkimals series. Designed to capture children's attention with its wide, vacant smiling eyes and hypnotically swaying head, Sloth has the vibe of a happy lobotomized kindergarten teacher. A trainee triggered one of Sloth's functions by pressing a button on his leg and it began to act. "Hello, how's it going?" asked the creature, sounding like a California college weasel brought to the front of a classroom. "Hahaha. Let's sing!"
A look of alarm crossed the toddler who turned away from the toy without taking his eyes off it. Such retreats are typical for young mammals when encountering new objects in their environment, they must assess the unfamiliar entity for danger before they can consider playing with it. One of the things Play Lab researchers look for is distinct "plays," an industry-wide term of art for the ways in which toys engage children: encourage a child to crawl on the floor, allow children to sort shapes and stack? block? Fisher-Price claims Sloth is proven to help "Strengthen early learning connections in little brains" and teaches "ABC & 123s, Opposites & Games." The little boy advanced toward the Sloth, then retreated again, curious, but alert. He might be learning something, but it wasn't, at that moment, his ABCs.
The idea that we need electronic games to teach children to name colors or count to 10 has been challenged by several centuries of human history. However, because school is the dominant vehicle for learning, children who are not yet in school are often seen as little more than empty vessels waiting to be filled. "The conventional wisdom about children under five was that there wasn't much going on there at all," said Alison Gopnik, the developmental psychologist. "You still hear people say things like, 'Oh, kids can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality,' or 'They can't think logically,' and all that."
In the 1970s and 1980s, Gopnik and her colleagues at UC Berkeley, along with other researchers, began developing better techniques for assessing how developing minds work. They did not focus on what the children said, but on what they did in creative and problem-solving situations. "It turned out that even the youngest babies already knew more and were learning more than we ever thought," Gopnik continued. "They're highly logical, and they're much better in some ways at doing inferential learning" — using piecemeal information to make accurate generalizations about a messy world — "than any other creature we know."
One of the ironies of many so-called educational games is that they don't leave much for children to do or figure out on their own. You turn the arrow, pull the string, and a pig grunts, end of story. "As I like to put it, the best toys are 90% the child, 10% the toy," said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychologist at Temple University who has led some of the most widely reported research on the effects of play on child development. "If the toy is 90% and the child is 10%, that's a problem." (Her comments brought to mind the Fisher-Price Linkimals, which “connect, sync, play and learn together,” as the tagline runs — no baby required.)
Instead of playing with educational toys that dispense information the way a fair dispenses cotton candy – like saccharine, fluorescent, trivial fluff – kids could be exploring the fascinating complexity of the world. They could spend time discovering, before they can ever articulate their knowledge, the basics of Newtonian mechanics and interpersonal dynamics. In the first research program of its kind, a ten year study at the Center for Early Childhood Education at Eastern Connecticut State University examined the types of play elicited by different types of toys. "In 2010, when we started this, there wasn't a lot of research on games," Julia DeLapp, who now runs the center, told me.
After watching children play with more than 100 different types of toys, the researchers concluded that simple, open-ended, unrealistic toys with many parts, such as a random assortment of Legos, inspired high-quality play. While engaged in such games, children were "more likely to be creative, engage in problem solving, interact with peers, and use language," the researchers wrote. Electronic toys, however, tended to limit children's play: “A simple wooden cash register in our study inspired children to engage in many discussions about buying and selling – but a plastic cash register that produced sounds when pressed buttons mostly inspired kids to just press the buttons repeatedly."
As a result of such research, it is increasingly recognized that the best new toys are the best old ones – sticks and blocks and dolls and sand that do not follow any pre-programmed routines, that do not elicit predetermined behaviours. "I don't think video games are horror, but what often happens in the industry is that we kind of overdo it with games and take over the kids' experience," Hirsh-Pasek said. "Then after kids play with the toy once or twice, they're more interested in the box."
And yet many policy makers, toy makers and parents still drastically underestimate children's cognitive abilities. Just three years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics deemed it necessary to warn about "the proliferation of electronic, sensory-stimulating noises and light toys ... that may be viewed by parents as necessary for developmental progress despite a lack of supporting evidence."
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Located in a former syrup factory in San Francisco's Mission District, Ideo Play Lab could be considered Fisher-Price's more urban second cousin. A design and consulting firm famous on the Ted Talk circuit for trying to redesign everything, from shopping basket up to death , Ideo has had a toy division for over 30 years. "We like to say that play is part of Ideo's DNA," Michelle Lee, one of Play Lab's managing directors, told me as we sat in the company's elegantly appointed headquarters.
Inside his sunny, open workspace, a boon to the creativity and well-being that creative and affluent people in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area associate with their home region, the lessons of recent developmental science seemed to seep through like fresh cup of coffee the entire detached house. Unlike Fisher-Price, toys that teach literacy and numeracy have become less sought after by the families Ideo Play Lab researches. Now it's all about open play and creativity. "The idea that you have an entire aisle in the toy store dedicated to helping parents feel like their kids are learning to read early is crazy," said Adam Skaates, co-director of the Idea Play Lab. Among other things, these kinds of educational games have been disrupted by newer technologies, he pointed out: "Tablets can deliver these experiences much more effectively."
It wasn't clear to me how open or creative the play offered by some of Ideo's best-selling toys—many of their ideas are bought by big manufacturers like Fisher-Price, Mattel, and Hasbro—but the designers there had a sophisticated way of talking about the play patterns their games provide. Construction sets offer build and fail play. Marble runs are for physics game. They were especially proud of a small plastic bunny with soft, fuzzy ears that nibbled on small pieces of cardboard illustrated with vegetables and pulled them into tiny pieces. When I was told that this charming little paper shredder was a good example of "parenting the game", I was almost convinced. It was certainly a good example of their own ingenuity.
Ideo's designers understood that the game isn't always about hitting developmental milestones. Vlasta Komorous-King, a toy inventor who has worked at Ideo for 15 years, told a story about watching a girl play with a doll. "And when the doll got upset, she gave the doll a puppet to calm it down," Komorous-King said. "He understood how powerful an object could be at that moment." It was the bright side of a more heartbreaking anecdote I'd read somewhere about the effects of video games on children's psyches: a struggling little boy who failed to poo on the toilet remarked to his mother, despairingly, “I guess I need new batteries. "
Despite these glimpses that play might mean other things, Ideo was in many ways a shrine to the old ethic that play should be productive. "Too often we see play and work as opposites, but we do our best work when we combine the two," Lee said. In addition to inventing games, Ideo Play Lab was trying to offer the game to all kinds of companies as a tool to improve their results. Not for the first time, I had the sad feeling that everything had been absorbed into a single overarching logic, that games and play and childhood had been completely considered and were now conquered territories in the work-implementation of everything.
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By the time my oldest son started elementary school, the toys that had been left in our playroom were largely tossed aside. His free time dwindled rapidly. Now there was homework, tennis and soccer practice, and 90 minutes of extracurricular study at our local branch of the Russian Mathematical School. Like a flickering light bulb, my wife and I vacillated between worrying that we were overloading him and then rushing to get him on the waiting list for Mandarin and chess lessons. Occasionally, I suggested setting up a woodworking shop in the garage or taking my son and his friends to the local woods on Wednesday afternoons so they could have fun getting lost and climbing trees.
Even in my visions of cherub-headed gambols in makeshift forts in hundreds of acres of woods, playing out narratives of joyous defiance among groups of real and imagined mates, figuring out as they go how to solve mechanical and emotional problems – even in such romances that lurk the kinds of aspirations and anxieties that had haunted our playroom: how to prepare children for a world that every day seems more uncertain, unequal, and insecure, in which, in addition to intergenerational privilege—which we certainly had—intelligence and creativity seemed to be the biggest guarantors of security and autonomy. Open play turned out to be just another way to try to get my six-year-old to Harvard. Even the new developmental science seemed to see children in terms that fit the market very well: it turns out that children are already optimal problem solvers, having exactly the kinds of non-linear thinking that the knowledge economy requires.
In the downtime between school and afternoon activities, when he had completed his symbolic worksheet and while I was tidying up the kitchen, my son would sometimes pretend to be the owner of a small ice cream stand that a family friend had recently bought for our children Christmas, serving wooden pieces of chocolate and vanilla with a child-sized plastic scoop. At times like these, it struck me that, after all, the logic of games was the logic of the supply teacher: keep the kids focused enough to keep them from bothering anyone or destroying anything, and maybe impart some basic lessons—to the letter , physics or neoliberalism – in the process.
"The history of games is the history of teaching children to be usefully and lonely," wrote Brian Sutton-Smith, the play theorist, shortly before his death in 2015. , games were ultimately gifts with a paradox. double message: "I'm giving you this toy to bond you with me, now go away and play with it yourself."
The day before I visited Fisher-Price, I had driven an hour east of Buffalo to the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester. Along with Sutton-Smith's archives, here you can find the world's largest collection of toy-related material, including around half a million dolls, toys and other toys. Wandering from row to row of Strong's rolling stacks was like being in the bowels of Noah's ark, if the pre-settlement world had been populated by rocking horses, Pet Rocks and Mr and Mrs Potato Head. It occurred to me that one thing we had taught our children with their toys was the habit of hoarding.
Strong is also home to the National Toy Hall of Fame, which since 1998 has featured some of America's most popular and enduring toys, from the stick, blanket and cardboard to the Atari game console and Barbie. Some of these toys were specifically about creativity and intellectual development (the Erector Set, Crayola crayons). Others were about unbridled joy or a refreshing waste of time (bubbles, the Magic 8 Ball ).
While at the Strong, I sat down with the museum's vice president of collections, Christopher Bensch. Before joining the museum, Bensch had worked at an art museum in Utica, New York, which had a historic house next door. "In the 19th century, it was home to the richest family in town," Bensch said. "Every Christmas, the two daughters growing up there would get a diary and in the diary they would write whatever else they got for Christmas."
"They had all the money in this booming industrial town and one year they got a dollhouse," Bensch continued, evoking a snowy New England yuletide from a bygone era. “But in later years, they would get an orange, a book, a dollhouse piece of furniture. They didn't get the full onslaught of goodies that every child expects to receive for birthdays and holidays today – or that a parent thinks, "I'm delinquent if I don't give them everything under the sun."
There was something like a jewel in the beauty and simplicity of this story: a single dollhouse, in a messy room, adored and filled, a closet with a tiny painted wardrobe, over the course of many years. I wanted for my son some of the austerity, some of the quiet, that these two girls must have shared.
But then again, they grew up in another world.
Source: theguardian.com