Not all shoppers will be searching for electronic devices or the latest fad toy released by toy makers this season!
Elementary age girls can expect to find Easy Bake Ovens, tea sets, dolls, and hula hoops under the tree this year. Boys can expect to find Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Tonka Trucks, and GI Joe’s under the tree. Older kids will not be exempt from receiving classics. Topping the list are classic board games such as Monopoly, Sorry, Battleship, and Scrabble.
There are several factors attributed to the resurgence of classics versus fads or technology. The first is that parents are reaching a saturation point with the electronics and battery operated toys. One parent, declining to be named, was expressing frustration at a store recently. “It seems that every time I turn around, the electronic thing stops working. Beyond that, I spend more on batteries than I did to buy the toy.”
Grandparents are inclined to nod in agreement with the experts, who say that children do not know how to play anymore. It is not simply that they do not have the toys, but that many have become desensitized to the point of needing therapy to develop sensory integration skills that are lacking.
Sensory integration is the ability to take in information through the senses of touch, movement, smell, taste, vision, and hearing, and to combine the resulting perceptions with prior information, memories, and knowledge already stored in the brain, in order to derive coherent meaning from processing the stimuli.
The National Occupational Therapy Association, in part attributes the lack of creative play opportunities to the rise in sensory issues in children. Child experts agree that children need to be stimulated from birth. Replacing an infant’s rattles and cloth books with a television is often the beginning of a childhood of problems. As the child ages, playing outside in a sand pile has been replaced with sitting in front of a computer screen. Riding bikes has been replaced with riding a virtual bike in the “gaming” world.
It is difficult for seniors to understand how it is that an occupational therapist would need to prescribe a sensory diet for a child, mandating that the child engage in activities that were once commonplace, yet that is exactly the trend that the country is in.
Craft fairs are an excellent source for locating classics such as wooden planes, trains, and automobiles. Handmade doll outfits are also found in most of the craft fairs. Smaller department stores and general stores, themselves reminiscent of days gone by, carry most of the classics that are topping the list this year. Larger stores also are carrying the classics; however shoppers will need to navigate through aisles of barking dogs, talking robots, shooting tanks, and crying dolls to find the toys that require the child to use their imagination and create the play script.
Originally published in print paper, Sebasticook Valley Weekly
