So we have this nanny, DL, who takes care of the Little One (8 months) while I’m at work. DL noticed we have a grand total of one electronic toy and decided to rectify this situation, bringing in a LeapStart toy of her own (she used to run a daycare center so has a bunch of random toys) that has all sorts of neat buttons and dials that play music and talk to you. DL was very excited about the fact that it teaches the baby to count to 5 in four different languages!
I, on the other hand, was a little horrified. We have no electronic toys because I don’t want them. I fought and won an active campaign against my mom who determined the Little One needed a musical mobile. (The Little One was an easy infant; I’m not saying musical mobiles aren’t lifesavers for some parents, but we didn’t need one.)
I think I’m mostly afraid that the e-toys make playing too easy: press a button or turn a dial and the toy does all the work of amusing you. It seems to me it could make it difficult to play with conventional toys that require a little more creativity and input from the kid to have fun with it. In addition, the Little One in particular is… well, the offspring of her dad and me, and as such is likely to be a computer geek and unlikely to be a people person, so I think she needs all the non-electronic stimulation she can get, as I suspect that will in her childhood be a premium rather than electronic/computer time (mr. hunter keeps asking when he can start to teach her Perl).
But on the other hand I guess they do teach the kid things. The one we do have trained her to push buttons for a little musical reward, which I think is really kind of cool. (Though why would you want your baby to learn to count to 5 in four different languages? I guess I can count to 10 in five different languages, but it’s never actually helped me with anything.)
So… I dunno. What do you guys think of them? Any good experiences or bad with them?
I do think it’s very important for babies/young children (well, children in general) to have and appreciate toys that don’t run on electricity/batteries. But I think a lot of the newer generation of e-toys are cool for a couple of reasons. One, they do teach cause and effect. If baby presses button A, such-and-such happens; if baby presses button B, something else happens. Two, let’s face it, we’re turning into an electronic world. My 10YO is better with electronic stuff than I am. Any kid growing up now is going to have to be ‘button proficient’, and electronic toys help with that.
Mudgirl didn’t have a LeapPad when she was little, but she did have something very similar. I don’t think it helped her learn to read, but it did teach her that if she used the stylus to highlight a particular word, the word would be read to her. We tended to save these e-toys for times when we didn’t have the option to interact with her (like on car trips).
In short, e-toys are not a substitute or replacement for old-fashioned toys (building blocks, Duplo blocks, Play-Doh when they’re a little older) or parental interaction. But they do have their place, imho.
I recall listening to a New Moms New Babies podcast a few months ago (episode from 21/4/10) where a child development expert was interviewed. IIRC they advised against the loud electronic ones for little bubs, since what their brains are trying to learn early on is shapes, textures, colours, functions, categorization and relationships etc. The electronic stuff is a little too complex and esoteric for little kids. We don’t have much that is electronic - I think one Lamaze flower game which I like since it encourages exploration of music. But everything else is pretty simple - blocks, shapes, stackers, wood toys, cloth fruits and vegetables, animals etc.
Eh, I think some people don’t understand “learning” at all. They think that being able to say unodostrescuatrocinco means you can count in Spanish: no, it doesn’t. I knew batbiirulauboseisaspi for over thirty years before I found out how to split it into the numbers from 1 to 7 in Basque (bat, bi, iru, lau, botz, sei, zaspi - I learned the run-on version from a song). For The Nephew, my sister in law refused to hear any suggestion (including from teachers and from my brother/her husband) that The Nephew couldn’t really count, he had just learned the string by rote and not very well at that. For The Niece, she one day confided in my mother “you know, I think maybe she can’t really count, she just knows the sounds but not what they mean.” Nooooo shit. This was at ages where both kids could evaluate “more” and “less”, but yeah, the rattling off was just rattling off. They couldn’t count any more than they could have written their own names.
I’m not fond of electronic toys in general terms, but then, I am also not fond of plunking the kids in front of the TV when they’re barely old enough to sit on their own, or of switching the car’s DVD on for any trip longer than “from home to the school” (trips to the pool take less than 15 minutes: The Nephew expects the DVD on, and I wonder whether he’d be able to recognize the path if he saw it from outside the car). But as for so many other things, it’s fine when judiciously applied. I would have been Mightily Pissed at the nanny for bringing it, though, and would have asked her to please check that kind of things with me, explaining that the lack of electronic toys was not an oversight but a conscious choice.
It’s not like there aren’t any toys that make noises acoustically, either. At first, our extended family didn’t understand - they thought we objected to the noise. It was when they came to visit and found the floor covered in Boomwhackers, tambourines, shakers and drums that they started to differentiate between ‘I hit this here and it makes this noise; I hit it somewhere else and it makes a different noise’ and ‘beep-beep-beep’.
One of the advantages of noisemaking toys is that you can get the dishes done and still hear what the kids are up to. The instant the noise stops, you step out of the kitchen to see what’s up.
Our kids, now 11 and 8, are on a 2 hour a day ration of TV, computer games and video games. No limit on how much drawing, reading, playing or listening to music and no limit on board games. Our most recent battle was over a wii - I don’t want one of those things in the house, and Grandma thinks they’re the best thing ever ‘because they get exercise.’ :rolleyes: Our compromise (over my objections) was that Grandma bought the wii and it’s hers - it stays at her house.
I just think there’s plenty of time to learn to do what the machine tells you to do - why not learn what you want to do first and then discover that the machine is actually quite limited compared to your imagination?
I hate electronic toys, too many anyway. I believe they totally halt imagination and wonder. I think you should have some for the kid, and maybe those should be the special toys, because as norinew says, it’s an electronic world. But mostly they should play with the stuff that doesn’t play for you.
We didn’t have them. (My girls are 7 and 10 now.) I was pretty much of the same opinion as you–also I dislike electronic noise. We had a zillion toys, but none of them went beep or boop. Nor did I buy them LeapPads or other kid-computer-program toys. I also had to limit TV quite strictly for years.
I’m not going to tell you that my kids’ personalities and accomplishments are the result of not having electronic toys, since they aren’t–but they are reasonably bright kids with lots of imagination, and they love to read, and they’re both good at math. (I’m trying not to brag here, can you tell? ;))
My younger girl does indeed have the issue you mention as a possibility with your kid–she is irresistibly attracted to screens, and she is a natural-born geek. (An adorable little geek. But she might as well have been born wearing a Tron t-shirt.) I do make a serious effort to keep her off the computer stuff as much as possible, because it’s kind of like crack for her and she’s too young to be spending 12 hours a day clicking mouse buttons and staring at a screen. Which is what she would do if she could! But she’s also so good at drawing and playing and imagining…
Yes, we live in a keyboarding, button-pushing age. But button-pushing just isn’t that hard of a skill to learn; we don’t need to start it at 6 months. I hardly let my kids touch computers before this year, but at a keyboard they are indistinguishable from their friends who have spent years playing LeapPad and Wii games.
So: personally I vote for tossing the beepy games. Your Little One will not suffer, I promise.
We had plenty of electronic toys for the kids since the oldest was born - my daughters are 10, 8, & 6 now. They’re doing well in school, especially in math, love to draw and read, and in all other ways seem perfectly fine.
My opinion? Kids will do well if they’ve got involved parents who love them and interact with them. Stressing over whether toy X provides the required amount of tactile stimulation and whether toy Y will affect their ability to understand logarithms when they’re 14 is a waste of energy. Let them play with the toys they enjoy.
Most battery operated toys for young kids have a screw that holds the battery compartment closed - by the time the kid can manipulate a philips head screwdriver, hopefully she’s not swallowing everything in sight. I said “most”, but it’s “all” in my experience - I assume there’s a CPSC requirement they’re following.
If I did it over again with my 4 year-old I wouldn’t get him anything electronic until he asked for it.
I think the marketing of these things on store shelves is totally aimed towards the parents and most kids under the toddler age have little interest in them or can ever understand what they’re trying to teach.
Letters and numbers formed with rows of LED lights for a 2 year old? Please.
I’ve also found them marketing remote control cars to younger and younger kids.
I think Dads think these are pretty cool but most toddlers prefer to be hands-on with vehicles.
So I’d probably agree with you. No need for any toy that requires batteries until the kid is old enough to ask for that particular toy.
Most of my son’s toys that take batteries have at least one screw, and they seem to be pretty safe.
My son gets bored with the electronic toys fairly quickly and prefers his toy trucks and blocks. I don’t have anything against them, but I think you get more bang for your buck from crayons and paper or other types of toys.
Thanks – it is great to hear (er, see) the different opinions!
Hee. DL is great with the baby but I have definitely noticed that her conception of learning is… different than mine. For example, after a week with my (then) 7-month-old she said to me, “Your baby is saying ‘Yeah!’ It’s her first word!” Now, both my husband and I were pretty sure that she was just vocalizing randomly, and since then we’ve listened to her closely and… we’re still sure; she doesn’t even seem to understand any language at this point, much less speak any. The point being that DL seems to almost romanticize learning in babies.
I’m not upset with her this time because the only time we had previously talked about it I didn’t really give her any good direction (“There are so many great electronic toys on the market!” “Mm.”) but definitely we’ve since had a talk and she knows to check with me in the future.
As long as I could confirm the kid wasn’t spending too much time with the toy, I probably wouldn’t care. I’ve got a few electronic toys - all purchased by my mother for my now four-year old. They’re handy occasionally for the baby, who’s 10 months, but she loses interest quickly, which is fine by me. Usually I just bring her into whatever room I happen to be in and hand her a ball or other household toys. For example, I’ll take her in the kitchen with me if I’m cooking dinner after work and open a few drawers with things like measuring cups. That way she can pull up, drag them out and smack them against the floor. Or if I’m folding laundry, we’ll play peek-a-boo in the sheets.
Amen.
I have a 6 year old and a 2 year old, and they have all kinds of different toys. I think people put too much weight on what any kind of toy will or won’t do. The electronic learning toy is probably not going to teach your kid anything OR destroy his creativity. Most likely he will see the pretty lights and then move on 5 minutes later to some blocks. Baby Einstein is not going to make your kid a genius, but it entertains them for half an hour so you can take a shower.
My kids have leap pads and legos, Wii and board games. They play with all kinds. Everything in moderation.
If you are the type of parent who cares enough to research toys/worry about time spent on them, then you are already an involved parent and your kids will benefit from that.
I agree with those who say it’s how you use the toys and allow them to be used that is critical, rather than the type of toy. The fact that you are giving this thought and making active decisions about it is the key point. We don’t have a lot of electronic stuff for our (almost) four year old, but we do have an electronic Tag reader, similar to the Leappad I think, which she loves for long journeys. My decision point has always been adaptability - I don’t like her to have things which can only be used to do one thing, or in one way. That doesn’t give her imagination any room at all.
Thirded? My daughter who is now four had a variety of electronic and non-electronic toys as a baby/toddler. Her creativity does not seem to have suffered for it. She likes playing with electronic things like the Wii (she has a high score of ~150 on bowling now), but will also invent her own games. For instance, last night she made up a game where you had to roll a ball onto a piece of paper and then dance around it if you succeeded. She also spent 30 minutes giving her doll a medical exam. All that despite really liking her beep-booping activity table as a toddler.
dangermom, I so agree with the electronic noise. I have a fair amount of classical music training and it has rendered me practically allergic to the canned electronic music that you hear in babies’ toys.
muldoonthief (and supporters), I really like that. I’ll stop stressing so much about it. (New mom, can you tell?)