Have you heard of the recent parenting trend of snack toys?
Keeping a child amused for hours on end isn’t the only aim of toy makers. They are increasingly creating playthings aimed at busy kids who only have bite-size bits of time to play—a trend some in the industry are calling “snack toys.”
School-age children are increasingly playing in short bursts of time between organized activities—whether on the sidelines of a sibling’s soccer game or at home, between piano lessons and homework… (Dr Amy Tuteur, The Skeptical OB)
When I was a kid, my snack toy was, and still is to a large extent – books! REAL books, not Kindle books. Remember what those are? 😉 (Geez, my kids won’t even know what it was like to have LPs or cassette tapes that came with storybooks!)
As for these snack toys – way to induce a guilt complex/overachieving/frenetic/masochistic lifestyle into your youngster!
“Parents and children tell us they want a quick in-and-out, frictionless gaming experience,” says Jonathan Berkowitz, vice president of marketing at Hasbro. “That’s the snackable component.”
Oy.
I suspect that in this context, “frictionless” means “a game in which a single player is guaranteed to win in some way”. The kid isn’t challenged to develop skills by losing to a more skilled opponent and has less of a chance to develop the critical thinking skills so important later in life:
We claim to want children to develop creativity, critical thinking, especially to learn how to “think outside the box.” Yet our actions belie our words. Children who have only time enough for “snack toys” don’t have time for creativity or critical thinking and certainly aren’t going to learn to “think outside the box” when their lives are so controlled that even their play comes out of a box in bite size pieces. (Dr. Amy Tuteur, The Skeptical OB)
I recently watched a Louis Theroux documentary called “America’s Medicated Kids”, which interviewed families with kids who were supposedly suffering from conduct disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, or even antisocial personality disorder (which cannot be diagnosed in children under 18 – instead, they get diagnosed with conduct disorder).
Louis asked one of the children why he got angry so often (his repeated tantrums and outbursts were what led to his diagnoses). The child’s response was to crawl under the table and say, “I hate to lose!” In other words, he wants “frictionless” experiences. Another time, he howled and rolled on the floor behind the couch.
So what? That kid doesn’t have a pathological disorder. He’s blowing off steam, like lots of kids do! And who isn’t disappointed when they lose at some sort of competition?
Another problem is the power of diagnostic labels – once you get dxed, especially with something that sounds impressive or frightening, it makes people feel like they’re special in some way. It sets you apart from your peers when you have to take meds every day, and that sort of distinction feels even stronger when you’re young. It may also induce the patient to actually mirror the behaviour of that diagnosis in order to continue to meet the expectations of patient behaviour of it.
One of the kids, Hugh, talks about this. He’s extremely bright and extremely well-spoken for only being 10 years old, yet here he is, on psychiatric medications. And as it turns out, everyone in his family, including the dog, is on medication, supposedly to deal with the stress of being around this very intelligent child. I’d hazard a guess that Hugh’s acting-out is probably because he’s bored to death.
Having said that, the documentary doesn’t follow these kids around every day for years and years – we see only a fraction of what their daily lives are like, much less than the minimum 6 months’ duration of behaviour required for a psychiatric diagnosis of any kind – so things are watered-down. But I think Louis does an exceptional job of exploring these issues.
Here’s the documentary.
Have a look and see what you think. Do you get where I’m coming from? I’d love to get comments on this!
