The Christmas season is a time of stress for parents, illusion for children and well-founded hopes for the Spanish toy sector, which concentrates more than 40% of its annual sales in the last three weeks of the old year and the first of the new year. And despite the fierce competition from electronic leisure – videogames, applications for mobile devices, gadgets adapted to the children’s market … – the three-dimensional and manipulable object of all life continues to monopolize a large part of the space under the fir tree. Where does the need arise to cradle a doll, kick a ball, or live intergalactic adventures moving articulated plastic figurines?
The Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) defined the human being as Homo ludens for their unique ability to play, but in reality it is not an exclusive behavior of our species, far from it. Many animals practice it: from juvenile spiders, which simulate copulation to improve their sexual skills in adulthood, to baby dolphins, which have fun blowing bubbles. A special case among mammals is that of dogs , which continue to behave like puppies when they are of childbearing age. Some full-fledged people we all know share that late-game playfulness.
From the point of view of neuroscience, recreational activities strengthen two areas of the gray mass: the cerebellum, which coordinates movements, and the frontal lobe, associated with decision-making and impulse control. And as has been experimentally verified, the toy plays a key role in these maturation processes, as it helps younger children learn the cause-effect relationship – “if I push the stroller, it moves” – and exercise the calculation of probabilities. through trial and error.
Petra María Pérez Alonso-Geta, professor of Educational Theory at the University of Valencia and member of the Children’s Play Observatory, further opens the range of the benefits of toys: “They are a vehicle to develop skills such as attention, abstraction, memory, representation, symbolization, or problem solving. For this reason, in all cultures and at all times, children play with them ”.
In the field of psychopedagogy, the classification elaborated decades ago by Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is still closely followed. For this influential Swiss theorist, there are three types of toys, according to the mental evolution of infants: up to two years old, rattles, mirrors and musical dolls stimulate the senses and motor skills; from two to six years old, costumes, kitchens or construction games appear, which promote memory, self-control and imagination; and from the age of six, children are subjected to the complex regulations of sports, board games or activities such as rope and hopscotch . Thus they begin in the ruthless world of human competitiveness.
Given the importance that toys have in the intellectual development of the most tender brains, as has already been amply pointed out, some parents become obsessed with educational etiquette. According to the French sociologist Sandrine Vincent, it is especially in the more affluent families and couples with liberal professions where concern is appreciated that the little ones learn by playing , while delegating the funniest gifts to their grandparents.
However, many believe that such a dichotomy is meaningless. ” I usually say that anything that serves the development of cognitive abilities educates, ” explains Pérez Alonso-Geta. Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, a professor of Applied Psychology at New York University and the author of several studies on early learning, has also expressed this emphatically: “They are opportunities to play, explore and socialize. If the educational toy succeeds, fine, but if an ordinary object does it, it will produce the same effect ”.
Because often the simplest triumphs, as that famous television advertisement in which a boy opened a package and shouted with joy: “A stick … !!!” Another renowned specialist in the field, the psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, author of the book Einstein never memorized, learned by playing , advocates such objects without a defined structure, which favor freedom of action, such as the classic cardboard box.
An experiment often cited in academic literature drew attention to the potential of the most everyday objects . Scientists left several children between the ages of three and four fiddling with napkins, screwdrivers – it was the 1970s! – sticks and office clips. In another group, the little ones were limited to seeing how the adults handled them. Then, when asked about the possible uses of these tools, the former were much more ingenious: physical contact, experimentation with their own hands, had awakened their tender imagination.
However, if there is one phenomenon that has intrigued parents, educators and researchers in recent years, it is that of sexual stereotypes. Because it gives the impression that the typecasting has only become more accentuated, unlike what happens in society. For example, the sociologist Elizabeth Sweet, from the University of California at Davis, has denounced it in the New York Times: “ We have made great strides towards gender equality in the last half century , but the world of toys looks a lot like more to the fifties ”. But are there innate reasons for girls to assume maternal, domestic or social roles and boys to opt for movement, wrestling and sport?
Several studies seem to agree with those who believe that there is a certain biological predisposition. Primatologists have found that male green ginger and rhesus macaques prefer to play with trucks, while female rhesus monkeys prefer dolls. In 2010, research published in the journal Current Biology pointed out that baby chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park spontaneously adopted sticks and treated them like babies.
Apparently, up to three or four years, boys and girls often share toys, but from that age they begin to separate. The phenomenon is more pronounced with boys, who face stigmatization when their peers catch them with some supposedly feminine object.
But culture is precisely there to emancipate us from the rigid distribution of roles that evolution fixed in the genes of our ancestors. For this reason, citizen initiatives are emerging in several countries against sexist bias in toys . One of the most active is the British association Let Toys Be Toys , which convinced twelve large distributors – including Toys ‘R’ Us and Marks & Spencer – to sort their articles by interests or themes, not in the categories children / girls
Earlier, in 2011, neuroscientist Laura Nelson got the famous Hamleys toy store in London to abolish the same gender distinction in its plants. In Spain there are also examples of mobilizations in this line, such as the Campaign for Non-Sexist and Non-Violent Games and Toys , promoted annually by the Andalusian Institute for Women.
The fact is that, objectively, stereotypes have not lost their validity so far in the 21st century. Researchers from the Rey Juan Carlos University, in Madrid, analyzed 595 television advertisements between the Christmas campaigns of 2009 and 2011 and came to the conclusion that, predominantly, they induced “the learning of values such as fun and competition, risk and aggressiveness for that matter. of the boys, and of beauty and appearance, the care of the others or the attention of the home in the case of the girls ”.
The fact is that, apart from instilling egalitarian values, the exchange of roles carries undoubted psychological benefits: while construction games increase girls’ interest in technology and engineering, cooking favors the creative streak of boys, for example .
Another contemporary concern is the emergence of touchscreens . Leaving aside the reprehensible practice of some wild parents, who leave smartphones to their children as a kind of virtual rattle so that they can be left alone, specialists are divided on their advantages or disadvantages compared to conventional toys.
Some, like the Uruguayan psychologist Roberto Balaguer, believe that mobile devices are “closer to simulation” and that their video games help “to manage large flows of information, to deal with errors and mistakes in a healthier way, to to lose”. Others, although they acknowledge that it is still an incipient field of research, suspect that they do not precisely favor the social dimension of the individual and can cause behavior problems, especially in children under three years of age. Rahil Briggs, a child psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, has even argued that they delay language acquisition.
It is true that there are very interactive and rewarding applications, but often tablets and mobiles become a kind of portable television to view drawings. It is up to parents to encourage good use, because it is not possible – and it should not – put doors to technology.
