Toys are a scam – at least the way Americans consume them today

The baby doll broke me.

Two Decembers ago, my daughter spent weeks yearning for a doll she’d seen at Target. Hard plastic, sparkly eyes, named Chelsea or Chloe or some such. Chirped “Mama” and freakishly grew pigtails if you pumped her arms up and down.

It was the thing our 8-year-old wanted most in the world.

And Santa – surely against his better judgment – delivered. Man, was this kid elated. She played with darling little what’s-her-face for a solid 20 minutes. Changed her clothes, brushed her hair, gazed adoringly. Then shoved that thing into a bin and five days later declared it was time to give her away.

Which left me with one abiding thought: Toys are a scam. At least the way we consume them in America today.

That might sound like sacrilege, but let me be clear – I’m not talking about games or bikes or art supplies or building blocks. I’m talking about everything else.

You’ve seen the articles. Parents are drowning in toys. We have so many toys, we need containment systems or even entire rooms devoted to their sprawl. To manage the modern toy glut, parents are often advised to hide some playthings away, then reintroduce them a few months later, once the luster of novelty has been restored. Our toy collections have grown so vast, we have to rotate what’s on display! We’re toy curators now.

And here is the part that burns me – nobody plays with them. At least not at my house, not with any regularity. My husband and I have four kids. The oldest is 11. The youngest is 3. You know what’s been consistently played with over the past decade? Couch cushions. Boxes. Sticks, though we don’t allow those inside.

The rest just sits there. Occasionally, bins are pulled out and contents scattered across the floor, where they … sit.

Perhaps you’re thinking that our kids don’t play with toys because they have three siblings to harass. You’re right! There seems to be no end to the appeal of sibling torment. But I suspect that even households with a more reasonable number of children have stockpiles of toys languishing with neglect.

Still, we’re not quite calling uncle, are we? We’re not admitting, privately or to one another, that our relationship with toys has become problematic.

I guess because, at so many levels, we’ve bought what they’re selling: that toys aren’t an indulgence – they’re a necessity. Receiving them is paramount for kids; giving them is requisite for grown-ups.

Michaeleen Doucleff knows. In 2021, she moved to a small town in West Texas with her husband and 5-year-old daughter, Rosy. There, a neighbor learned that Doucleff doesn’t like to buy her child toys. Guess what this new acquaintance did? Hopped online and started shipping packages of toys straight to Rosy.

“This was a middle-aged woman who decided I was depriving my daughter,” Doucleff says. If you’re not showering your kid with toys, “you’re like a bad parent.”

What that neighbor might not have known is that Doucleff is a science journalist who crossed continents to examine the way other cultures raise children. Her research culminated in the 2021 book “Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans.” She hadn’t come blithely to this minimalist approach to toys.

Among the various messages in her book – about the value of autonomy, the importance of responsibility – her perspective on toys seemed particularly hard for readers to swallow.

“Somebody said once to me after the book came out, ‘But, you know, that’s how we show love to children – by giving them toys,’” Doucleff recalls. “We’ve been convinced of that.”

And that seems true. Kids are now given toys to celebrate just about every happy occasion in their lives. Toys for birthdays, holidays, out-of-town visits, potty-training milestones. Sometimes just because they made it through an amusement-park ride and were spit out at the gift shop.

We’ve arrived at this moment, Doucleff says, in part because of modern psychology, which stresses the importance of play in child development – and by our conflation of the word “play” with “toys.”

But Doucleff is not blind to the other force in the mix: “A lot of companies make a lot of money off of all this stuff that we’re just kind of moving in and out of our house.” (According to the Toy Association, retail toy sales in the United States were a $28 billion business in 2023, up 26% from 2019. And while our country represents 4.2% of the world’s population, we account for 27.5% of the global toy market.)

As Doucleff observed kids across cultures, she found one consistency: “Kids everywhere, throughout time, make play versions of adult tools.” A scene that stands out to her happened in the Arctic, where she watched as a group of little boys found a cardboard box and pretended it was a whale they were harpooning. This went on, she says, for hours.

The anecdote made me think of a recent weekday morning at my house. My 3- and 5-year-old boys grabbed a box of tinfoil and began tearing off sheets and molding them into … I don’t know what. Swords? Towers? Metallic spitballs to fling at my head? There were definitely some of those.

I wasn’t delighted by this spontaneous display of child-directed creativity. It was 8:15 a.m. I was trying to not-so-gently parent those children out the front door. But on reflection, later, it did make me think: Hey, we should have “tinfoil night” this Hanukkah! Each kid gets their own box and then, when they inevitably tire of it, I’ll be stocked for months.

Our kids, of course, would be as appalled by that idea as they will be by this essay. Because there is one thing they never tire of doing with toys: desiring them. They pore over that Amazon toy catalogue for hours. Every television commercial, every print ad, every retail experience elicits the same request: “Can I have that?” My response is always the same: “Put it on your list!” (Reader, there are no lists. Except for a couple of weeks before a birthday or holiday, these kids can’t be bothered. The rest of the year, their yearnings fly off like glitter in the wind.)

Jeffrey Trawick-Smith, a professor of early-childhood education at Eastern Connecticut State University, suggests that may be for the best. He helps run a children’s center where researchers can observe kids in action. One of their most interesting findings, he says, is that “toys that were exceedingly popular didn’t always have particular play value. Children would be drawn to them, but the interest wouldn’t last long.”

For instance, they placed a talking telephone in the center. Kids flocked to the toy – then quickly abandoned it. “The telephone kind of did their playing,” he says. “It talked.”

His team ultimately concluded that “simpler, basic” toys like blocks inspired “high-quality play.”

So that seems like a good rule of thumb. Want to get a kid something they’ll actually play with? Avoid just about anything they’d pick out for themselves.

Suzanne Gaskins, a cultural developmental psychologist, says it’s only in the past 50 years that we’ve started accumulating piles of toys. As she compared families in America with those in other societies, a couple of observations stood out. One is that our kids are less engaged in the adult world – regularly helping prepare food, say, or care for a household – and more focused on the kid-centric universe we’ve constructed to “maximize their development.”

Also, our objectives are different. “The first goal for American parents is to let their kids be happy,” Gaskins says. “And not just happy in a contented sense, but happy in an active, almost hysterically happy sense.”

For Mayan parents, by contrast, the “primary goal is that the kid is even-keeled – not particularly happy, not particularly sad.”

Gaskins’s findings shaped her own thinking as a parent and grandparent in one major way: “It helped me be a little more suspicious,” she says, “of the pure robbery that goes on with toys.” (See: the Russian-nesting-doll-style toys that are now everywhere. Plastic eggs that open to reveal another package and then another and another. All of it leading to a two-inch trinket that will inevitably be swallowed by a vacuum cleaner while the mountain of detritus lives in a landfill for all of eternity.)

I suppose part of our problem is that it’s hard to predict which toys will become beloved. I started a version of this essay months ago but abandoned it when one of our kids was given a set of Pokémon figurines and … played with them. That lasted only a few weeks, but it was real. And it made me wonder why we can’t treat toys like library books – things that we share but don’t necessarily own, and that live in a place open to all.

It’s not that I think we should banish toys from our homes. I’m just suggesting we consider the possibility of consuming fewer. An interesting study published in the scientific journal Infant Behavior and Development found that having more toys around “reduced quality of toddlers’ play” and that the presence of fewer toys may help young kids “focus better and play more creatively.”

We know kids need play. So maybe we focus on giving them that. Over Thanksgiving, the wife of my husband’s cousin folded and colored paper airplanes with our 5-year-old for hours. Hours.

No toy on a shelf is better than that.