Toys

Toys as Training Tools

Traditionally, the study of toys centered on concerns with child development. Inspired by canonical cognitive models from, for example, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, developmental psychologists and social philosophers have examined the role of play in children's development and, subsequently, the role of toys in children's play. Here toys are recognized as objects children act on, causing their character to be abstracted. They are categorized according to typologies, such as social (e.g., playing cards) and isolate (e.g., puzzles), and used as markers in developmental progressions of play, gradually disappearing in the sequential transitions that demonstrate a child's social and intellectual advancement. Within this framework, different toys are deemed appropriate, and in some cases necessary, for different stages of development. This basic categorization of toys as “good” or “bad” continues to permeate popular understandings. A preoccupation with cognitive development is witnessed in this work's quantitative character, its reliance on measurements and modeling tactics, and its focus on preschoolers or children in their first years of primary education as subjects of study.

In contrast, an alternative wave of scholarship has addressed toys as instruments of socialization, reading them for their ideological content. According to this scholarship, toys are viewed as reproducing society's most troubling features, such as racism, sexism, and a preoccupation with war and violence. They are deemed important because children engage with them before they can read or understand spoken language. This structural approach to children's culture has been predominantly developed through feminist theory's concern with how gender is constructed through children's texts and toys. In assuming the effects of toys in a priori manner, this structural approach employs a narrow definition of consumption that understands consumer behavior to be stipulated by production.

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