Betsy wet.
And dolls were never the same again.
In their steady march toward mimicking real life, dolls today employ so-called emotive technology that makes them the smartest of the smart toys. Their sophisticated animatronics let them talk and walk, ask to be fed, turn their heads at the sound of “mama’s” voice, change their facial expressions, swim in the tub, expand their vocabulary from baby talk to hundreds of words, even grow a few inches.
They join robotic dogs, cats, lizards and spiders, talking firetrucks and doll houses, and pens that send voice mail.
It’s a whole new world of toys out there, all right. But is it one that we want our children to grow up in?
That’s the question asked by critics who say smart toys are mostly a dumb idea.
Their concern: These toys do too much, leaving children with little or no room to exercise their own imagination.
But it’s what we’re buying.
Tekno the Robotic Puppy has topped the best-selling toys and games list at the Web site http://www.toysrus.com/
Tekno is one of three high-tech playthings, along with Poo-Chi the Robotic Dog and Amazing Babies, among the top-selling toys introduced this year.
Last month at Zany Brainy in Santa Ana, Calif., Sue Stickel of Whittier couldn’t resist adding the $19.99 Cyber Spider to the toys that filled her shopping cart on a lunchtime toy run for her 8-year-old nephew and his older sisters.
She sees nothing wrong with playing with smart toys like the programmable spider, as long as kids have other types of toys to play with and learn from, such as the miniplanetarium and the “I Spy” riddle book she also selected.
“I just thought he’d get a kick out of the spider, scaring them with it,” she said of the silver-colored plastic creature with the bulbous red head. “I just thought it would be fun.”
The Alliance for Childhood issued a report late last year that blasted robotic baby dolls as “the worst toy idea of the year.”
The dolls they love to hate included “My Dream Baby” by MGA Entertainment, “My Real Baby,” by Hasbro and “Amazing Babies” by Playmates Toys.
The report quoted Mary Pipher, author of “Reviving Ophelia” and “The Shelter of Each Other,” who questioned the wisdom of encouraging children “to attach emotionally to machines and objects rather than real, loving people.”
“When children play, they take the lead themselves and generate their own creative activities to help them work through the issues, problems, or personal experiences that are most pressing in their own lives,” the group states. “The real magic wand for play is the child’s own imagination, not expensive electronics.”
Lest the Alliance for Childhood be dismissed as rogue technophobe toy assassins, consider the opinion of the well-respected folks who put out the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, a guide to more than 1,000 award-winning toys.
“The most unfortunate thing is a lot of the new toys tend to be very bossy. A lot of these toys are in their face, telling children what to do and trying to run the show,” says Joanne Oppenheim, who produces the Portfolio with her two grown children, Stephanie and James Oppenheim.
She cites as an example a playhouse that makes rain sounds and then tells the child to close the window: “It’s as if we don’t trust or believe that children can make their own pretend.”
She often found that kids were either bored or frustrated by the high-tech toys.
Some of the programming manuals for the robotic toys were so complex that children would walk away. Or once they saw what the toy did, shrugged and asked, “Is that all there is?”
Parents can end up spending a lot of money — and a lot of time at the computer downloading information into a toy — for just a little bit of “wow” factor, Oppenheim says.
“It’s not that they are going to melt anybody’s brain, but they do change parents’ expectations and children’s expectations of what a toy should be. They end up needing more toys after they get over that initial `Wow, how did it do that?”‘
“To tar all tech toys with one brush is ignorance of what’s out there,” says Chris Byrne, a.k.a. The Toy Guy, who edits the Toy Report industry newsletter and helps put together the Hot Dozen holiday toy list for “Toy Wishes” magazine.
And who’s to say, he adds, what goes on in a child’s head when playing with these toys?
Byrne watched little girls interact with the Amazing Babies, which were introduced this fall and made the Hot Dozen, and says he saw just as much creative play as with traditional dolls.
“They get deeply into the role play. The doll says `Mommy, I want milk’ and the little girl says `No, you’ve had enough, it’s time to go to sleep.’ It doesn’t make the child an automaton.”
The style of play is still patterned after traditional doll play, and the electronic components merely enhance that play, says Lori Farbanish, vice president of girls marketing for Playmates Toys.
“I think it kind of adds to the magic,” she says.
The kind of interactive play that a child engages in with an electronic doll is not necessarily bad, it’s just different, says Dawn Buckingham, director of education for Children’s World Learning Centers.
“It actually simulates more real-life experience,” she says.
And real-life these days is increasingly about interacting with high technology.
“People are very quick to get on the bandwagon and burn this stuff,” says Buckingham, who helped evaluate toys for the Early childhood NEWS Directors’ Choice Awards. “The reality is technology is here to stay. We need to evaluate them in terms of what is good technology and what is bad technology and embrace that which is good for our children.”
Along those lines, Oppenheim finds something to cheer in the Lego Studio Steven Spielberg Movie Maker Set that gives kids the means to make their own movies starring Lego pieces. She’s even OK with the $180 price tag.
“That uses technology to make something that is problem-solving, creative and open-ended,” Oppenheim says. “It’s not telling kids what to do but giving them the tools to do it.”
Maybe when we only take a casual look at how children play with their high-tech toys, we miss what’s really going on.
When children swap strategy or discuss how to advance to the next level in a video game, they are problem-solving, Buckingham points out. “That’s a life skill.”
Not to mention socializing.
Besides, she asks, what’s to keep children from playing with their smart pets and smart dolls and smart trucks in the same way they play with their traditional counterparts? That is, when the electronics are switched off.
“When you take away the electronic portion from Let’s Pretend Elmo isn’t it still a traditional doll? Can you put it to sleep or feed it lunch in play? There are still other things children can do with it above and beyond the idea that the toy talks back to them.”
Then again, says Byrne, it’s a good thing, too, if a child is just having fun getting Poo-Chi to bark.
“To me, it’s simply entertainment. It’s no better or worse than Transformers. It’s simply a toy. It’s not the child’s only play experience. You can’t look at these things in absolutes. It’s just a cute thing.”
