Toys vs. Good Old Fashion Outdoor Fun: When will the recalls end?
Just when you think there isn’t a toy left to be recalled…wham!…you get hit with another and then again another. So when will the recalls end? It seems as if they may not be going away anytime soon, as Mattel announced third Chinese toy recall just this past week. So as the kids head back to school, parents are again turning the house inside-out to find potentially toxic toys. Its not really the homework you expected during the first week of school, especially after coming off a summer of toy induced fear. However until a crack down on toy manufacturing plants in China is made, it looks as if recall may become a regular ordeal for most parents. With millions, somewhere around 19 million, of toys recalled so far, most of which have been in the United States and Europe. Parents are again asking themselves, “who is looking out for our children?”, and the answer seems to be no one. Yes, the toy companies such as Mattel are now actively searching for so-called ‘toxic toys’, but isn’t it all just a little too late?
All of this news and hype over toy recalls makes me long for the good old days when children had less toys and more friends waiting impatiently outside to play games conjured up by their little imaginations. I know I am not alone with my memories of searching for frogs, catching lightning bugs, riding my bike all around the neighborhood looking for other kids willing to go on an imaginary adventure with me, or swimming all day at the pool. Honestly I think my parents had more trouble getting us to come inside then they ever did getting us to put a toy down, as we adamantly refusing to come home more often than not.
Maybe our real problem isn’t China’s lack of controls on their production industry, but our obsession with consumerism and materialism. Don’t get me at all wrong, someone should be keeping a close eye and an iron fist on all toy manufacturer’s, to ensure product safety. However maybe recalls wouldn’t seems so scary if you didn’t have endless piles of toys to dig through as fear begins to take hold of you. Children need a lot less toys then they have, lets face it they don’t even remember what all they have half the time. Yes, I know that many of you have dealt with temper tantrums when sneaking out these ‘toxic toys’, but how quickly they forget. In my day you gladly jumped on your bike, or ran to play with the garden hose over that of any plastic painted toy. In a day and age where obesity in children is of grave concern, lets put the toys away a bit more and encourage our children to get outside and play, join a sports team, ride their bike, and just have some good clean old fashioned fun. So while we are demand better controls on the toy industry and our import standards and regulations, lets also demand more toy free time for our children.
My childhood has little memories of toys, but I do remember camping in our garage all summer, swimming in the lake, ridding my bike all the time, searching for bugs and frogs, playing dress-up, building forts and snow houses. As kids we had countless lemon-aid stands, put on too many ‘preformances’ to count, and who only knows how many games we invented. Children today seem to have stimulation overload, as we have become a society of excess, yet is any of it really better for them? Their are countless memories that come flooding through my mind, and honestly only one of them really has a toy in it, and that was a little toy house my Dad built us and I’m not sure that even counts as a toy. Children will not look back in twenty years and remember their giggling Elmo’s and Thomas trains, but they will remember all the adventures they had outside with their friends.
Please see my earlier posts Are Children Playing Enough?, Toys That Will Make You Sick, and Update to the Toxic Toy Story. As always myself and all of the sites readers are interested to hear your comments on the topic, so please let us know what you think of this topic, and any of the related stories.
September 9th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
I think you’re absolutely right — kids need to get outside, run and play and just be kids. They can create the best toys with their own imagination. I guess it’s different nowadays than when I was a kid because it’s a little harder to just send kids outside and have them go explore the world on their own (there’s just too many weirdos these days!). I have four kids, and they’ve always had the best summers when they’ve been able to spend their days playing in the river, building forts outside, and just staying active.
The recalls this year have bothered me, though, because of corporations outsourcing American jobs and expecting us to buy the junk they produce. It bothered me enough to cause me to research and compile a list of American-made products for kids, which I have listed on my website, www.toysmadeinamerica.com. Many of these sites sell the kinds of things I did have when I was a kid - dollhouses, playhouses, kits, science stuff, etc. I agree with you, though, that most kids have way too many toys, and parents are way too quick to buy them everything they ask for (which is basically everything they see commercials for, or everything that their friends have!). Take care. Teresa
October 8th, 2007 at 3:47 am
Yeah I agree with you since most of the factories in China don’t focus in the quality of the product, instead, they focus more on the quantity being made… but I think we shouldn’t generalize all Chinese factories since all are not the same… some are good and some are not… It’s just that you know, China has the largest population in the world, so it would be expected that you really can see Chinese people or establishments all over the world…that is why China is not being missed in every event all over the world…