Have toys got too brainy? How playthings became teaching aids for the very young

For decades we have been using toys to cram learning into playtime – and toys have increasingly been marketed as helping to turn children into prosperous, high-achieving adults. But it turns out this approach is all wronghe week my eldest son finished nursery, I decided to clear out the playroom where he had spent much of his young life forming bonds with inanimate objects.

But the “bathe your toddler in ABCs and 123s” version of child development has recently come under threat. In its place, a vision of childhood and its playthings that is more archaic and even anarchic is emerging. “The model has been, ‘If I get toys that do schoolish things, then that’s good,’” Alison Gopnik, a leading developmental psychologist, told me. “But that really goes against what the developmental science is telling us.

The little earworms that emerged from a tinny speaker on the back of one of the Linkimals – “Hell-ooh friends, how are you to-day? Are you rea-dy to play? Let friendship li-ight the way!” – were largely the creation of Paul and a sound designer named Glen Tarachow, who moonlights as a techno DJ named Euphoreum and, under his own name, as a composer of minimalist music – an antidote, perhaps, to the carnival-barking audio he engineers at Fisher-Price.

On their own terms, these were groundbreaking insights into what is now known as neuroplasticity, the study of how the brain changes over time. But the results were quickly lumped together and extrapolated to humans in scientifically unfounded ways.

, an eight-inch-high electronic light-and-noise box in the Linkimals line. Designed to seize children’s attention with its wide, vacantly smiling eyes and hypnotically swaying head, the Sloth has the vibe of a merrily lobotomised nursery school teacher. An intern instigated one of the Sloth’s routines by pressing a button on its foot, and it jolted into action. “Hey, what’s up?” the creature asked, sounding like a California college stoner transported to the front of a classroom. “Hahaha.

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