Beast of burden
Hatchimals, the season’s must-have toy, are cute — but they could also have a worrying side effect on your kids
It has become so difficult to get a Hatchimal, the hot new toy of the season, that parents have reportedly taken to giving their kids apology letters from Santa. One reads: “Dear Children, Due to the current climate within the North Pole, Hatchimals will no longer be given out as presents. We are now forming a colony . . . to protect them from their future decline and possible extinction.”
As much as your child might want this toy, there is no reason to feel guilty about failing in your nationwide pursuit to provide one. Hatchimals, in case you’ve been living under a rock, are stuffed toys that only come out of their shell after 30 minutes of continuous play with a child, and then interact with them in more sophisticated ways as they “grow up,” repeating a child’s words and moving when they are given commands. Like all things “interactive,” they might seem fun and even good for our kids’ development. But, in fact, these toys teach children all the wrong lessons about how to relate to other beings.
Talking toys are not new. Thomas Edison invented the first talking doll in 1890 — researchers were recently able to piece together a recording of its creepy voice — and they have been alternately annoying and engaging us ever since. In some ways these toys are most tempting to offer to young children who never seem to tire of pressing buttons and getting a voice response.
We may even believe there is some educational value in this kind of toy. They must be better than a plain old teddy bear, right? Wrong. It turns out that the more toys do for children, the less they do for themselves.
In her book, “Alone Together,” MIT researcher Sherry Turkle documents the relationships that kids have with their Furby pets. These small furry robots, which were released in the early 2000s, became hugely popular, particularly because kids could teach them language skills. Keep talking to the Furby and it learns English; ignore it for too long and it spouts nothing but annoying gibberish.
The kids that Turkle interviewed seemed both deeply attached and also anxious about their robotic companions. As one girl tells Turkle, “Dolls let you tell them what you want. The Furbies have their own ideas.” Turkle notes that traditional dolls can be “hard work” because they require your imagination.
It may sound odd to think of playing with dolls as hard work, but play is actually the “job” of children. It’s what prepares them for adulthood — intellectually, physi- cally and socially. But just like any other aspect of human life, people will take the easy way out if they can. Why walk to work when you can drive? Why read when you can watch TV? Why make up your own game when there’s a stuffed animal who will do it for you? There are reasons to do all these things, but you first have to develop the habits and the tastes for them. You have to know that you enjoy walking and reading and using your imagination.
As Peter Whybrow, head of the the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, says, “If you give a child at the age of 18 months a wooden spoon and few other bits out of your kitchen, they will play . . . Before you know it, they have a realm of fascinating stories about teddy and how teddy keeps on spilling his tea. That’s the normal way in which human development begins.”
Instead, we continue to offer what we think are spurs to that development. Instead of having to imagine both sides of the interaction — a child’s and the teddy bear’s — now the child only has to make up half of it. It’s true that when a child is playing with another kid or an adult, she is also only coming up with her half of the interaction. But the other being is a partner with a vocabulary of his own and a full range of emotions and reactions. The Hatchimal, just like Tickle Me Elmo and Teddy Ruxpin, are all perfectly predictable.
The Furbies have a wider range of reactions, but they demand a different kind of work. Not imagination but constant attention.
Turkle warns that “sociable robots open new possibilities for narcissistic experience” because we are not really engaging in a relationship with another fully developed being.
Children, in particular, she notes, “need to be with other people to develop mutuality and empathy; interacting with a robot cannot reach these.”
On the one hand these interactive toys are always there, telling us what they want. On the other, they are one-dimensional. We think of their reactions as more of a reflection on us than anything substantive about them.
While no one toy is going to completely undermine our children’s ability to use their imaginations and develop social skills, it’s probably just as well that the Hatchimals go extinct, after all.