Touching, but misguided
Campaigns to track down lost toys are sweet, but not a great way to teach a lesson
We live in dark times. North Korea has threatened “physical action” in response to UN sanctions, the suicide rate among teenage girls is the highest it’s been in 40 years, the ice caps are rapidly melting and a 6year-old girl named Phoebe just lost her favourite stuffed animal at the Eaton Centre. You might be thinking that one of these things is not like the others, but these days, a lost stuffed animal stirs up a spirit of public concern typically only seen after natural disasters and terror attacks. Thanks to technology, the norm around lost stuffies isn’t to let them stay lost but to launch sophisticated social media campaigns and enlist the help of the powers that be to return the missing toys to their tiny masters as soon as humanly possible.
According to a Tuesday story in this newspaper, Phoebe and her family were visiting Toronto from England recently, when the girl misplaced her beloved stuffy, Sleepy Dog, a pink plush canine, somewhere in the massive Eaton Centre mall. When Phoebe’s mother, Julie Letton, noticed Sleepy Dog was missing, like so many parents of our age, she took to social media for help. She made a Facebook post describing her daughter as “heartbroken” about the AWOL stuffy.
The post has since gone viral (shared more than 7,000 times) and inspired sympathy from Toronto police Sgt. Wendy Drummond, who recently tweeted “We are all pulling together to bring this little guy (Sleepy Dog) home.” If you think this is an isolated incident of adults going raving mad for lost toys, think again.
Such missing stuffy hunts are commonplace now, and if they aren’t launched on social media, then they are fuelled by it. This summer, when a little boy forgot his stuffed bear, “Teddy Bear,” on a bench outside baggage claim at a Texas airport, airport officials took to Twitter to hunt for the lost bear. The stuffy was found and returned to its rightful owner to considerable social media fanfare. In similar fashion, when a Nova Scotia boy forgot his stuffy on an airplane last year — a Stitch from Disney’s Lilo and Stitch that his grandmother bought for him at Disney World — a flight attendant not only recovered the lost Stitch and returned it; she took photos of the stuffed alien flying around the world with her first. These are only a few incidents.
YouTube is teeming with “reunion videos” featuring kids embracing their formerly lost stuffies with tears of joy — evidence, perhaps, of their parents’ attempts at a viral moment.
Phoebe’s mother, Julie Letton, meanwhile, is living a viral moment of her own. “As adults we’ve all experienced heartbreak at some point in our lives, so we know what it feels like, and it’s awful to see (Phoebe) going through such an emotional time,” Letton said in the press this week.
I don’t want to be a Scrooge, nor come down on a parent trying to do the right thing, but the kid didn’t lose a limb. She lost a toy.
The public response from airport staff, police and strangers on the internet when parents launch social media campaigns to find their children’s lost toys is no doubt touching, but it’s also completely misguided.
Of course I understand that a lot of children are deeply attached to their stuffies — I still have my favourite teddy bear, Holly, and I’m almost 30 years old — but is it not one of the most valuable lessons of childhood that things are things and therefore replaceable, and not worth mourn- ing? (I mean, we are talking about a stuffed dog here, not somebody’s family heirlooms). I worry that when we send out search parties for lost stuffies, we do kids a disservice, because a) we lead them to believe that when they lose something they deem valuable, a band of merry strangers comes along to save the day; a nice idea, but one that is sure to disappoint when they grow up and lose their car keys for the first time. And b) when we go nuts searching for lost toys, we rob kids of the experience of mourning a material thing until they wake up one morning and realize it was just that: material and superfluous. Loss is painful, but it’s not always bad. It’s good to lose something you love and learn, in turn, that life goes on.
But when adults bend over backward to locate misplaced stuffies and enlist the help of thousands of determined strangers who won’t rest until they’ve found those stuffies, that lesson is lost. And another lesson takes its place: Things aren’t unimportant. They are the most important. I hate to say it, but we ought to grow up and let Sleepy Dogs lie. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.