Word: child
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spirit of caution, the established companies are relying instead on their proven winners. Many are backing away from the high-tech, high-priced offerings of Christmases past, the electronic spaceships, the laser guns, the chatty dolls, stuffed with microprocessors, that weighed roughly as much as the average child. Parents and grandparents could not be more pleased. "Last year I gave my granddaughter a talking doll called Heather that cost $125," says Margaret Simpson, 71. "She was no good whatsoever. My daughter had to take her to the doll hospital for an $85 limbs transplant." The only high- tech...
...takes some magic and luck, and a grasp of that most chimerical substance, a child's imagination, to make an eternal toy. The best of them are infinitely simple and endlessly entertaining. There are nearly 103 million ways, for example, in which six eight-stud Lego bricks of the same color can be joined together. An artist in Colorado has re-created part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling on his Etch A Sketch. A classic toy, says John Brandt, manager of Toys International in Los Angeles, "is something where the child's imagination is the most important thing...
...sociology behind the economics. Because baby boomers take their parenting so seriously, there is much murmuring about traditional values. Thus Kenner is pushing its Special Blessings doll, with Velcro hands that clasp and floppy knees that genuflect. The company wanted to develop a doll that "would appeal to a child's image of God as a big, * amorphous friend." Kitchenware is also popular. "I am getting my daughter a set of plastic pots and pans and a little stove and sink, which I also had," says Hillary Adams, 30, mother of Natalie, 2. "But the best are the most solid...
...flinch at gifts that are meant to be good for them, it is still true that toys that teach unobtrusively have real staying power. "Children are extraordinarily curious about their environment," says Richard Garvey, vice president of marketing for Lego. "Fad items like Hula Hoops do not engage a child's innate desire to learn." That desire largely accounts for the ubiquitous plastic Lego bricks, which can now be found in 55% of American homes with children under 15. "The best thing about the Lego blocks," says Paul Matthews, 37, father of Paul Chandler Matthews IV, 3, "is that...
...merits of classic toys -- their durability, their simplicity and their imaginative appeal -- the greatest strength may lie not in the child's reaction to them but in the parents'. As mothers and fathers grow ever busier and more pressed for time, they frequently resort to toys that do the parenting for them: the bears that tell bedtime stories, the plastic heroes who teach virtue. For many children, a toy whose nostalgic appeal and sheer pleasure lure parents back into the playroom may be the best present...