Word: toye
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...York City mother of two, "we had a cake with our family and maybe one or two friends." She describes a party she went to recently for a three-year-old, in which the kids went on simulated space rides, then after pizza and a clown, made their own toy dolls, Lego trains and balloon sculptures, all in the span of a couple of hours. "The kids didn't have a chance to take in what they were there for," she says, "which was to celebrate their friend's birthday...
...Build-A-Bear stores have private party rooms and there's even a museum that allows kids to dissect sheep's eyeballs. It can cost from $500 to $1,000 to hold a party at one of these venues - or $38,000 if you want to rent out famed toy store FAO Schwartz for a sleepover...
...Parents also complain about providing goody bags, which can add another $3 to $25 dollars per kid to the cost of the party. "You end up spending hundreds of dollars and then find it all at the bottom of the toy box," says Ginny Loving, a mother of two in Virginia. Recently, Loving, Cadby and six of her friends got together and risked kids' ire by putting a moratorium on goody bags. "We told the girls they were too old for them," says Cadby. "That seemed to work...
Daniel is now engrossed in watching video clips of a red toy train on a circular track. The train disappears into a tunnel and emerges on the other side. A hidden device above the screen is tracking Daniel's eyes as they follow the train and measuring the diameter of his pupils 50 times a second. As the child gets bored--or "habituated," as psychologists call the process--his attention level steadily drops. But it picks up a little whenever some novelty is introduced. The train might be green, or it might be blue. And sometimes an impossible thing happens...
Elkind further indulges his atavism in his new book, The Power of Play, a lamentation on the gradual replacement of toy trucks and dollhouses with "robo pets and battery-operated cars," which "don't leave much to the imagination." (But didn't the toy truck seem outrageously modern to a Victorian who grew up playing with wood blocks and marbles?) Similarly, in its journal this month, the American Academy of Pediatrics protests the ebb of recess, arguing that "undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts ..." But most schools...