Ancestry.com recently emailed me an offer to look through archived Sears Catalogs. I searched the year 1922 and found it to be a worthwhile portal into the past.
I decided to focus on toys. Notice that some toys are specifically marked "Girls Toys" and "Boys Toys." The prices are always interesting. Also, many toys from 1922 seem to still be excellent toys, superior to many modern blinking bleeping toys. Those excellent toys from the past include my childhood favorite, wooden blocks.
Go to full article to see a small sampling of pages from the 1922 Sears Catalog
There's no gender socialization in monkeys, right? Then why are the boy monkeys (vervets and rhesus) preferring "boy" toys to "girl" toys? The two sets of experiments have been reported by Psychology Today:
In 2002, Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University and Melissa Hines of City University in London stunned the scientific world by showing that vervet monkeys showed the same sex-typical toy preferences as humans. In an incredibly ingenious study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Alexander and Hines gave two stereotypically masculine toys (a ball and a police car), two stereotypically feminine toys (a soft doll and a cooking pot), and two neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) to 44 male and 44 female vervet monkeys. They then assessed the monkeys’ preference for each toy by measuring how much time they spent with each. Their data demonstrated that male vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the masculine toys, and the female vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the feminine toys. The two sexes did not differ in their preference for the neutral toys.
I wish they had reported the actual results in this short article. They did report that the boy rhesus monkey preference for "boy" toys was "strong and significant."
See also, this related post: Boys' Toys
If you buy your child an expensive and detailed toy based upon the latest new movie, you'll end up with a toy that can be used in only one way and your child will quickly get bored with that toy. It's happened over and over. I’ve seen it with my…
On June 7, 2008, I had the opportunity to discuss the commercialization of American children with Josh Golin, the Associate Director of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.
Josh’s two-part interview was sponsored by—no one. Isn’t this total lack of commercial sponsorship a pleasant change of pace?
People who warn about the commercialization of our children sound quaint or even shrill to most other Americans. After all, how could it possibly be a bad thing to buy lots and lots of things for our children, to “spoil” them?
As Josh indicates in this interview, there is now scientific data substantiating that buying children more things is harming them. More stuff (and the anticipation of yet more stuff) leads to a warped set of attitudes and priorities, as well as obesity and attention disorders.
I enjoy talking with Josh because he makes his case clearly and enthusiastically. You can see this for yourself by clicking on the two videos of his interview. What CCFC offers in place of a chokingly endless stream of products is common sense: children can thrive without owning the toys hawked by merchandisers. Instead of more toys, children need more creative play and more time developing real life relationships with other children and adults in their communities.
Part I - Interview of Josh Golin
We all know that American middle class children don’t need most of possessions they have (they are a lot like their parents in this regard). Because there is a limited number of hours in a child’s life, giving children more of what they don’t need leaves them with less time and energy for the sorts of things they do need, such as physical fitness, healthy relationships and creative play.
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