December is Safe Toys Month

Honestly, I think we may have gone a little toy safety crazy in our country. It’s one thing to use common sense—cover electrical outlets, don’t let infants play with marbles, that sort of thing. It’s quite another to recall all blinds ever because they pose a risk we’ve known about since, oh, the invention of blinds. I fully expect butter knives and Gillette razors to be recalled due to safety hazards soon, at this rate.

That said, I think we need to approach toy safety in a different manner than we’ve been doing. We think about toy safety as whether an object can physically harm a child, right? What about the entire emotional and social contexts of a toy?

Take a GI Joe, or a military tank toy, or a toy gun, for example. Can it physically hurt a kid? Maybe, if used to conk another kid on the head with, tripped over on the stairs in the middle of the night, or sat on one the wrong way.

But what about how these toys effect boys mentally? They may pose no risk at all. They may make them want to become snipers when they grow up—or, better yet, Aryan skinheads or shoe bomb terrorists, depending on the household they’re in. Are toys that make war into a game, that teach that bombing and blowing up buildings and killing are all fun, really all that safe?

And most people know that I could go on and on all day about Barbie—but she’s definitely not alone in the sexualizing of young girls. Toy irons, brooms, tea sets, baby dolls (even ones that nurse), and various Barbie-like dolls can be a lot of fun to play with; they also have the potential to indoctrinate little girls to breed, become free housekeepers for men, and generally dream about a life of servitude, whoohoo!

It all depends on the context, I think, though I’d never give a kid a plastic hand grenade for “fun.” Perhaps the most dangerous toy we should protect our children from are parents; after all, that’s ultimately who decides which toys the child has, how the toys are used, and what kind of environment the child lives in. That said, parents can also be the best toy a child ever has, right? It’s all in the context of common sense and practical application…

Just like those blinds.