7 ms·

Kids Toys Suck (2011)

37 points by ctoth 4y ago

ioseph 4y ago
A trend I've noticed is a tendency toward beige, dull pastel palettes, soft organic shapes and timber in toys (and clothes) for babies ala montessori. I believe this is driven by parent's sense of aesthetics opposed to user research. We've been gifted a bunch of things, by far our daughter is way more into the fluro coloured garish plastic toys that are pointy and make loud noises.
- 878654Tom 4y ago
  This phenomenon even has been named "sad beige parenting/room". An overuse of all Instagram/tik tok families of the beige color as beige is the current hype-color. While research shows that babies during their first months/years can mostly only differentiate between bright primary colors.
  - nikoraisu 4y ago
    Certainly one of the things that surprised me most about parenting was having to distinguish between toys that were designed for the children (that are actually fun to play with) vs toys that were designed for the parents (which are aesthetically pleasing but dull as ditchwater to play with)
    - apricot13 4y ago
      Don't forget the third group, dinks (dual income no kids), who buy those toys for home decor! I'm waiting for a sad beige play-fridge to come down in price so I can have it in my kitchen to keep onions and potatoes in!
- com2kid 4y ago
  There is actually a lot of discussion around avoiding sensory overload in kids with too many bright flashy toys. That said, you will likely enjoy this short video https://www.tiktok.com/@sadbeige/video/7197135994779340075 https://www.tiktok.com/@sadbeige/video/7197135994779340075 and here is the channel https://www.tiktok.com/discover/werner-herzogs-sad-beige-toys?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/discover/werner-herzogs-sad-beige-toy...
nicolas_t 4y ago
We have a 20 months old son and I've been rather appalled by some of the toys. There's a brand vtech that specializes in toys that makes random sound and light and even worse, makes some sort of callback sound a few minutes after the last interaction with the toy to make sure the toddler comes back and continues playing with it. I don't get why anyone would think those toys are good. It doesn't teach anything, pressing a button will result in completely different sound randomly so there's not even a cause and effect relationship between an action from the toddler and the light/sound coming out of the toy. That said, coming back to this article, we did get some metal toy cars for our son and he happily makes vroom sounds while moving them around (he has learned that from the older kids in our apartment building). So at least imagination influenced by seeing other kids hasn't completely disappeared.
- zzleeper 4y ago
  Vtech is pure evil, they are the most useless annoying toys; I would prefer giving kids YouTube than let them play with those unless it's with a hammer
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    You mean, the now banned RGB cartoons or the still kicking Ukrainian family with kids making indecent sounds while doing random stuff?
- nikoraisu 4y ago
  We did well out of these: https://www.smartgames.eu/ https://www.smartgames.eu/ At 20 months you’re still a bit early, but some of the games for younger ones make a nice transition from ‘playing with blocks’ to puzzle solving. Plus they go up through the ages nicely - our oldest is 7 and there are plenty of good ones for him. Also they serve as a good gateway drug to board games…
  - nicolas_t 4y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation, those look good. For the gateway to board games, we're planning on getting the my first orchard game from haba when he's a few months older. Later on, I stocked up on the discontinued lego board games :)
esalman 4y ago
We can't afford a house with yard and garage in the Bay area so living in an apartment complex with our 2 year old. Most of the days he gets an hour of outside time at the daycare and that's it. All of us are more miserable the longer he is inside the apartment. It'll probably obliterate out finances but he's the reason I am looking for a house possibly within a block of a children's park.
- ignormies 4y ago
  The issue isn't purely house vs apartment. It's a symptom of our neighborhood design. Not Just Bikes has a really good video on why suburbia (usually single family housing) is often worse for children than denser environments. https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - onlypositive 4y ago
    Definitely agree it comes down to design, this video is really just about one type of suburbia, the type without any shops or recreational facilities of any kind or even footpaths to get around. The suburbs I grew up in were full of kids running around from house to house to park to shop to tree to trains to busses to school to tennis court to basketball court to skate park etc. Urban areas where I grew up tended to be kind of concrete filled jungles. Similar facilities but nowhere near as exercise encouraging. Now we live in a country where suburbs lack footpaths and there isn't much to do locally. We're considering moving back to another suburb in a nearby city that was urban and apartment filled but at least had a local mall, parks and rec centre that was extremely popular and well utilised.
    - ignormies 4y ago
      Yep definitely agree. I grew up in Phoenix and moved to the Bay Area after I graduated. I've come to absolutely adore the density (as paltry as it may be compared to other places) and abhor the environment where I came from. I can finally walk, bike, or train to 99% of things I do day-to-day. I'd never ever move back to Phoenix, but likewise I don't see myself ever moving to, say, NYC. It goes too far in the other direction and is one of those concrete jungles you speak of. I really think cities like London and Amsterdam strike a great middleground. Density, but not at the cost of green space.
bink 4y ago
The great thing about those old metal dump trucks was that if your friend brought his over you could use them as roller skates and crack your skull open like your parents did when they were kids.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Sounds like a personal story?
  - bink 4y ago
    It is. But the stories about throwing lawn darts over the house trying to hit each other is more exciting.
    - euroderf 4y ago
      Jarts were fun. But Darwin was always lurking in the bushes.
PhasmaFelis 4y ago
I'm sure there's some good arguments for why toys suck now, but the complaints about the Tonka truck are pure nostalgia goggles. I had one of those metal Tonka jobs as a kid, too. I loved and I pushed it around and I split my brother's face open with it by mistake (he healed up fine). I very much doubt I would have had any less fun if it had been plastic and used a slightly less realistic design style, of all the things to get upset about. I'm not saying the metal truck was too dangerous for kids, but I also don't think being able to cut my brother's face open was an upside like this guy seems to. Also, I'm about the same age as him, and I'm not sure how he thinks toys that don't do anything but light up and bleep obnoxiously are new. Those things were huge in the '80s.
lcw 4y ago
It was surprising to me, but my kids like going into retro toy stores and getting things more than getting newer stuff. Some things can be more expensive but generally these places have a bunch of cheap used toys that come from franchises and brands my kids understand and like. For instance, transformers, star wars, power rangers, and ninja turtles.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
Vertibird [0] was my nostalgic toy of a bygone era. I guess (older) kids have drones now, so that's cool, I guess. [0] https://youtu.be/FojzXSa6bxk https://youtu.be/FojzXSa6bxk
Pxtl 4y ago
I distinctly remember my first child prioritizing toys by heft. He ranked his choices almost wholly based on their effectiveness as a bludgeon.
dajonker 4y ago
I have a 1.5-year old and we bought 25 kilograms of used Duplo (toddler safe, bigger Lego from the same brand). There are bricks from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and they all still click together well and have barely faded in colour. The quality of this stuff is amazing, and it still is judging from the brand new bricks we got as a gift.
- plufz 4y ago
  I agree, we are big lego/duplo fans in my family as well. Just a little safety warning that old legos, especially 70s (and older I guess) can contain toxics in the colors like cadmium. I am not qualified to say how large a risk that poses. The risk of choking is probably larger? A more positive side note, have you seen that you can order separate bricks from all newer lego/duplo kits? You just search for the name of your kit and get a list of all the parts it contains in the lego support. It is not cheap, but a great service.
- myrion 4y ago
  Incidentally, Lego and Duplo are compatible! So eventually you can use the Duplo blocks as large building blocks under more intricate Lego designs.
verall 4y ago
The top comment says: > compare the new tonka dump to the caterpillar 797F mine truck. It looks exactly the same. Pretty interesting how quickly it's dismissed as unreasonable.
pb060 4y ago
For my 20 months old daughter i’m only getting mechanical toys possibly made of wood, or simple dolls with no electronics. Trying to keep her away from modern cheap animations and songs, especially from the Baby Shark saga which washes your brain and leaves it empty.
dgloria 4y ago
[flagged]
dusted 4y ago
> you make real mistakes on a smaller scale and learn from them rather than being sheltered, so you don’t grow into an incompetent idiot as an adult. This. It might sound rough, but in a lot of "accident scenarios" kids don't break as easily adults.. They don't break their bones and hips as easily.. They're shorter, so their tiny cute little heads don't get banged as hard on the concrete when they fall.. Yes, of course we need to protect them from danger, we don't want them to lose fingers, eyes or lives.. We want to limit the head-banging to especially teachable moments.. But still, I want my kid to learn balance and inertia and all the physical things that comes with being in a human body, while he can do it without the same serious consequences as someone in their 20s would suffer. I don't wish him pain, but I want him to be comfortable with himself, not be scared of everything because he don't know what will happen or how to do anything, and the other hand, know what things are unrealistic and shouldn't be attempted, because they already tried it while they were flexible enough not to break too much.
- rtpg 4y ago
  One valuable trait of most humans is that we are able to have experience and consequences transmitted to us without experiencing it first hand. I understand that falling from high up is painful, not because I have fallen, but because I have seen other people fall, or have had people tell me. I have never broken a bone in my body, but I still understand that it is a thing that I want to avoid! First-hand experience teaches people things, but it neither guarantees the lesson (people make the same mistake over and over all the time!) nor is necessarily the best way to learn a thing. I think it's good that kids toys (mostly) no longer can cause lasting damage to children.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > we are able to have experience and consequences transmitted to us without experiencing it first hand Speak for yourself. I don’t think I really learn anything without trying it out for myself. Still have no broken bones though. It makes me a bit anxious about the day that it’ll finally happen because I have no idea what to expect (and it’ll only get more likely as I get older).
  - 4y ago
peepee1982 4y ago
Sounds like any run of the mill complaint that everything used to be better. I romanticize my childhood as much as the next guy. But I recommend looking at all the ways our childhoods were worse than those of our children. Makes for a much more balanced comparison.
jbm 4y ago
I was a child in the 80s as well; the idea that we spent a lot of time outside does not jive with my memories. I had the same dump truck as in the article, but this did not inspire me to go out and explore the neighborhood alone. Other than my backyard and a local park, there literally was nowhere worth going where I lived (a suburb of Montreal). There were no kids in the immediate neighbourhood, and everyone seemed to be living in their bubble. Suburban isolation was very real, at least for me. The quality of everything then was much worse than people seem to remember. Recessions bit harder, schools were worse in every way (activities, teachers, handling bullies, etc..). I really don't know why people miss the 80s, it was an awful, ugly place. My friends at the mosque and my friends on BBSes were literally the only bright spots in an otherwise dull and dreary childhood. On a semi-related note, my daughters used to spend a lot of time in the house, but recently they started going to the park more often. Having friends in the neighborhood is huge.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  I grew up in the same 80's, 70s and 80s actually (born in 70), in a few different locations without this overall memory. I had other kids, yards, woods sometimes, city blocks other times. Tonka trucks in particular were never my most favorite thing although I did have them. But I had, did, and loved all manner of other equivalent outdoor and slightly dangerous things. There was nothing intrinsically terrible about the 80's as a kid as far as I would say. Economic problems were the parents problems, even though that means you don't get to have the flashy stuff from the Sears catalog, it didn't actually matter. And I was a geek that didn't easily make friends with the normies, especially later in high school when I really started to have my own firm (and differrnt) personality. I too found my true community on bbs's. If you grew up in a kid-desert, and you were not good at amusing yourself, neither of those problems are "the 80's". I spent countless hours amusing myself alone working on random nothing projects with nothing but some pieces of wood in the yard or something. A kid doesn't really care what there is to play with, they will play with it. In the country it was everything found in the woods, or fishing, or working on minibikes that spent 500 hours apart for every hour running, in the dreary city with no yard then it was busted appliances from the curb etc. I lived in both worlds, and both under and over 10 yrs, and so you can't say I just was lucky to live anywhere especially good by chance. We moved a lot and some places were shitty little apartments in a city, and some were single family houses not very near any other houses let alone ones with kuds let alone ones with kids that liked me. One absolute change from the 80's is in the 80's, and this is in the city too not just the country, I could bike myself all over the place. I don't know but I just assume that today parents either don't allow that, or the rest of society doesn't allow it even if a parent wanted to. Which is a shame.
euroderf 4y ago
My Tonkas (1960s) were solid all-metal stuff. Is it really so expensive nowadays to bend and shape metal into toys ? All this plastic crap disintegrates (or just frays into uglitude) under realistic use.
4ggr0 4y ago
My childhood is not that far away. Favorite toys were my plushies and action figures, which I'd used to roleplay big fights while voicing every single character. Also really loved Playmobil(is this an european thing, or do y'all also have Playmobil?). Matchbox and Hot Wheels were also used a lot. Basically, I think I just really liked to roleplay. Maybe because I grew up as an only child, so I had to come up with different characters on my own to entertain myself :) Then, one day, I was gifted a computer. That's the day I almost completely stopped playing with toys :)
ctoth 4y ago
I posted this because I was looking at Tonka trucks for a friend's kid and noticed how they were all plastic now, and wanted to find something about this. This was from 2011, so the rot must have set in quite a bit earlier. Does anyone have more information about what changed in, like, late 1999? Did we all get plugged into the Matrix and the robots don't want us to get hurt as kids? More seriously, was there a sudden wave of lawsuits or something then that changed things?
Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
I mean, in the end if you are the parent, choose wisely the toys you buy. We spent a lot (really a lot!) of money on: duplo, brio, a wooden toy kitchen, an enormous set of duplo animals, a set of magnets. Our children use those, yes we have garbage toys from friends and parents, but our children use those, exception for cars. Any car is fine. We also have 4 different garbage trucks (one for the sand, 2 rideables, 1 for playing at home), since we have a passionate guy. The plastic of all 4 is good, yes they are not metal unfortunately (but he is still 2). Train and duplo are still going really strong, the kitchen a bit less because we had to remove some pieces since they made such a mess that they wouldn't know how to cleanup, and I got frustrated doing it myself every time. For videogames, stoo giving garbage videogames and give them quality stuff. We skip tv for children and tablet videogames are not a thing, instead I let my children play yoshi's crafted world and kirby star allies. My daughter (almost 5) is really strong by now, my 2 year old is still getting started. I am very passionate of toys, I am very fond of my old ones (I have a very large lego collection, as well as mechas from power rangers). Aside from that, yes toys are mostly crap quality nowdays. I struggle to find good stuff, we'd rather skip a birthday and find a good more expensive toy to buy later on, if needed at all.

37 points by ctoth 4y ago

A trend I've noticed is a tendency toward beige, dull pastel palettes, soft organic shapes and timber in toys (and clothes) for babies ala montessori. I believe this is driven by parent's sense of aesthetics opposed to user research. We've been gifted a bunch of things, by far our daughter is way more into the fluro coloured garish plastic toys that are pointy and make loud noises.

878654Tom 4y ago
This phenomenon even has been named "sad beige parenting/room". An overuse of all Instagram/tik tok families of the beige color as beige is the current hype-color. While research shows that babies during their first months/years can mostly only differentiate between bright primary colors.
- nikoraisu 4y ago
  Certainly one of the things that surprised me most about parenting was having to distinguish between toys that were designed for the children (that are actually fun to play with) vs toys that were designed for the parents (which are aesthetically pleasing but dull as ditchwater to play with)
  - apricot13 4y ago
    Don't forget the third group, dinks (dual income no kids), who buy those toys for home decor! I'm waiting for a sad beige play-fridge to come down in price so I can have it in my kitchen to keep onions and potatoes in!
com2kid 4y ago
There is actually a lot of discussion around avoiding sensory overload in kids with too many bright flashy toys. That said, you will likely enjoy this short video https://www.tiktok.com/@sadbeige/video/7197135994779340075 https://www.tiktok.com/@sadbeige/video/7197135994779340075 and here is the channel https://www.tiktok.com/discover/werner-herzogs-sad-beige-toys?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/discover/werner-herzogs-sad-beige-toy...

nicolas_t 4y ago

We have a 20 months old son and I've been rather appalled by some of the toys. There's a brand vtech that specializes in toys that makes random sound and light and even worse, makes some sort of callback sound a few minutes after the last interaction with the toy to make sure the toddler comes back and continues playing with it. I don't get why anyone would think those toys are good. It doesn't teach anything, pressing a button will result in completely different sound randomly so there's not even a cause and effect relationship between an action from the toddler and the light/sound coming out of the toy. That said, coming back to this article, we did get some metal toy cars for our son and he happily makes vroom sounds while moving them around (he has learned that from the older kids in our apartment building). So at least imagination influenced by seeing other kids hasn't completely disappeared.

zzleeper 4y ago
Vtech is pure evil, they are the most useless annoying toys; I would prefer giving kids YouTube than let them play with those unless it's with a hammer
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  You mean, the now banned RGB cartoons or the still kicking Ukrainian family with kids making indecent sounds while doing random stuff?
nikoraisu 4y ago
We did well out of these: https://www.smartgames.eu/ https://www.smartgames.eu/ At 20 months you’re still a bit early, but some of the games for younger ones make a nice transition from ‘playing with blocks’ to puzzle solving. Plus they go up through the ages nicely - our oldest is 7 and there are plenty of good ones for him. Also they serve as a good gateway drug to board games…
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation, those look good. For the gateway to board games, we're planning on getting the my first orchard game from haba when he's a few months older. Later on, I stocked up on the discontinued lego board games :)

esalman 4y ago

We can't afford a house with yard and garage in the Bay area so living in an apartment complex with our 2 year old. Most of the days he gets an hour of outside time at the daycare and that's it. All of us are more miserable the longer he is inside the apartment. It'll probably obliterate out finances but he's the reason I am looking for a house possibly within a block of a children's park.

ignormies 4y ago
The issue isn't purely house vs apartment. It's a symptom of our neighborhood design. Not Just Bikes has a really good video on why suburbia (usually single family housing) is often worse for children than denser environments. https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- onlypositive 4y ago
  Definitely agree it comes down to design, this video is really just about one type of suburbia, the type without any shops or recreational facilities of any kind or even footpaths to get around. The suburbs I grew up in were full of kids running around from house to house to park to shop to tree to trains to busses to school to tennis court to basketball court to skate park etc. Urban areas where I grew up tended to be kind of concrete filled jungles. Similar facilities but nowhere near as exercise encouraging. Now we live in a country where suburbs lack footpaths and there isn't much to do locally. We're considering moving back to another suburb in a nearby city that was urban and apartment filled but at least had a local mall, parks and rec centre that was extremely popular and well utilised.
  - ignormies 4y ago
    Yep definitely agree. I grew up in Phoenix and moved to the Bay Area after I graduated. I've come to absolutely adore the density (as paltry as it may be compared to other places) and abhor the environment where I came from. I can finally walk, bike, or train to 99% of things I do day-to-day. I'd never ever move back to Phoenix, but likewise I don't see myself ever moving to, say, NYC. It goes too far in the other direction and is one of those concrete jungles you speak of. I really think cities like London and Amsterdam strike a great middleground. Density, but not at the cost of green space.

bink 4y ago

The great thing about those old metal dump trucks was that if your friend brought his over you could use them as roller skates and crack your skull open like your parents did when they were kids.

hackernewds 4y ago
Sounds like a personal story?
- bink 4y ago
  It is. But the stories about throwing lawn darts over the house trying to hit each other is more exciting.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Jarts were fun. But Darwin was always lurking in the bushes.

PhasmaFelis 4y ago

I'm sure there's some good arguments for why toys suck now, but the complaints about the Tonka truck are pure nostalgia goggles. I had one of those metal Tonka jobs as a kid, too. I loved and I pushed it around and I split my brother's face open with it by mistake (he healed up fine). I very much doubt I would have had any less fun if it had been plastic and used a slightly less realistic design style, of all the things to get upset about. I'm not saying the metal truck was too dangerous for kids, but I also don't think being able to cut my brother's face open was an upside like this guy seems to. Also, I'm about the same age as him, and I'm not sure how he thinks toys that don't do anything but light up and bleep obnoxiously are new. Those things were huge in the '80s.

lcw 4y ago

It was surprising to me, but my kids like going into retro toy stores and getting things more than getting newer stuff. Some things can be more expensive but generally these places have a bunch of cheap used toys that come from franchises and brands my kids understand and like. For instance, transformers, star wars, power rangers, and ninja turtles.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

Vertibird [0] was my nostalgic toy of a bygone era. I guess (older) kids have drones now, so that's cool, I guess. [0] https://youtu.be/FojzXSa6bxk https://youtu.be/FojzXSa6bxk

Pxtl 4y ago

I distinctly remember my first child prioritizing toys by heft. He ranked his choices almost wholly based on their effectiveness as a bludgeon.

dajonker 4y ago

I have a 1.5-year old and we bought 25 kilograms of used Duplo (toddler safe, bigger Lego from the same brand). There are bricks from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and they all still click together well and have barely faded in colour. The quality of this stuff is amazing, and it still is judging from the brand new bricks we got as a gift.

plufz 4y ago
I agree, we are big lego/duplo fans in my family as well. Just a little safety warning that old legos, especially 70s (and older I guess) can contain toxics in the colors like cadmium. I am not qualified to say how large a risk that poses. The risk of choking is probably larger? A more positive side note, have you seen that you can order separate bricks from all newer lego/duplo kits? You just search for the name of your kit and get a list of all the parts it contains in the lego support. It is not cheap, but a great service.
myrion 4y ago
Incidentally, Lego and Duplo are compatible! So eventually you can use the Duplo blocks as large building blocks under more intricate Lego designs.

verall 4y ago

The top comment says: > compare the new tonka dump to the caterpillar 797F mine truck. It looks exactly the same. Pretty interesting how quickly it's dismissed as unreasonable.

pb060 4y ago

For my 20 months old daughter i’m only getting mechanical toys possibly made of wood, or simple dolls with no electronics. Trying to keep her away from modern cheap animations and songs, especially from the Baby Shark saga which washes your brain and leaves it empty.

dgloria 4y ago

[flagged]

dusted 4y ago

> you make real mistakes on a smaller scale and learn from them rather than being sheltered, so you don’t grow into an incompetent idiot as an adult. This. It might sound rough, but in a lot of "accident scenarios" kids don't break as easily adults.. They don't break their bones and hips as easily.. They're shorter, so their tiny cute little heads don't get banged as hard on the concrete when they fall.. Yes, of course we need to protect them from danger, we don't want them to lose fingers, eyes or lives.. We want to limit the head-banging to especially teachable moments.. But still, I want my kid to learn balance and inertia and all the physical things that comes with being in a human body, while he can do it without the same serious consequences as someone in their 20s would suffer. I don't wish him pain, but I want him to be comfortable with himself, not be scared of everything because he don't know what will happen or how to do anything, and the other hand, know what things are unrealistic and shouldn't be attempted, because they already tried it while they were flexible enough not to break too much.

rtpg 4y ago
One valuable trait of most humans is that we are able to have experience and consequences transmitted to us without experiencing it first hand. I understand that falling from high up is painful, not because I have fallen, but because I have seen other people fall, or have had people tell me. I have never broken a bone in my body, but I still understand that it is a thing that I want to avoid! First-hand experience teaches people things, but it neither guarantees the lesson (people make the same mistake over and over all the time!) nor is necessarily the best way to learn a thing. I think it's good that kids toys (mostly) no longer can cause lasting damage to children.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > we are able to have experience and consequences transmitted to us without experiencing it first hand Speak for yourself. I don’t think I really learn anything without trying it out for myself. Still have no broken bones though. It makes me a bit anxious about the day that it’ll finally happen because I have no idea what to expect (and it’ll only get more likely as I get older).
- 4y ago

peepee1982 4y ago

Sounds like any run of the mill complaint that everything used to be better. I romanticize my childhood as much as the next guy. But I recommend looking at all the ways our childhoods were worse than those of our children. Makes for a much more balanced comparison.

jbm 4y ago

I was a child in the 80s as well; the idea that we spent a lot of time outside does not jive with my memories. I had the same dump truck as in the article, but this did not inspire me to go out and explore the neighborhood alone. Other than my backyard and a local park, there literally was nowhere worth going where I lived (a suburb of Montreal). There were no kids in the immediate neighbourhood, and everyone seemed to be living in their bubble. Suburban isolation was very real, at least for me. The quality of everything then was much worse than people seem to remember. Recessions bit harder, schools were worse in every way (activities, teachers, handling bullies, etc..). I really don't know why people miss the 80s, it was an awful, ugly place. My friends at the mosque and my friends on BBSes were literally the only bright spots in an otherwise dull and dreary childhood. On a semi-related note, my daughters used to spend a lot of time in the house, but recently they started going to the park more often. Having friends in the neighborhood is huge.

Brian_K_White 4y ago
I grew up in the same 80's, 70s and 80s actually (born in 70), in a few different locations without this overall memory. I had other kids, yards, woods sometimes, city blocks other times. Tonka trucks in particular were never my most favorite thing although I did have them. But I had, did, and loved all manner of other equivalent outdoor and slightly dangerous things. There was nothing intrinsically terrible about the 80's as a kid as far as I would say. Economic problems were the parents problems, even though that means you don't get to have the flashy stuff from the Sears catalog, it didn't actually matter. And I was a geek that didn't easily make friends with the normies, especially later in high school when I really started to have my own firm (and differrnt) personality. I too found my true community on bbs's. If you grew up in a kid-desert, and you were not good at amusing yourself, neither of those problems are "the 80's". I spent countless hours amusing myself alone working on random nothing projects with nothing but some pieces of wood in the yard or something. A kid doesn't really care what there is to play with, they will play with it. In the country it was everything found in the woods, or fishing, or working on minibikes that spent 500 hours apart for every hour running, in the dreary city with no yard then it was busted appliances from the curb etc. I lived in both worlds, and both under and over 10 yrs, and so you can't say I just was lucky to live anywhere especially good by chance. We moved a lot and some places were shitty little apartments in a city, and some were single family houses not very near any other houses let alone ones with kuds let alone ones with kids that liked me. One absolute change from the 80's is in the 80's, and this is in the city too not just the country, I could bike myself all over the place. I don't know but I just assume that today parents either don't allow that, or the rest of society doesn't allow it even if a parent wanted to. Which is a shame.

euroderf 4y ago

My Tonkas (1960s) were solid all-metal stuff. Is it really so expensive nowadays to bend and shape metal into toys ? All this plastic crap disintegrates (or just frays into uglitude) under realistic use.

4ggr0 4y ago

My childhood is not that far away. Favorite toys were my plushies and action figures, which I'd used to roleplay big fights while voicing every single character. Also really loved Playmobil(is this an european thing, or do y'all also have Playmobil?). Matchbox and Hot Wheels were also used a lot. Basically, I think I just really liked to roleplay. Maybe because I grew up as an only child, so I had to come up with different characters on my own to entertain myself :) Then, one day, I was gifted a computer. That's the day I almost completely stopped playing with toys :)

ctoth 4y ago

I posted this because I was looking at Tonka trucks for a friend's kid and noticed how they were all plastic now, and wanted to find something about this. This was from 2011, so the rot must have set in quite a bit earlier. Does anyone have more information about what changed in, like, late 1999? Did we all get plugged into the Matrix and the robots don't want us to get hurt as kids? More seriously, was there a sudden wave of lawsuits or something then that changed things?

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

I mean, in the end if you are the parent, choose wisely the toys you buy. We spent a lot (really a lot!) of money on: duplo, brio, a wooden toy kitchen, an enormous set of duplo animals, a set of magnets. Our children use those, yes we have garbage toys from friends and parents, but our children use those, exception for cars. Any car is fine. We also have 4 different garbage trucks (one for the sand, 2 rideables, 1 for playing at home), since we have a passionate guy. The plastic of all 4 is good, yes they are not metal unfortunately (but he is still 2). Train and duplo are still going really strong, the kitchen a bit less because we had to remove some pieces since they made such a mess that they wouldn't know how to cleanup, and I got frustrated doing it myself every time. For videogames, stoo giving garbage videogames and give them quality stuff. We skip tv for children and tablet videogames are not a thing, instead I let my children play yoshi's crafted world and kirby star allies. My daughter (almost 5) is really strong by now, my 2 year old is still getting started. I am very passionate of toys, I am very fond of my old ones (I have a very large lego collection, as well as mechas from power rangers). Aside from that, yes toys are mostly crap quality nowdays. I struggle to find good stuff, we'd rather skip a birthday and find a good more expensive toy to buy later on, if needed at all.