No-Toy Story
In the Age of the IPod, What Do You Give Kids Who Are Getting Older Younger?
My kids aren't getting any toys for the holidays.
Don't feel bad for the little darlings. They've been hauling in plenty of Hanukkah loot -- digital cameras, Ugg boots, gift cards galore. But at 9 and 11, my daughters seem, much to my dismay, to have aged out of toys.
  Katherine Gallagher and her mother, Emily, of Glen Rock, N.J., looked at a Barbie Primp and Polish Styling Head at the Toys R Us flagship store in New York in 2004. (By Kathy Willens -- Associated Press) |
I tested this theory while I was driving them to school a few weeks ago.
Me: "You guys aren't getting any toys for Hanukkah."
Julia, 9, sputtering with indignation: "We're not? What do you mean, we're not getting any toys?"
Me: "Well, can you think of any toys you want?"
Julia, after a long pause: "Not really."
This no-toy story isn't for lack of trying. I have a closetful of unplayed board games and unmade crafts. Macrame bracelet, anyone? And I'd chalk it up to bad parenting skills -- what ever happened to that plan for family game night? -- except that it seems to be a broader societal phenomenon.
Broad enough, in fact, to have spawned its own acronym: KGOY -- Kids Getting Older Younger. Toy sales have been down three years in a row, and 2006, no matter how many Elmos are tickled, may not be much better. The biggest culprit is the defection of the tweens, the ever-expanding -- downward -- category of wannabe teenagers.
"Eight is the new 13," Bill Goodwin, a marketing consultant who specializes in children, wrote in the latest issue of Marketing Times.
In my unscientific survey of my children's friends, the gift they most often said they wanted was a cellphone. A friend reports that her 9-year-old daughter refuses to use her Firefly cellphone -- this is the kind that comes programmed with buttons for Mom and Dad -- because it's too humiliatingly babyish.
There are as many reasons for this premature aging as there are headless Barbies crammed in the back of our playroom closet. The technology explosion: If toddlers are playing computer games, how can 10-year-olds be expected to content themselves building with Legos or playing jacks? The ubiquity of cable television and the Internet, and with them the constant exposure to commercialism and branding and ever-more-sophisticated things to crave.
