All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior

Author:Jennifer Senior
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

THE SENTIMENTALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD has produced a great many paradoxes. The most curious, however, may be that children have acquired more and more stuff the more useless they have become. Until the late nineteenth century, when kids were still making vital contributions to the family economy, they didn’t have toys as we know them. They played with found and household objects (sticks, pots, brooms). In his book Children at Play, the scholar Howard Chudacoff writes, “Some historians even maintain that before the modern era, the most common form of children’s play occurred not with toys but with other children—siblings, cousins, and peers.”

But by 1931, kids had enough gear for the Hoover White House to declare that they deserved a room of their own. Children, said conferees on a panel on child’s health, needed “a place where they may play or work without interference from or conflict with the activities of the adult members of the family.” The idea of the modern playroom was born, by executive decree.

In the years directly following World War II—the time when modern childhood began in earnest—the toy boom began in earnest too. In 1940, toy sales were a modest $84 million; by 1960, they had reached $1.25 billion. Many classic children’s toys were invented during this era, including Silly Putty (1950) and Mr. Potato Head (1952). And the pickings back then were paltry compared to today, when playrooms as well stocked as Emily’s are increasingly common. In Parenting, Inc. (2008), Pamela Paul writes that toy industry sales “for babies between birth and age two alone” were over $700 million annually. According to the Toy Industry Association, domestic sales of kids’ toys were $21.2 billion in 2011, a figure that didn’t include video games.

Such oceans of plenty have had unintended consequences. In Huck’s Raft, Steven Mintz notes that toys before the twentieth century were primarily social in nature—jump ropes, marbles, kites, balls. “Modern manufactured toys,” on the other hand, “implied a solitariness that was not a part of childhood before the twentieth century.” He’s thinking of Crayons, for instance, introduced in 1903. Or Tinker Toys (1914), Lincoln Logs (1916), or Legos (1932).

More generally, writes Mintz, “one defining feature of young people’s lives today is that they spend more time alone than their predecessors.” They grow up in smaller families (22 percent of American children today are only children). They are more likely to have their own rooms than children in generations past, and to live in larger homes, which means the very architecture of their lives conspires against socializing with other family members. They also live in a nation of suburbs and exurbs, where neighbors and friends live farther away.

Isolation results in a lot of extra work for parents. Their children recruit them as playmates, as Emily does Carol. They are prodded for rides hither and yon. And parents oblige, worrying that their children will suffer from loneliness if they don’t. This is yet another reason why mothers and fathers schedule so many after-school activities for their children.

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