The shadow side of Toyland

Christmas is in the air, even though it's 70 degrees outside and early November.  Besides the catalog bilizzard, store aisles are filling up with Christmas goods.  And this is only the beginning. Thanksgiving weekend heralds the beginning of the "Christmas season" according to merchants and just about everyone else - transformed at some point from the more somber season of Advent of times past. Back in the day, Christmas began on Christmas day and ended at Epiphany twelve days later.  But now that's clean-up and recuperation time.  Our function as dutiful consumers over, there's no longer use any use for the tree which we gladly toss within days (it's kind of old anyway since we put it up at the beginning of the "season").

I don't mean to sound exasperated; I've come to peace over the years with how Christmas is celebrated and over the years have found ways that work for our family  to avoid some of the more commercial aspects of it.  I always felt a bit of a stranglehold regarding the Santa Claus business though. Once a saintly guy who left coins for the poor, he was turned into an omnipotent extortionist to be pulled out when we wanted to threaten our children into good behavior - and then turns against us when it comes to Christmas shopping, pressuring us to make sure our children feel as loved by Santa as the next kid - by shopping and spending more. 

The issue for me was consumerism and the environment; how would we teach our children values like frugality and simplicity when they each got five new toys (at least) each year from Santa?  And, honestly, I hated the clutter of the new stuff. We tried different things over the years - having the kids go through their rooms and choose things to give or pass down to a younger relative, asking relatives to give them something useful (like a sleeping bag or lunch box); Still, we ended up with a lot of stuff.  

What I haven't always been as conscious of is the social justice ramifications of where our toys come from - how they are made, who made them at what cost, who profits, etc., and how these issues are connected at the core to values like simplicity, frugality, ecology, and consumerism - how they are connected to the well-being of our children. Sharon Astyk, author of Depletion and Abundance, has such a wonderful understanding of this. She brings to light the motivation behind and the consequences of our desire to shower our children with toys during the holidays. Here's a somewhat lengthy excerpt from the chapter "Raising Kids in a New World."  I think her book woudl make a great gift.

If you are like many parents, you've spent a good bit of time in the past few years sorting through your kids' toy box, tossing out lead-contaminated toys, items made with endocrine-disrupting plastics and other dangers. It turns out that not only are our houses cluttered with toys but the toys themselves are often toxic. In the summer of 2007 there was an enormous outcry against Chinese toy manufacturers. How, we asked, could they dare to endanger our kids?

But of couse, such anger is misplaced. All of the relevant toys were cheap plastic crap, manufactured in a poor country with lax standards on environmental, child and worker safety. They were being manufactured in a comparatively unregulated economy by people making tiny wages, often in poor working conditions, on a contract given to the lowest bidder. The average action figure that retailed for $10.99 actually cost far less than a dollar to produce, and only a few pennies actually went to the guy whose job it was to ensure safety. And every single parent and grandparent who bought one of the toys knew that this was true - or could have if they stopped to think for two seconds about where the toys came from. We either didn't bother to think or we trusted that other people, far away and with no incentive to do so, would care more about our kids than we care about theirs.

I'm not blaming anyone here - I'm as guilty as anyone of this. I buy toys at yard sales, but plenty of them started out as cheap new toys somewhere. The truth is that because we think our kids need a million toys, we need them to be cheap. That way everyone who knows them can afford to buy them a ton of stuff for Christmas, birthdays, and whenever Grandpa comes to visit. They can have gift bags at every birthday party, a toy in every Happy Meal, a bunch of junk for every occasion. And they can have toy boxes full, closets full, houses that look like stores. This is possible only is we cut every corner, pay no attention to the environment or labor practices or sustainability. The problem is not any particular toy - it is all the toys.

Cheap toys aren't just bad for our kids, they are bad for everyone - for kids, for workers, for the planet, for the future. The toys are made by impoverished people who didn't get to have toys themselves growing up, sometimes by children who are enslaved in factories instead of playing at home. And for all that the lead paint on Elmo's face is dangerous for our kids, it is worse for the workers who make the toys. They are the ones who work 12 hours a day with lead paint - many of them young women at the beginning of their reproductive years. The factories emit greenhouse gasses that warm the planet and use up limited supplies of petroleum for what? For a toy that will be broken in a mattter of days or hours? And their destruction is inevitable, because children with a million toys simply cannot understand the value of a thing - and children who own only cheap plastic junk are not making a mistake when they imbue it with no inherent value.

What's the solution? There is only one answer I know of, and I hope that parents and grandparents will begin to take this seriously - many, many fewer toys, made to much highter standards. That is toys made of natural materials that are demonstrably nontoxic and made without waste. Toys you make yourself or that your children make. Toys made from non-toxic recycled things. But most of all, fewer of them for every child. That means not 50 dolls, but one or two. Not 100 stuffed annimals, but two. A set of blocks. Some old clothes for dress up. Pots and pans and empty cans and boxes for playing store. A blackboard and chalk. Some crayons and the backs of paper you've already used. A few balls. A bat. A glove. a few games. Lots of books. Perhaps one big thing - a dollhouse or a battle cruiser or some trains and track.

. . . If we're honest about our motivations for giving our children toys, I think we'll find that this is what we are seeking - the child inside us who loved a particular toy, or a few particuar toys, and felt powerfully about them. We give our kids toys because we want them to have that magical and imaginary space in their lives with a toy that feels real to them. So we give and give and hope that the next one will be the one. But the reality is that it is more likely that we will create magical experiences for our children and grandchildren if they have fewer toys, rather than more. The experience we remember is in part a conequence of limitation. That is, we imagine better when we have more reasons to imagine, and fewer real things that substitute for imagination. Our toys are real to us precisely to the same extent that we make that possible by limiting them.