Toys and Playthings

In Development and Remediation

John Newson, Elizabeth Newson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138506237
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351378604
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

John and Elizabeth Newson were well known for their studies of child rearing, which have combined a rigorous research methodology with sympathetic insights into family life and a lively approach to scientific reporting. 'Path-breaking', 'brilliant', 'seminal', 'outstanding', 'fascinating', 'enthralling' and 'enchanting' are some of the adjectives used by critics to describe their previous books.

They now turn their attention to toys, the 'pegs on which children hang their play', a study for which they are uniquely qualified. Not only had they long experience in normal child development: they had been actively involved for many years in research and training in remedial play for disabled children, their research unit was a major influence in the phenomenal development of the toy libraries self-help movement, they designed for and advised the toy industry, and they had their own family-run specialist toyshop.

With this background, it is not surprising that their book on toys and playthings is both informative and entertaining on many different fronts. Richly observant, it follows the child's development in play from using the mother or father as the 'first and best toy', through the exploratory and manipulative sequences, to the use of toys in ritual, symbolic or contemplative ways. Against this detailed understanding of 'ordinary' children's growth points in play, the Newsons and their collaborators examine the special needs of disabled children, with a firm emphasis on how parents can help. What is more, in providing an intensely practical guide for the parents and teachers of the disabled child, they draw out comparative insights which are enlightening and absorbing for those whose children do not have such urgent problems.

Once again the Newsons share with the reader the viewpoints and preoccupations of research workers in the field. There is indeed a continual sense of 'work in progress', and nowhere more than in the chapter on using toys for developmental assessment, where the reader is given a hot line to a laboratory (i.e. playroom) notes used in their own research unit at the time in a welcome move away from the rigid test-bound assessment of 'special' children. The book is enriched by the authors' sharp awareness that the history of playthings has a far longer perspective than the history of child psychology. They are not basically interested in educational toys as such, but in all the objects, made or found, on which the child hones his skill, his reasoning powers, his imagination, his emotions or his sense of humour. Fairground baubles, joke toys and poppy-head dolls are as much a part of this book as bricks, sorting boxes and teddy bears. In the Newsons' own words: 'We hope that people who simply like toys as objects will find something in this book to interest them; we suspect, indeed, that liking toys will be what all readers, whatever their reason for opening the book, have in common'.

1Why Toys?

But First – Why This Book?

It is only during the last eighty years or so that the activities of children have been considered to be of any interest at all by more than a handful of eccentric individuals; but during that time a great many books on play have been written, mainly by psychologists who have, on the whole, been indifferent to the toys which focus and sustain play. Toys themselves only began to excite more general interest as a by-product of two trends: the nostalgia for domestic antiques which reached its full force in the seventies, when picture books on antique toys began to be found in every bookshop; and the playgroup movement, when community playgroups operating on tiny budgets created a demand for practical books on how to put together a stock of basic toys without spending too much money. A third movement, the demand by parents of handicapped children to learn how to use play remedially to help meet the child’s developmental difficulties, led to the enormous growth of toy libraries and made people think again about what a toy was capable of doing for a child.

What we have tried to do in this book is to take a long look at toys, with the developing child as our starting point. This means that we are concerned not so much with ‘the right toy for the right age’, but rather to think about the logical basis for a child’s movement from one stage to another, and to discuss how certain kinds of toys can complement and expand this growth. Right from the beginning, though, we want to emphasize that personality growth includes a sense of humour and a capacity to enjoy and to be fascinated, and we are just as much interested in why a child likes a particular toy and in the fun she* gets out of it, as in the toy’s ability to stimulate learning. In any case, it will only stimulate learning if she does like it and finds it fun to play with.

Starting from the developing child, then, we must inevitably be concerned with the child who has problems in making progress because she is in some way handicapped. Here we have not been content to give a quick wave of the hand to the handicapped child in a tacked-on chapter, but have chosen to devote a considerable part of the book to thinking about her special needs. We might have written two separate books, one on normal children’s playthings and one on toys for handicapped children; one reason why we have not done so is that most parents of handicapped children have normal children as well: most handicapped children do their growing-up in the context of a normal family. A more important reason, though, comes out of our own learning experience. It was only after fifteen years’ work with ‘ordinary’ children that we became involved with handicapped children and their families, and when we did so we found that this detailed background of what growing-up was like for normal children was immensely important as a perspective against which to understand the difficulties for the child which arose as a result of handicap. Equally, though, another dozen years working with handicapped children and normal children in parallel has continually given us new insights into what is important in normal development. So we hope that those who are not themselves involved with a handicapped child will also find it worth while to think about what happens when normal development goes wrong, side by side with, and illuminating, the more usual patterns of growth.

Because child development has always existed, even before it was invented as a subject by psychologists and paediatricians, toys as a focus for play go back a very long way. Although this is not a book primarily about antique toys, we must certainly be interested in those toys which appear century after century in different disguises to suit the technology and the spirit of the time. Some of the material for this book has, therefore, quite relevantly we believe, been collected over the years from museums and libraries, from collaboration with the modern toy industry and toy designers, and not least from occupying that precarious vantage-point between industry and consumer, the specialist toyshop in which we are partners. We hope that people who simply like toys as objects will find something in this book to interest them; we suspect, indeed, that liking toys will be what all readers, whatever their reason for opening the book, have in common.

Why Toys?

Once upon a time, at a conference of psychologists, we happened to fall into conversation with a prominent government scientist and his wife, as we were strolling back from lunch. One of us happened to mention that our psychology department had just acquired its own small but nonetheless very expensive computer installation, and went on to remark that this would provide a beautiful new toy which a lot of people in our department would enjoy playing with. The scientist’s wife was clearly shocked at the levity of this remark, and at the thought of the abuse of a very large sum of taxpayers’ money, and she said as much. But her husband quickly stepped in with the reassurance that the word ‘play’ had obviously been used jokingly, and continued to the effect that academic psychologists were highly responsible people who only used such expressions as a modest cover for their earnest dedication to the pursuit of important scientific questions. Not being able to decide, on the spur of the moment, which of these attitudes misunderstood our meaning most thoroughly, we let the matter drop; but the incident brought home to us that not everyone automatically shares the developmental psychologist’s view of the nature of play: which can be expressed in the paradoxical statement that play is perhaps the most serious and significant of all human activities.

To consider the role of toys at all, it is necessary to look briefly at this concept of play and its implications. Fundamentally, play seems to be a partly random and infinitely flexible activity which affords an opportunity for the extension and reorientation of both mind and spirit. The essence of play is that it has no rules. Here one must make a necessary distinction between ‘play’ as we understand it and the activity of taking part in games, which is also often described as ‘playing’. The essential feature of a game is that it involves a formal confrontation between the player and his opponent (or one player in two opposing roles) in which all activity takes place within an agreed system of rules. These rules may be highly arbitrary, and the stakes may be as low as the mere prestige of winning or as high as life or death; but in either case the rules have to be obeyed, because basically it is the rule structure which defines the game. Once the rules are clearly being flouted or disobeyed, the participants know that the game is over.

Play, by contrast, may almost be defined by its absence of agreed rule structure; that is, if there are any rules in operation at all, they are private, internal and idiosyncratic. The child (or the grown-up) who is engaged in true play may allow her activity to be constrained by small rituals or established and familiar patterns of behaviour; but, because these are her own rituals, she has the right to jettison them at any moment and to move off in entirely new directions at will. It is this supreme flexibility which makes play the ideal setting or jumping-off point for creative thinking and imaginative invention.

This is not to say that children do not concentrate when they play: they do, and indeed their single-minded absorption and capacity to cut themselves off from ordinary distractions is often particularly striking. Possibly this ability to shut out the everyday world with its reality-bound constrictions is a very useful adjunct to exploring and stretching the boundaries of thought in play. Neither children nor adults are necessarily aware, when they embark on play, of just what goals they even hope to achieve; it is through playing, often almost aimlessly, with both thoughts and feelings – a kind of imaginative free-wheeling – that these begin to become clarified and crystallized and are seen to lead on in specific directions. Each new occasion for play contains in it some elements of past experience, and every child brings to her play the uniqueness of her own personality. Basically, then, play offers a stimulating environment for both intellectual and emotional creativity, and potentially each child’s play is the perfect expression of herself as a developing individual.

Play comes first; toys merely follow. We do not play as a result of having toys; toys are no more than pegs on which to hang our play. In theory, toys are not needed; the child could happily wander through her fantasy world, her imagination supplying all that was wanted. Perhaps because the human imagination is so extensive and complex, however, children seem to look for solid and tangible reference points, as it were, from which to range the more freely. Just as language makes subtle and complicated thought possible, perhaps toys do the same for play. Children who have no toys as such learn to provide their own ‘pegs for play’: a circle drawn with a stick in the dust becomes a play house; hanging creepers make a swing; a spoon, a sandal or a piece of wood, wrapped in rags, makes a perfectly lovable baby doll; a length of hollow bamboo is a toy canoe. Even privileged children who have many ‘proper’ toys will often improvise their own to meet the needs of their private imaginings. One of us, at the age of four, had a favourite ‘doll’ which was re-made every bath-time out of a wooden nailbrush and two damp flannels; it was called ‘The Forsaken Merman’ (after the narrative poem by Matthew Arnold), which reflected the child’s mother’s preference for reading her poems rather than nursery rhymes and the child’s own delighted response, and it had a personality which is still real to the adult the child became. To quote an English toy designer, ‘anything is a toy if I choose to describe what I am doing with it as play’.

Perhaps a baby’s best toy is, potentially, her own mother. Watch the baby stare at her eyes, play with her fingers, become alert at her voice, finger her face, explore her mouth. Familiar yet changing, adaptable in some ways but in others unyielding, sometimes surprising, capable of providing reassurance or active stimulus in response to the baby’s need, both soft and hard, both sparkling and dull-textured, a machine for bouncing, rocking and lulling by turns, with a most intricate sound-mechanism over which the child has just enough control to find it fascinating but not enough for boredom to set in – here is an all-purpose toy whose versatility any toy-maker might be proud to produce. Through most of childhood the mother who will allow herself to be played with has an advantage over the most expensive toy. Mother is not always around, however, nor does she always wish to be played with; nor, of course, do we really want the child to fail to be weaned on to other toys, for to help a child towards the pleasure of independence is one of the toy’s functions.

We do not believe, in fact, that there is any one toy or kind of toy which is ‘best’ for a child. Many different kinds of toys contribute to her many needs in different ways, for different moods and at different age-stages.

Babies and toddlers seem to get especial joy from toys which provide them with an experience that they can perceive as a completed event, or a ‘happening’. Dropping a rattle from a pram and having it returned is a satisfying ‘happening’, and will be repeated as many times as someone can be persuaded to complete the baby’s action. Pushing down a tower of bricks which someone else has built, dropping a shape through a posting-box hole, a penny into a money-box, a piece into a form-board – these are all ‘happenings’, which can be identified by the child’s heightening of tension followed by a relaxation and smile of pleasure at the onlooker. The perfect ‘happening’ is perhaps some variation of peep-bo play in which the mother’s face is hidden and reappears: ‘Where’s Mummy?’ – expectant tension – ‘Here she is!’ As the baby becomes a little more sophisticated, she responds with delight to an element of surprise; for instance, where a ball pushed through a hole in the top of a closed box may re-appear randomly from any of four holes in the sides.

For the very small child it is enough that she is able to create this infinitesimal explosion in her world. She has made something happen, and she is satisfied – except that she would like to repeat it a few hundred times. The nursery-age child demands more; with her greater grasp of sequence and time, she wants things to develop and grow, including her own skill. This is where the toys which have functional versatility serve the child’s specific need. By this we mean that, while some toys can only be used in rigidly defined ways (a bride-doll is a good example, but it is also true of a jack-in-the-box), others can be exploited by the child in all kinds of different roles to suit her moods, her personality and her ability. A plain wooden box can serve as a little table or stool, a doll’s crib, the turret of a castle, a boat or a miniature doll’s room according to need; a collection of planks, cushions and blankets can turn into tents, fortifications, or a hospital ward; a pile of bricks can be built into towers or roads, pushed in a long line as a train or arranged in ranks as a troop of soldiers. In general, toys which have a high degree of functional versatility also have a quality of being non-descript, and it is precisely because of this that they stand-in so successfully for whatever specific object the child has in mind. The very fact that a toy is ambiguous allows a child to use her imagination in filling out the details.

We would not want to pretend that there is no place in a child’s play for thoroughly realistic toys, however, for it is obvious that children get a great amount of pleasure and satisfaction from realistic detail that mirrors the world they live in. Tiny windows in toy cars and a moulded metallic engine under a hinged bonnet, or dolls’-house furniture with drawers and cupboard doors that really open and shut: these give a special joy which cannot be ignored. Sometimes perhaps we overdo the ‘plain polished wood’ philosophy, and allow an adult aestheticism to over-ride an equally valid appreciation of the exact. We bought basic-shaped wooden animals for our university playroom because we thought they were beautiful; the children steadfastly ignore them, and play imaginatively and creatively with the mass-produced polythene animals, and the children may well be right, for they are a perfect example of the best that modern technology can produce. They are also cheap, and we need not worry if a tiny plastic lamb goes home in someone’s obstinately clenched hand.

Children who are given a wide choice of toys will exploit the different qualities and properties of different kinds in a very eclectic and catholic manner. Replica cars and animals mix in happily with pipe-cleaner dolls, and all are made to inhabit a fantasy city in which wooden bricks, cotton reels, match-boxes and old cardboard tubes are eked out by the scale-model steel bridges borrowed from an older brother’s electric railway. The truth is that a child absorbed in imaginative free play will make use of anything that comes to hand, and use it moreover to open out new avenues for her fantasy to explore.

In imaginative play a child tends to be limited more by the range of her fantasy than by her physical skill or lack of it; but children are essentially developing creatures who are in the active process of perfecting the bodily skills of manipulation, muscle co-ordination, balance, strength and endurance. Rural children improve their skills by pitting their bodies against the natural environment, and learn to make use of the flow of a stream or the slipperiness of snow; children in urban settings are more likely to be protected from taking physical risks in an environment that includes traffic hazards and high buildings, and for them the toy that stretches their physical prowess is a necessity. Such toys are especially valuable where they are progressive: that is, where they can almost infinitely extend the child’s skill while allowing her plenty of satisfaction during the earliest stages. Swings, ropes and trapezes offer a good example: a baby of six months merely rocks in a supportive canvas chair, a three-year-old learns the complementary movements of back, arms and legs that get the swing going higher and higher; as time goes on she swings upside-down by her arms and somersaults between the ropes, and eventually, if she wishes, she can acquire the more hair-raising skills of the trapeze artiste. Similarly, scooters, tricycles and bicycles, roller skates, skateboards and stilts lend themselves to a remarkable range of skills, from what is no more than a hesitant moving around on something other than feet, to an acrobatic expertise which terrifies and impresses the adult onlooker. Toys of this sort have in common that they serve as extensions to the child’s own body, allowing a physical range beyond what the body is capable of.

The swing, that classic and universally loved toy, has another property which leads us on to a further group of toys which seem to give something special to the child and which all share what we might call a hypnotic quality. The swing is hypnotic because it catches up the whole body in a rhythmic action which can be perpetuated with a minimum of active attention; but a bodily rhythm is not at all necessary for the hypnotic quality of a toy to be felt. Anything played with aimlessly in the hand – a stone egg, a string of so-called ‘worry-beads’ – can serve this function. Adults often make such a toy of a large finger-ring or a pipe. Such experiences in ordinary life are usually visual, however – watching firelight, smoke, moving clouds or water. Three visual toys are particularly hypnotic. One is the small wooden top for spinning with the fingers. Another is the old-fashioned ‘snowstorm’, where a hollow glass ball containing a landscape or a flower is completely filled with water and a small quantity of white particles; when the toy is shaken, the ‘snow’ swirls round the ball, then peacefully floats down on to the landscape. The third toy, invented in our unit by Joan Head, has no name; it is simply a perspex tube, sealed at both ends, containing a ping-pong ball which exactly fits its width; held vertically, the ball slowly falls against the pressure of air to the bottom of the tube. Turn it over, and it does the same again. It is totally useless, and we cannot stop people playing with ours.

Perhaps the chief function of a hypnotic toy is that it allows the child to withdraw completely for a little while, and this is a very relaxing experience. It does something more, however: it seems to occupy just enough of the attention to free the rest of the child’s awareness for creative and imaginative thought. Perhaps it fills up that part of the consciousness which would otherwise be distracted by more demanding stimuli. An ethologist might call it a displ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Toys?
• 2 People as Playthings: lap and cradle play
• 3 Toys For the First Two Years: a developmental progression
• 4 Some Timeless Toys and Play Equipment
• 5 Props for Fantasy
• 6 Miniature Worlds
• 7 Play and Playthings for the Handicapped Child
• 8 Using Toys for Developmental Assessment
• 9 Using Toys and Play Remedially
• 10 Toys and Play for the Sick Child
• 11 Toys Through Time and Space
• Notes
• List of Suppliers
• Further Reading
• Index