For toddlers, toy of choice is tech device

 

By Matt Richtel and Brad Stone

New York Times

November 28, 2007

 

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 28 — Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.

Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are not satisfied with fake gadgets.

Consider the “hottest toys” list on Amazon.com, which includes the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price (to help children surf on “preschool-appropriate Web sites”) and the Smart Cycle, an exercise bike connected to a video game.

Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine and an industry analyst for 24 years, said there had been “a huge jump in the last 12 months” in toys that involve looking at a screen.

“The bigger toy companies don’t even call it the toy business anymore,” Mr. Silver said. “They’re in the family entertainment business and the leisure business. What they’re saying is, ‘We’re vying for kids’ leisure time.’ ”

Technology has been slowly permeating the toy business for a number of years, but the trend has been accelerating. On Wednesday, six of the nine best-selling toys for 5- to 7-year-olds on Amazon.com were tech gadgets. For all of 2006, three of the top nine toys for that age group were tech-related.

The trend concerns pediatricians and educators, who say excessive screen time stifles the imagination. But more traditional toys — ones without computer monitors, U.S.B. cables and memory cards — are seen by many children as obsolete.

“If you give kids an old toy camera, they look at you like you’re crazy,” said Reyne Rice, a toy trends specialist for the Toy Industry Association. Children “are role-playing what they see in society,” she added.

That seems to be the case even when youngsters are not old enough to have any clue how to use actual gadgets.

Yunice Kotake, of San Bruno, Calif., recently purchased a Fisher-Price Knows Your Name Dora Cell Phone for her twin year-old daughters. But a few days later, she returned the play phone to a local Toys “R” Us, after she found that the girls seemed to prefer their parents’ actual phones.

“They know what a real cellphone is, and they don’t want a fake one,” Ms. Kotake said.

Inside the Toys “R” Us, the shelves near the store’s front were brimming with toys with a high-tech twist. Among them were numerous starter laptops that play educational games (and in the shape, for instance, of Barbie’s purse and Darth Vader’s helmet) and traditional board games with DVD extras. Perched prominently on one shelf was one of the country’s hottest-selling toys, the EyeClops Bionic Eye, an electronic camera for children ages 6 and up.

Standing near the front of the store, a 6-year-old named Sabrina, with a gap-tooth smile, explained that her No. 1 choice for a Christmas gift is an adult laptop.

“ ’Cause it’s cool,” she explained.

“Maybe when she’s 8,” said her mother, Amina, who declined to give her last name. She might, she said, have to yield when her daughter turns 7.

“These kids are different from the way we were,” she added.

Toy companies are eager to meet demand with products like the LeapFrog ClickStart My First Computer, which gives children ages 3 and up a keyboard to help them learn computer basics, using a TV screen as a monitor.

“Children want to emulate their parents, whether they are on the phone, using a digital camera or on their computers and online,” said Mark Randall, vice president of the toy and baby store at Amazon.com. “The toy industry now has pretty much got a product for every one of those behaviors.”

Even toys with no typical connection to technology are newly wired. A new generation of popular stuffed animals and dolls, like Webkinz, are now tied to Internet sites so that toddlers can cuddle and dress them one minute and go online to social-network the next. Among the hottest toys listed in the holiday issue of Toy Wishes magazine are Barbie Girls MP3 players and the Rubik’s Revolution, a blinking, beeping update of the Rubik’s Cube that includes six electronic games.

Wiring toys for a young audience is worrying some children’s advocates and pediatricians. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against screen time for children ages 2 and younger, and it recommends no more than one to two hours a day of quality programming on televisions or computers for older children.

Donald L. Shifrin, a pediatrician based in Seattle and the spokesman for the academy, said tech toys cannot replace imaginative play, where children create rich narratives and interact with peers or parents.

“Are we creating media use as a default for play?” Dr. Shifrin asked. “When kids want to play, will they ask, ‘Where’s the screen?’ ”

But to the toy industry, the so-called youth electronics category is a bright spot and now accounting for more than 5 percent of all toy sales. Overall toy sales have been flat at around $22 billion a year for the last five years, according to the market research firm NPD Group.

“If you’re just selling traditional toys like board games or plastic toys, you can survive but you can’t grow,” said Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Needham & Company. “This industry has to redefine what a toy is.”

Toy makers are also worried that they might be losing their youngest, most devoted customers to the consumer electronics and video game companies. Mr. McGowan said the industry has even coined a term for the anxiety: KGOY, which stands for Kids Getting Older Younger.

Meanwhile, electronics makers, and entrepreneurs, see opportunity in capturing today’s bib-wearing consumers.

A cellphone company called Kajeet, based in Bethesda, Md., introduced a cellphone this year for children ages 8 and up. In October, Toys “R” Us started stocking the phones, which have software aimed at children but the same hardware as adult models.

“When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness, they’re much less interested,” said Daniel Neal, Kajeet’s chief executive. “They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they’re smart enough to use it better than you do.”

Eric Jorgensen, a programmer at Microsoft, has invented PixelWhimsy, a computer program that allows toddlers to sit at a regular computer and bang away on the keys to create sounds and colors and shapes, but without damaging the computer.

Asmin Jalis, who also works at Microsoft and whose 2-year-old boy, Ibrahim, has been using PixelWhimsy, said his son liked it better than his toy computer. “We have a toy laptop for him, and he knows it’s a fake,” he said.

Grace, a 1-year-old in San Francisco, however, has been going through a decidedly nontechnology phase.

Recently, playtime has involved “putting little toys and dolls into bags and zipping them up,” said her mother, Tanya, who declined to give her last name. “Wouldn’t it be great if our lives were so simple?”

Still, Tanya has put the Fun Elmo Laptop on Grace’s Christmas list. Tanya says Grace is getting the gift because she loves to sit on her mom’s lap and hit the keys and move the mouse on the family’s real computer.

“I think she just likes mimicking people,” Tanya said.