We gave away all our Little Tikes-type stuff two years ago when we moved from Tennessee to North Carolina, and I haven’t exactly been paying attention to what’s trending, as they say, in Plastic-Land. Boy, have I been out of it.
I Totally Missed Baby’s First Cubicle.
Why be outside, lying on your stomach in the clover with wrens twittering over your head, when you could be doing pretend spreadsheets, sending around pretend inter-office memos, and forwarding pretend email jokes?
Or, if office geek isn’t really your bag, how about this?
I mean, I’m all about encouraging other people to do the housekeeping . . .
And why the heck does it say “Girls Only?” Son, put down that mop AT ONCE, and track some mud on the floor for your sister to clean up.
PS: 6-year-old, her eye happening to fall on the image of My Cleaning Trolley: I want that.
8-year-old, regarding the cubicle dealie: We could get a bunch of those and play Dilbert.
Just what I was hoping for.
That is depressing…yikes! But I bet that plastic cubicle comes in a really cool cardboard box, one that’s plenty big enough to build an awesome fort out of…
The housekeeper trolley, ugh. No. Just…no.
There used to be a brand of cleaning item – steel wool – I think it was, called Chore Girl. Bad name. So, the fix was clearly to change the name to…wait for it…Chore Boy. Ugghh. Complete lack of imagination. That company must have gotten into the girls’ toy business.
But the cubicle…I think this is a practical toy. It lets kids experience the soul killing drudgery of mindless office work before thay have any chance to glamorize it. The photo even shows the controlling supervisor pointing out deficincies in the little guy’s work. “Here’s some reality for ya, son!” Might as well let ‘em practice early on inventing excuses for not showing up.
Unfortunately, my homeschooled children can’t get enough of Dilbert, and would love the cubicle. I’d rather give them an appliance box and have them Magic Marker their own, of course, but they’d probably love it, much as my son loves anything with Spiderman on it.
My kids have seen cleaning toys like the trolley before, and scorn them, but because they’re “not real tools”.
My mom has some old-fashioned Oneida bristle brooms, two of them child-sized. They are my daughters’ favorite toy there, though not because I’m teaching them how to be janitors. (Nope, I’m teaching them to be mothers, which is far more wonderful and frustrating…and uses the same tools as janitors.)
Plus, bristle brooms make it easy to pretend you’re Kiki from the Miyazaki movie.
But I know what you mean. What sad toys.
Well it is pink…..soooooo maybe that is why it says Girls Only.
These just make me want to cry.
Well, er, we bought our then-18 m.o. his own whisk broom and dustpan, because he desperately wanted one. And all my kids have made their own cardboard laptops (and cell phones, tv’s, and remotes.) My youngest has a tiny niche in her bedroom that she calls her “office”.
So I think Little Tykes is just there for the preschooler who needs to outsource production . . .
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“But the cubicle…I think this is a practical toy. It lets kids experience the soul killing drudgery of mindless office work before thay have any chance to glamorize it.”
Yeah, but . . . isn’t that what cardboard boxes are for?
Oh, yeah, our kids have all had brooms and dustpans . . . and my youngest, who’s now 6, set up an “office” in one of our closets. Sometimes it was a post office, and she went around sticking cryptic little notes under all our bedroom doors, and sometimes it was an office-office where she did . . . office stuff, I guess.
I know, my kids can’t get enough of Dilbert. They all go through that launch-into-reading stage where the most appealing things to pick up are cartoon books, so then they go around talking in lines from Dilbert and Get Fuzzy.
My 6-year-old probably just liked that cleaning toy because it was pink, though she might also have liked the fact that it didn’t look like a real tool. I’m big on the real-tools thing. People here routinely get things like hammers in their Christmas stockings (once they’re old enough not to nail the dog’s ears to the floor).
I thought the cleaning toy was cool. My own kids could never get enough of the toilet brush; we had to put it in a high place–and wasn’t THAT hard to explain!
Real tools do make good gifts. By the way, a real stethoscope costs no more than a toy doctor kit, and is great for open-ended play, Harder to break, too.
Why oh why do our children not understand all the larger cultural implications of their toys? They insist on thinking it’s just about fun! “Is it fun? Is it fun?” they ask.
Where are their priorities?
Someone gave one of our children a baby toy which was a phone/fax machine. You pushed buttons and the phone rang and it said things like, “Please add paper to your fax machine!” in this chirpy childish voice.
We still have this toy; the little kids dragged it out not long ago to take to someone’s house, because her grandkids were visiting and she wanted some baby toys. If the toy had actually made it into the house, I might now be referring to this person as my former friend, but in the melee of getting out of the car, it was forgotten, and it’s been riding around back there ever since. It’s kind of old by now, and its little electronic synapses fire in kind of an erratic way, so that every time I go over the railroad tracks it starts up: the phone rings, and the voice says, “Please add paper to your fax machine!”
“Aaaaah!” my teenager said yesterday. “Drive by Goodwill! Now!”
I had to remind her how much fun she had had with this toy, at the age of about eight, when it belonged to her baby brother. “Please add paper to your fax — please! Add paper to your fax machine! Please add! Please add paper to your fax machine!”
Aaaaaaah, indeed.
Years ago I came to the realization that girls and boys are trained differently….and I think it continues to this day.
When I was a girl, my group was offered the diaper and feed the baby toy, the clean the house toy and the cooking toy.
The boys were offered to baseball bat and mitt toy, the fishing rod toy, the chess set.
So, in a girls off time/play time, she was supposed to do house/home work and the boy was supposed to play ball, go fishing, or play chess.
My granny was a sharecroppers wife. I LOVE my cubicle.
These toys are to clarify for children that what they observe in real life is really true.
Unlike the textbooks of California where:
“To make the list in California, books must be scrupulously stereotype free: No textbook can show African Americans playing sports, Asians using computers, or women taking care of children. Anyone who stays in textbook publishing long enough develops radar for what will and won’t get past the blanding process of both the conservative and liberal watchdogs.”
Seeing the cleaning trolley reminds me of when our now 8 year old daughter was in preschool and she had a crush on a little boy in her class. She was also fond of Cinderella at the time. As the year progressed, she shared with me that she wasn’t really interested anymore in her “crush” with the implication being that she was waiting for her Prince Charming. Then we learned this little boy was obsessed with vacuums and cleaning. One day out of the blue daughter says “He can clean the house before he goes to work.” I knew exactly who “he” was and so I asked “And what would you do?” She piped up “Make breakfast for my babies!”
You should also understand that her plan was to adopt all of her babies, each from a different country, since she herself was adopted.
Nowadays she is firmly rooted in the “boys are icky” phase but she would still like to adopt children someday.
The kids will LOVE the boxes those awful toys come in.
Trust me, I still remember putting my GI Joes aside for the boxes