The quality of the toys in the market has been in the news recently. There have been raids on sellers of uncertified toys, there have been exhibitions and video demonstrations on quality standards, and focused drives to make prospective customers understand how unsafe toys can be harmful for young children who play with them.
What does one need to look out for, especially with toys for toddlers? The paint, the plastic, the inflammable elements, detachable parts that can be swallowed, stuffing of soft toys, chemicals that can cause health problems … the list is long, and it gets me thinking about the toys our son played with when he was young.
As new and rather paranoid parents of the last and youngest child on both sides of the family, we were delighted that our toddler was the recipient of heaps of used and well-handled toys from all his cousins.
Surely, we thought, our siblings had made sure that they bought no harmful toys for their children — and then, as an aside, we also thought, “Even if they didn’t, there were seven others to lick and bite and taste all those toys and remove any lingering toxic materials — and they have shown no ill effects over the years!”
Happily, while in that experimental stage, our child was less interested in the toys themselves than in the cartons in which they arrived from all corners of the country. So, while we unpacked and washed and wiped and sanitised (decades before the pandemic made sanitising the trend), the plastic building blocks and metal engineering sets and slightly limp but still cuddly stuffed animals and birds, oohing and aahing as we did so, our toddler was busy sitting inside the cardboard cartons, pulling or pushing them across the floor like a train with our “puppy” (fully grown, but eternally childlike) as an obliging passenger!
Not partial to tasting toys
What’s more, given that the “puppy’s” chewies and juicy bones lay around on the floor for her to chew on at any time she liked, our son had heard an endless stream of stern “NO’s” from the time he started crawling, so he was not partial to tasting toys or anything he discovered on the floor or anywhere else.
Thus, again thankfully, by the time the toddler got to play with all those wonderful toys he had “inherited”, he was not a baby, but a rather mature three- or four-year-old who began his collection of He-Man, GI Joe, Ninja Turtles, Transformers, dinosaurs and other figurines.
That he guarded this collection and knew and preserved intact every single accessory of each figurine for the next few decades is something we don’t like to talk about or think about since that would involve clearing out a few dozen cartons in our garage — but we know for certain that not one of those accessories or weapons found their way into his mouth because he could recall the exact shape and list them before he could count or read and he could not bear to have them out of kilter in his neatly lined up “battlegrounds”, “sewers” or “Cretaceous” parks.
Now, when he — or we — present children with toys, however, we make it a point to look carefully at the age specifications and the certification stamps before buying anything. And from experience, we also make sure we do not buy anything from a series because we still remember slightly resentfully the generous givers of the first He-Man, the first GI Joe, the first Transformer, the first Batman …
But for them — and our subsequent caving in to demands for other toys of the same genre — we would have a clear garage today.
And we would not have to check periodically to make sure those old toys are still “safe” — from mould and vermin and decay — and not whether they meet safety standards!
— Cheryl Rao is a writer based in India