Speaking of Psychology - Psychology takes toys seriously, with Barry Kudrowitz, PhD, and Doris Bergen, PhD

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

Just in time for toy-buying season, Dr. Barry Kudrowitz, a toy designer and professor of product design at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Doris Bergen, a professor emerita of educational psychology at Miami University in Ohio, discuss the psychology of toys. What makes something a good toy? Why do some toys stand the test of time while others fizzle out after one season? How has technology changed the way kids play with toys? Does gender affect kids’ toy choices? And do we ever grow out of toys? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's that time of year when parents and other caregivers race to find the hottest toys and stock up on classic favorites. From poppets to Pokemon, from squishmallows to Legos. Toys might seem frivolous, but to psychologists, they're a subject for serious study. Researchers have long known that children learn best through play. Play is how kids stretch their brains and develop crucial cognitive, social, and other skills. toys are a fundamental part of playtime. But what makes something a good toy? Indeed, what makes something a toy at all?

Why do some toys stand the test of time, while others are just a one-season wonder? What's the difference between fun and educational toys? Why do we assign gender appropriateness to some toys and not to others? How do kids' toy preferences change as they age, and how has technology change what toys are and the way kids play with toys. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology,

the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. We have two guests today. Our first is Dr. Barry Kudrowitz, an associate professor and director of product design at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities,

where he teaches classes in toy product design. Dr. Kudrowitz has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied creativity, humor, and idea generation, and he has studied how play can fuel creativity and innovation. In addition to his academic career, he's also a toy designer. Highlights of his work include the Katsup Krapper, an anthropomorphic roller skating ketchup bottle that he designed as a grad student, and the Nerf Adam Blaster, a Nerf toy sold by Hasbro more than five years.

Our second guest is Dr. Doris Bergen, a distinguished professor emerita of educational psychology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Dr. Bergen began her career as a pre-kindergarten and elementary school teacher. And over her long academic career, she has explored the many ways that play is crucial to children's development. She has studied play and humor in early and middle childhood, the effects of technology enhanced toys, and cross-cultural considerations in play among many other topics. Dr. Bergen has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including her most recent, the Handbook of Developmentally Appropriate Toys, which was published in March 2021. Thank you both for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. God be here. All right. So let's start with a broad question, which we usually do. What is the purpose of toys and what makes something a good toy or make something a toy at all? For example, can a stick or a rock be a toy? Actually, toys have existed for a long, long time. You can even find them in early sites.

And so some of the typical toys that children still play with today, like dolls and wheel toys, things that sort, have been around for a long time. But I would say that the purpose of toys, in my view, is to enhance children's play, because children will play, even if there aren't any toys. They'll find sticks or they'll find rocks or they'll find other things to use in their pretend play and in their gameplay. But toys are a means of enhancing the play and making it more creative and often more elaborative.

Yeah, I agree. Toys are a tool for play. And, you know, there's a difference between a toy and a toy product. There are certain toys that are designed by people to be intended to be used for play. And then there's things that are not designed, you know, intended to be used for play that children still play with, like cardboard boxes and spoons and rakes and stuff, right? There's still toys, but maybe they're not toy products. And many toy products are designed by people who have ideas about what they think is good for children to play with.

Maybe they think they'll learn particular things from them. They have different expectations about the toys. And I would say a really good toy is one that doesn't do everything itself, but has the child do it. Unfortunately, I think some toys designed do too much, and there isn't really even room for children to do very much with them. And so those toys typically don't have very lasting value. Maybe kids will play with them for a while, learn what they do,

and then they'll probably turn them into something else and use them in a different way or maybe discard them altogether. And are those things that you think about, Dr. Kudrowitz, when you're designing toys or teaching people how to design toys? I mean, I'm thinking about them, but not necessarily the students. And even when we do playtesting, it's not necessarily even the children that we playtest are thinking about those things. Oftentimes, it's what is trendy or popular that they might gravitate to. but I also think that what makes the toy a good toy is that it can be used in a variety of different contexts and it doesn't die. You know, you can use it for generations, for example, or in multiple different ways of playing.

You know, like the cardboard box is a great example. We actually have a box in our dining room right now from a couch, but it's been played with by the children for months now and we left this giant box in the dining room. And they play with that more than, you know, all the toys we've got in so far. It's a fort. It's a rocket ship. They're drawing all over the walls. They're cutting out holes. And that was free.

And it's compostable. And I think it's fantastic. There are sort of different kinds of play, you know, of course, and different kind of toys facilitate different kinds. If you're thinking of just kind of exploratory play or, manipulative play, that's one kind of toy that'll work for that. If you're looking at pretend play, there's a whole range of other kinds of toys that are really facilitative of pretense. And then, of course, there's game play of all different kinds and very different kinds of toys for that. And there's certainly some overlap among those.

But the type of play that the child is going to do, if it's active play, quiet play, or of various sorts will usually need, or at least there'll be an expectation that different kinds of toys will meet the needs for different kinds of play. So a lot of parents think that toys come in basically two categories. And Dr. Bergen, you just described several categories, not just two, but for parents, they think they're educational toys, like those that are designed to teach science or math or reading, and then there are toys that are for fun, which covers pretty much everything else. Is that a valid distinction? And is there a difference between a fun toy and an educational toy?

Should there be? I mean, going back to the very first thing we talked about, the primary purpose of a toy is play. And if the primary purpose is to teach something, it may not be a very good toy. But, you know, that being said, play is how we learn. That's how we've learned skills growing up, as we learned developmental skills, cognitive skills, physical skills.

And so you could also argue that no matter what kind of play, if you're engaging in play, you could argue that you're learning something. And so it's a little bit hard to separate those two, but I don't necessarily like the idea of a toy being primarily designed to be teaching you something. I would agree. I think that's maybe more of a marketing distinction than it is a toy distinction, because I think children learn from every type of play and from every type of toy. They may not be learning a specific thing like letters or whatever the toy maker thought they would do. But they also learn many other

social and physical and intellectual skills from just about any toy. So I think the distinction educational toys is primarily a distinction for parents and for teachers and people who think that, oh, if it says educational, it's going to have a greater educational factor. The other way that educational toy could be seen is if there's a specific kind of teaching that the adult wants a child to have. And unfortunately, sometimes those kind of toys that are very specifically designed to teach a certain thing are either not used very often by the child or the child transforms them in some way into pretend or something else. And they don't exactly use them in the same. same way that the person who designed them thought they would use them.

And I think that's an amazing thing that kids can do. I mean, I've known parents, for example, who've decided that they never want their children to have a toy gun. And somehow, kids will figure out how to make something into a gun. If they want to play with guns, they're going to have a make-believe gun, right? I mean, it's just the creative end of childhood. Dr. Cudrowitz, you were quoted in a recent article talking about the fact that toy makers worry that kids are losing interest in toys at a younger age than they use. to? Is that actually happening? And if it is, why do you think so? So this is related to the concept of age compression. There's probably other terms related

to this. We talked to Doris about that, but it seems like kids are playing with the stuff that the older kids were playing with in the past. And this may be more of an artifact of technology advancing to the degree that things that we used to play with in the past were I don't want to say dumb, but they didn't have high tech inside because that was expensive. And in today's society, you can put LEDs in anything and it's relatively low cost. You could put motors in things and processors and there's computers in everything, you know, in my pocket right now. And it's not that much more expensive in today's society. And so a lot of the things that children are playing with today are not,

necessarily video games, but they're more like technology. And in the market space, some of those things kind of get lumped into consumer electronics and not necessarily in the toy aisle. And so, again, it kind of goes back to maybe marketing in some ways, but also you're not necessarily seeing kids play with the same toys as they were years ago. And there's a lot more screens and digital things in their hands. As a long-time observer of play and interviewing of adults' memories of their childhood pay, I definitely agree with Barry that the way play, the time and the experiences children have in play now has changed quite a bit.

When you think back to your own playtime, or certainly many other people who have either interviewed. They recall long periods of time where they pretty much could decide what they wanted to do with the time. And the kind of play materials they had were ones that they created, they made the toy talk, or they made the toy walk, or they did whatever it was with their own imagination. And now, so many of the toys, the toy does everything. There's really not much for the child to do. And so that toy is not going to be nearly as important in terms of children's development or their interest level, because if you're just, there's 10 buttons to push and

you've pushed all 10 buttons, and then that's really the end of, what you can do with the toy, usually that what you see the child do is either put it away and not look at it anymore or pick it up and pretend it's something altogether different and use imagination and do something else with it. So I do think that that change and certainly that idea that experiences have gone down to lower levels is not just, related to toys, but it's pervasive across a lot of other things for children today. But I do think I've often thought the people designing the technology are the ones that are having the playful time because they're the ones that get to figure out what to do with it

and so on. So it's the grownups who are coming up with these ideas. The kids aren't asking for the toys to be, yeah. So are you recommending that parents give their kids like dolls that don't do anything except sit there? They still make those. I know. One of the things that concerns me a great deal is if you remember back to your childhood, maybe all summer, you didn't have anything to do except just figure out what to play with yourself. Now children's lives are very structured, both after school and in summer. And so they don't necessarily have those long periods of time where they can really create their own play world. So that's a very, very different thing that we see now. So let me ask a kind of a developmental question. Maybe this is for Dr. Bergen,

although you're both welcome to answer it. But what happens to children who grow up without actual toys? Do they develop differently? And are they different as adults? That's a really interesting question. I really don't know of any research that's really looked at children who grow up without play because the research that, let's say, would be done in a country where there were very few toys show that children play anyway. They don't necessarily have to have toys to play. So it's more of a question, I guess, if you had children who had to go to work at age six or something like that. And I don't really know that's a very important issue. Probably should be studied. But I don't really know of the case that there are children who have any play experiences,

but they may be very different kinds of play experiences. They may have play experiences where they use whatever is in their environment and create their own play as compared to the kind of play that Barry was mentioning where they have many, many toys, but a lot of toys have all these characteristics that just require you to push a button or something like that. So I think there's a wide range of play experiences, but at least in my experience, children, even if they have 10 or 15 minutes of their own time, are going to find something to play. Going back to the last thing that Dora said, on technology maybe restricting play, and that is true, that happens, but it can also be used for good.

And designers can create open-ended play experiences for children taking advantage of technology. So, you know, they could create new types of musical instruments or things where children can program their own things to do whatever they want. What is the Spider-Man quote? You know, with great power comes great responsibility. you know, it's in the hands of the designer to create those good toys. I agree with that. I just think that if there's only one way to use a toy, that it's hard for children to use it for a long time period.

So as long as, you know, there are many different things to do with it, even if it's got a lot of technology enhancement, I think it can be a toy that has a lot of playability. So Dr. Carderowitz, one for you, do commercial toy designers think about developmental psychology while they're designing toys? I mean, do toy companies routinely have psychologists that they consult with, that they have them on staff? And are those toys different or better? Well, I think this is probably a question for Doris, because I think she was, she's consulted for those big companies. but I can say that, you know, not all toy companies are large and can afford consultation.

And so, you know, it's probably generally those big, the big players that could bring in consultants like Doris on these things. Yeah, I'll pick up on that because I did, and a lot of other developmental psychology people, did do a lot of work for Fisher Price. they had their headquarters in New York for a long long time and they would bring us there and we would look at the toys at the stage before they were in their final stage and we would evaluate them and describe what we thought might be good developmental aspects and what would work and what wouldn't and so on and that was really a very important thing and that's why

Fisher-Price toys were always so very playable and very good for development. Once Fisher-Price got taken over, I think, by another company, I don't think they still have those consultants that they did at that time. But there may be some other toy companies that do have consultants. But I originally thought that was really a good process because it was at the time of where there could still be some fine-tuning of the toy, but the basic toy was already designed. And I think that made the toys really more playable

and more developmentally appropriate by having that input from psychologists. So Dr. Bergen, you studied play in China. Dr. Katowicz, you worked on toy design in the Netherlands. Do the types of toys that kids like to play with very much around the world, or are they pretty much universal? I guess I would say as far as China, I didn't see any big differences.

When I was there, there wasn't a lot of, where I was, it was not a rich environment, and so a lot of the play was pretty basic. But, you know, things like balls and dolls and toy trucks and various things like that were pretty much the same there. They also played a lot of games outdoors, and outdoor play was very big at the time I was in China. I really don't know what it's like now. But that was quite a long time ago. What about in the Netherlands?

It wasn't too different. I'm always looking for new stuff. And so being in a new environment, I felt inspired. And I felt like all the toys were cooler there because they're all, you know, different. But I was just on sabbatical, actually, a couple years ago there. And it was my first introduction to Montessori. and so we had our two-year-old in a Montessori daycare. And that style of play was really exciting.

The toys are like real stuff. It's like, you know, prepping vegetables and cleaning and stuff. And it's turning these everyday activities, you know, into play in some ways. They have these kind of border eye, which are these kind of children farms. I guess, in the city. And you bring, you know, the family goes, and the kids take care of the animals, and they harvest vegetables, and they can go, and they take these little tiny kid-sized wheelbarrows and shovels, and they go into the pasture, and they pick up cow poop.

And they do that for like an hour. And it's like, and it's plate. This sounds like a con. This is how you make children do work. No, and my son is like, can we go back to the farm and do more of that, right? And it's getting out into nature, connecting with animals. You know, these are tools that aren't usually their size. And so there's some novelty about that, too.

Yeah, and I think that European play researchers and have studied a lot of outdoor play because they're very much more focused on the natural environment and doing things outdoors in many of the countries in Europe, not so much here as they do there, but that's been a very strong emphasis, I think, in Europe altogether. I think, though, that what I've found is that children's types of play are very similar wherever you are, And it may be that they use a manufactured toy that is designed specifically for something,

or if they're in an environment where there isn't a manufactured toy that fits whatever it is they want to do, they can invent something else to use. You can use a piece of wood to be a truck if you want to, if you don't have a real truck. You can use a rag and a ball to be a baby if you really don't have a real doll. So I don't think that necessarily the types of things children play are that different. I do think that there are many different materials they use in different places. But pretend play and game play and exploratory practice play, just doing over and over and expanding things.

Those are all very common types of play that you would see just really wherever you were in the world, I think. So I mentioned in the intro that Dr. Cuthrwood's one of your first toy designs was a pooping ketchup bottle. And Dr. Bergen, you've been quoted in a couple of recent articles about why kids are so interested in potty humor and toys that defecate. And since we're on the poop topic here, what is it about bathroom humor and potty-related toys that kids find so irresistible? Well, why do adults laugh at jokes that have those same kind of elements? The only difference is that young children don't have a lot of experiences. So bathroom stuff is one of the few, quote, shocking things that you're not supposed to talk about. So obviously, that's the one they focus on.

Their motivation, at least in my view, is absolutely no difference than the adult to tell some kind of a scatological joke or whatever. It's just that that's the material they have to act on and about being funny and being shocking. Scatological. Wow, I'm going to use that word in my book. Yeah, I don't know. Potty humor, they get reinforced, right? Whether it's good or bad, but if, you know, the child says something, they're going to get laughs, you know, it could be uncomfortable laughs or it could be actual laughs or it could be scolding, but they get feedback and they know it will consistently get feedback. And so we've had a very hard time getting our five-year-old to stop saying.

poop all the time. And it's just like ignoring it eventually is the, yeah. Well, and I've done, you know, developmental study of children's humor. And you see that's a particular stage. And later, they're going to do other shocking things or tell you a joke that wouldn't be appropriate either. But it's just that with humor, a lot of humor is designed to have some sort of shocking quality. to it because that's what makes it funny. So you use whatever is available at your own experience level. And there's been some interesting study of, you know, the differences in men's and women's humor.

And if you look at it closely, it has a lot to do with what have been their life experiences. So it's just the same kind of thing. Potty humor is very funny to young children. because that's a very important thing in their life. If you recall, there's a lot of attention their adults have paid to how they manage that. So it's a good thing to make jokes about and to find funny. So shifting gears here, a few years ago, there were a number of news stories about major retailers, such as Target, getting rid of boys and girls' labels in their toy departments.

I'm just wondering what role gender plays in kids' toy preferences and in how they play with toys. I mean, I think it's all fabricated to some degree by marketing. And when I was little, I just wanted to play with the easy bake oven. But I think it was only in pink or something. That's all I wanted, right? And then it was like, no, that's a girl toy because it's pink and it's cooking. I don't know. I thought that was weird.

Now it's not. You know, it's in different colors. And for us, you know, we just, we get our kids whatever they want to play with. And we're trying not to say that is, that's a gendered thing. Sorry, our son has, you know, this probably more clothes that are labeled as girls' clothes in prior times. He has a lot of dresses and skirts. And I think with art, what is the art class, I think that's the brand. It's just a lot of, it's all mixed up together.

And there's no calling out this is for a boy or a girl. And I think a lot more parents feel that way now than they used to. But the toy companies and the toy stores and all of them are still egregious about that because they are always determined to label boys' toys and girls' toys. I would agree with Barry that the typical child will play with anything that they find interesting, and there are times when dressing up is great for everybody, and there's times when pushing cars around are great for everybody to be doing. And so children would not be making those boys.

and girl distinctions, if adults were not promoting that. And if you ask a lot of parents, unfortunately, even today, they would say, oh, I would only want to buy that for a boy or I don't want to buy that for a girl. But it's kind of working against that tide of advertisements and store directions to allow your child to have as wide a range of toys as they want to have as Barry's trying to do. And I do think it's worse now than it used to be. There was a one-time period in my professional career where there was a real attempt to take those labels off of the toys and then it gradually crept back on everything again. So I'm hoping if it's the case that there begin. You're

beginning to get rid of those labels again, it would be great. But I haven't seen much evidence of that as yet. That sounds like it probably mirrors what's happening politically in a given country or in the world. So I'm sure that you both know adults who continue to be fascinated with toys. Do we ever really outgrow them? Do our toys just get bigger and more complicated and maybe more expensive? I think you never outgrow it, but the labels change. So instead of it being, I'm playing with this, it's something else. I have a hobby that I collect dolls, or I have a hobby that I fly automatic planes or whatever. So play is a basic human characteristic. It is going to be present hopefully for all of us all our life. And we should have times when we're playful and we're enjoying

things that aren't getting graded or don't have to be paid for, whatever. But I think that we call them by different names. As an adult, you're in a play maybe, but you're not playing, but you're still pretending. You're taking a role. You're acting, so forth. So that's That's a playful type of activity adults would do. And that's true for a lot of other adult activities. But we don't call them play. We call them hobbies or we call them a whole wide range of things. So I don't know why the word play doesn't continue to get used as much as it should be

because the playful quality of humans is one of our, in my view, best qualities. Yeah, I mean, some areas it stays. Like when we're playing video games still as adults or we're playing sports, for example. But in general, it's not like, hey, guys, you want to come over my house and play. Right. You don't call your friends as an adult and say that unless you're saying cards, maybe. Right. But yeah, the activities just get more challenging or they get more fine motor skill.

So it goes from, you just think about puzzles, right? You're starting with the four-piece puzzle as a little baby and then, or a toddler, and you get to like the 100-piece puzzle and then an adult, you're still doing puzzles, but they're a thousand-piece, right? And maybe they have like- And it's still fun. Yeah, and it's still fun, right? Or even skill-like-based, you know, it goes from like stacking, you know,

or the Nerf blasters to archery or something. It's like your motor skills get better. Your budget gets higher. You can put more time and money into these hobbies or recreation. And we just start to not associate it with that word because that word tends to mean for kids or trivial, right? But it's still play. It's just it's more fine-tuned. It's more advanced.

Yeah. And we call it a hobby or we might just say, I want to do creative things, instead of saying play, I'm creating, and so forth. And I think that my one concern, I guess I'll have to say, going back to that earlier when we were talking about technology and how toys have now become so much more technologically designed, My view is the people who are having the playfulness are the people who are designing the stuff more than if it's a toy that you can only do one or two things with.

And so I would hope that as the toys get more sophisticated, that they continue to have many different ways they can be used. Because if a toy only has a few ways it can be used, it either is not going to be played with very much, or it's going to make children no longer having opportunities to play. If you're doing video games all the time or you're doing things that are very structured, you are not getting a chance to have wonderful ideas. There's been some really interesting research on adults who won McArthur Awards,

and when they talked with a lot of them, they almost all said that what they most enjoyed when they were younger was what was called small world play, which is a kind of play that's allowed for elementary and older age kids. And it's like designing little structures where you make little towns or you make some kind of a small world, and then you still continue to interact in that small world, but it's appropriate for an older child

as compared to yourself taking on a pretend role or something like that. So the kind of play that older kids, I hope, still have, is where they can actually create the worlds and do things themselves and not just rely on the technology that lets them go into somebody else's wonderful idea of what is play, where they don't really get to do their own ideas of play. It sounds like you're also advocating for basically more unstructured time, right, for kids not to always be told now you've got to go play tennis because they may like tennis, but you're being forced to do it now as opposed to,

I think I'm going to go out in the street now and play ball with the kids. And Barry's done a lot about creativity. So you might want to talk a little bit about creativity's requirement for playfulness. Yeah, there's a number of studies that have shown you're more creative when you're playing or when you view an activity as play. And I think to just build off of the small world comet or the type of play, in today's world, a lot of adults and kids are building those imaginary worlds, but it's in the computer. And it's in Minecraft and Fortnite.

And it is creative. You're building things. You're making up your own stuff. But it's also on a screen. So I don't know, there's pros and cons there for sure. Yeah, I mean, there's something tactile if you, for example, make dollhouses or you've got a train set and you've created a whole layout of towns and so forth. It's very different from the experience of doing it just on a screen. So as we're moving into the holiday season, I think I opened with this and people are out buying toys,

Do you have any guidance suggestions for parents who are looking for gifts for their kids, toys that, whether they're classics or there's something, I mean, I'm not asking you to endorse a particular brand or a product, but sort of the concept of what would you recommend parents be looking for as they're trying to get their kids holiday presents? Wow. Okay. I get this a lot. And then I freeze. board game-wise, going to my research on creativity, I have a lot of favorites that I think build creative skills. My favorite game is actually called code names, and it's a game about divergent thinking and convergent thinking, and it's a word game. But it's now branched out into different properties, so there's a Disney version and a Marvel version and a Harry Potter version. And so you're likely to find one that resonates with your child. But I really, do like that game as far as the creative skills that it builds. I'm also partial to anything

related to cooking and food. And I don't necessarily think it needs to be a toy version of a thing. So I'm not necessarily advocating for the easy bake oven. I'm advocating for maybe the kids' knife set that are actually knives. And it's the safer knife. but they're still knives, right? And like the kid peeler, vegetable peeler. And if there's any other fun products that children can play with you in the kitchen, for example, like a pasta maker, right? The hand crank pasta maker, at least once a month, the children view that as a toy. And we're making food together. And it's not that expensive of a kitchen tool. So just I guess think beyond the toy aisle is my recommendation.

Okay, my suggestion would be sure to have some games that everyone in the family can play. If you think back to your childhood, you can remember some of the best times when your whole family gathered together and played some kind of game. It might not have been a very intellectual game, but it was something that you could do together. And one of the things you learn is how to be a little better sport, if you're not always the one who's coming out, winning the game. But I think that that idea of engaging with your family in play is a very important one. The other suggestion I would have is that the more open-ended toys you can provide the better in terms of play value.

that can be used in a number of different ways. Maybe they start out a certain way, but then you can kind of transform them into other things. And also, the idea that they don't have to be the most popular kind of name toy brand or whatever, but very simple things. Balls, for example, are still extremely popular toys. and just having a few different sizes of the balls and playing with them. But you do need to have either other children to play with or family members to do it.

And in a lot of my early research, I found kids used to play outside with a lot of other kids. And that seems to have been less common now. And so if they're not playing with other kids outside, then the family needs. needs to play with them or they have to play more with other kids at school or somewhere where they can learn some of the give and take. And as Paget would say, enhance their moral development. Well, thank you both. This has been really interesting. And I hope that we provided some good advice and guidance to parents and other caregivers of children who are looking for toys, particularly around this time of year, but all the time, because toys are, there's no season, right? Toys are,

for all time. So thank you both. Thanks. Enjoyably be here. Thank you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyant Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.