Toys as a Sign of Love

I ran across a list showing the most popular toys of each year from 1950 to 2010. It’s from Mental Floss.

Here’s the link: https://www.mentalfloss.com/fun/toys/most-popular-toy-year-born

You will need to copy and paste that into a browser. I’ve discovered that the direct links I’ve provided in past posts are breaking at an alarming rate. I blame this on a few things. Link rot has been a constant for decades. People and organizations change their websites or pull pages offline, so the links go bad. News sites that used to be free have switched to a subscriber model, so people can no longer access stories through a link from another site. I have a link checker on my website that lets me know when a link has gone bad, so I can fix it, but this year I’ve seen a dramatic increase in broken links. I suspect AI is playing a role because AI bots can overwhelm a website with traffic, so site owners are putting further protections on their sites, including blocking links from the outside.

Whatever the cause to the sudden increase in bad links, I am responding by providing a copy of the URL, rather than trying to link directly. I’m sorry for that inconvenience. It bugs me that AI is making the internet more difficult to use. 🙁

Okay, back from that digression to toys.

When I scan through the list of popular toys, I’m surprised at how many were in my household. I was a kid in the ’60s and ’70s and we had Fisher Price’s Little People, Play-Doh, Barbie, Etch-A-Sketch, Trolls, Easy-Bake Oven, G.I. Joe, Spirograph, Lite Brite, Nerf Ball, Stretch Armstrong, Star Wars Action Figures, Atari 2600, and Rubik’s Cube.

One of my favorite toys, which did not make the most popular list, was a turquoise and white typewriter.

My parents were not demonstrative people. They rarely hugged me or my siblings or said, “I love you.” They yelled at us and each other a lot. Given all this, it would be easy to assume they didn’t really care for us.

But, looking at that list of popular toys, so many of which we had, I think the toys were a sign of their love. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so the fact that they chose to put that money into toys for us … and popular toys, to boot … shows that they did care.

Nowadays, most parents tend to stress physical affection and saying “I love you” to more directly indicate their love for their children. They buy toys, too, but there are so many toys available now that children are almost drowning in them. This abundance of toys was not the norm when I was a kid, which made each one more special.

Discovering that my parents got us toys that were popular means they were paying attention to trends of the time and to us. (I’m sure we saw plenty of commercials or ads for these toys and expressed our interest in them.)

While I think it is clearer and healthier for parents to explicitly express love to their children, for parents who have trouble with this, toys can demonstrate that love.