War Chests to Toy Chests

From War Chests to Toy Chests
By Daphne White
Issue 127, November - December 2004

For the past eight years, I have been a professional buyer of children’s gifts: toys, video games, puzzles, puppets, and more. This is not a job I applied for. It is something I created as the founder and executive director of the Lion & Lamb Project, an organization founded in 1995 to stop the marketing of violent entertainment to children.

Soon after founding Lion & Lamb, I realized that if parents were to steer their children away from action figures, toy guns, laser tag, violent video games, and other products that glamorize violence—if they were to transform their children’s war chests into toy chests—they would need a lot of help and support. This is because the toy industry tends to promote the most violent toys and video games with the least play value: toys and games that just happen to have a TV show with the same name. Think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z. Unfortunately, some of the most creative, open-ended games that children will return to time and time again are some of the hardest to find.

So each year, beginning in 1996, Lion & Lamb created a Top 20 list of creative, nonviolent toys, and a Dirty Dozen list of violent toys to avoid. This year will be the first that Lion & Lamb will not produce such a list, because the organization is shutting down. In this article, I will for the first time share my guidelines for selecting the Top 20 toys, so that you can create your own personalized Top Toy list.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty: There is not just one Top 20 list. Lion & Lamb never claimed that the toys on each year’s list were the best 20 toys of any year. With literally thousands of new toys and games entering the market each season, it is impossible to come up with any list of the absolute “best.” What we tried to do was suggest 20 excellent toys from as many excellent companies as possible, offering a range of activities for a range of age groups and interests. There were always many outstanding products that had to be left off.

Using the guidelines presented below, different parents and families will come up with their own variations on the Top Toy list. No two lists will be the same, but your list will be perfect and unique for your particular child and family.

What is a “violent” toy?
When I conduct parenting workshops, parents always ask: Are Nerf guns violent? Are tiny little squirt guns violent? Are the Lego Pirates or Star Wars characters violent? To answer these questions, I came up with some basic guidelines:

Violent toys and video games:

promote violence and aggression as the best way to settle disputes
depict violent actions as fun, harmless, and “cool”
encourage children to act out aggressive scenarios
foster aggressive competition
depend on “enemies” that need to be “destroyed”

With this list, you should be able to answer the questions posed above. Do Nerf guns and squirt guns depict the act of shooting a friend as fun and harmless? Do some Lego characters encourage aggressive pretend behavior? If the answer is yes, then these games have a violent characteristic—regardless of the brand name.

One thing that has saddened me, as I’ve observed the toy industry, is that in recent years trusted brand names such as Lego have begun selling action figures and other violent toys in order to maintain or increase their market share. While Lego action figures such as the Star Wars and Galidor series are not nearly as violent as many others, children still use them for fantasy fighting. With movies, video games, and TV programs tied to some of these action-figure lines, they are clearly more about marketing opportunities for Lego than toys for children.

Lego is not alone in abandoning quality play for profits. K’NEX is another company that started out making quality-construction toys for schools and families, then added a line of violent action figures based on the Mech Warriors video-game franchise. And one of the largest toy companies in the world, Hasbro—whose motto is “Making the World Smile”—makes some of the most violent children’s products. In fall 2002, as a sniper terrorized the Washington, DC, area, Hasbro was marketing a Lego-like construction toy, the Gun Sniper, for children ages four and up. This “posable action figure”—part of Hasbro’s Zoids line—looked like a mechanical dinosaur wielding a gun in each hand. The packaging promoted other Zoids, which preschoolers could “customize for battle!”

Hasbro also makes Nerf guns, Super Soakers, Transformers, Pokémon action figures, and more. Each year, without fail, one or more Hasbro toys ended up on our Dirty Dozen list. Hasbro makes some excellent products as well, but one of the criteria we developed at Lion & Lamb was to support only companies that make creative, quality products for children, and that do not make toys that are violent, sexist, racist, or otherwise harmful to children’s developing values.

We found, however, that the larger a company grew, the more concerned it became with profits and quarterly earnings—and the more willing it was to stray from a laudable-sounding mission such as “Making the World Smile.” How can a toy named Gun Sniper and marketed to kindergarten students possibly bring a smile to anyone’s lips?