Let's start with the positives - the prices of many children's toys¹ are now incredibly low. Even the poorest family can now afford toys, and they don't necessarily need to be second hand. Ironically, the cheapest toys now do the most - they are electronic and plastic and have noise and sound and buttons. It's difficult not to have the nagging suspicion that this very low price is being reached as the result of exploitation of the planet and the workers assembling them (adult or otherwise) but lets put that thought to one side for the moment². What is irritating though is when you pay for something that is unusable or excessively irritating, for no other reason than lack of thought. Below are some of the most common sources of grief.

To be honest, it is rarely the case that a parent or other purchaser can anticipate these problems in the shop - the product is often in a box, and you don't really want to test everything out in a crowded shop - it's bad enough your kids doing it. Still the hope is that maybe a toy manufacturer will read this and have a think about their products?

You can also think about a more general strategy - if you're a friend trying to get something the parents would like, think about the character of their child, and therefore what they might do with the toy. At a birthday party recently, one parent said to me that it didn't matter that someone had bought their child a drumset, as he didn't play with one toy for more than 5 minutes anyway! Of course, if you're trying to get a really nasty present for the parents, then the sky is the limit as we will see...

Cannot control volume

For many children's toys, the volume is much too high. It is very rare that everyone in the room just wants to listen to the toy. Much more likely is that child number one wants to play with the toy, child number two wants to be able to read their book, parent number one would like to listen to the radio while cooking, and parent number two would like to be able to put baby number one to bed upstairs without the toy waking them up... One can be suspicious that the volume is one way of competing for attention in the shop, and nevermind what impact it has once bought.

Even more criminal is where there is a 'low' button and this is already too noisy! Or no volume off button for a game that can be played without the music.

Toy constructed like Fort Knox

It's already tricky trying to open the packaging for most electronic toys³, without having an obstacle course for the batteries. Of course we don't want our beloved offspring testing them on their tongue, but if you need the tiniest screwdriver ever made to get at them, this might be excessive. Think like IKEA - four tools in your tool box, and you can make every IKEA product known to man⁴.

We have a sit on Thomas the Tank Engine at home that manages to compound this - when you finally get the compartment open with your tiny screwdriver, you find it takes three watch type batteries! Not only are these things expensive and difficult to get hold of, they are sold in pairs, and are very dangerous for kids if swallowed! Madness, total madness.

Default setting at fault

This is a particularly vicious one, as it generally needs a bit of testing until you realise what the full scale of the problem is - difficult to do in store...

My parents in law bought the children a small synthesiser. Perfectly reasonable thing, volume can be adjusted, type of instrument and background music can be changed, everyone happy. Except, one of the favourite activities for a toddler with any electronic toy is turning it on and off, and pressing the button that gives you automatic noise - the background music. When turned off, this thing resets the volume to loud, the instrument to plinky plonky piano, and the background music to the Ode to Joy, played by a Wurlitzer. A few hours of this would turn even the most fanatical Europhile into Bill Cash⁵, and so another toy migrates to the cellar. I genuinely don't know what they were thinking when they set it up like this.

Toy will not let child be

This is a deliberate feature, and all the more dastardly. It is becoming very common! They are trying to make the toy 'sticky' so that the child will not put it down, but in fact what this generally ends up with, given small person attention span, is the following: play with toy A, get bored, pick up toy B, get called back to toy A, get bored again, start toy C, and so on, until the parent intervenes and forcibly quietens toy A. This sometimes requires removing the battery, which is unforgivable really. Also bad is where the toy goes quiet when left alone, but restarts at will! So you're tiptoeing out of a darkened room having finally put to sleep a restless child, and you stub your toe on a plastic ball - you bite your lip to stifle a curse, but the toy itself thinks you want to play and starts a jolly tune at about 100 decibels. Cue woken up and irritable child, and toy dropped into toilet until cessation of noise.

My children have got a sort of animated map of the world, with animals on it. You can press various buttons, and it tells you things about the animal, asks you questions and so on. Quite a good toy, fundamentally. But what is completely insane is the sort of artificial intelligence you've given it. Imagine that you are a toddler. Your use of this toy consists of press a button, hear the name or listen to the noise it makes. Lion roars - rrrargh! So far, totally age appropriate. But what happens when you leave it for more than a minute? You hear a noise - welcome to the quiz! And then it asks a question - 'where does the beaver live?' You haven't got the foggiest. So you ignore it, or press any old button - it says to you 'too slow ocelot!' and then calls back, again and again. Result, irritated parent, frustrated toddler, useless noise.

A variant on this, as mentioned above, is the toy that so wants to be played with that even the faintest inkling of a human presence is enough to have it raring to go, playing its little musical heart out, flashing all the lights it has available...At night, at the bottom of the toy box! Another researcher gives some examples:

I made the mistake one year of buying K a Shrek Donkey. We still have it. The slightest thing can set it off (a gentle breeze, a fly landing on it) and all you can here is Eddie Murphy's voice. If we're in bed it gets kicked down the stairs and if we're downstairs it gets kicked upstairs. We've had it three years I don't know where the battery compartment is and suspect that I'd have to take it apart to get to them any way.

The number of toys that he's had that just start off on their own is just daft. We even have a train that was really rather cool when he was under two. It lives under the stairs now, playing 'Dinah Won''t You Blow Your Horn' to a captive audience of vacuum cleaner and sundry 'bits' - they haven't complained so far.

Graphics and sound quality below standard

There is one infamous electronic toy maker that is especially guilty of this. You know who you are. This particular company makes 'children's computers'...

My eldest son has one of these 'computers'. The user friendliness is quite good, to be fair. He can spend 30 minutes on it at a time. But the graphics - to say that they could have been written on a BBC Acorn is an underestimate. Blocky, cheap, unclear, no colour. And the sound! - plinky plonky electronic nastiness. And there is no excuse - there is plenty of processing power in these things, and basic sound and graphics components are not expensive. How hard can it be to make a decent sized screen, some proper graphics and to use a 10 year old sound card!

Toy breaks on first use

I'd like to say this was an urban myth, but unfortunately it still seems to be quite common. You don't need to be a brain surgeon to see that a toy with antenna that can be twisted off, or that has small pieces that are fundamental to its use, is going to have a low life span. True, you can't break off a dangerous bit, toy legislation obliged, but the average toddler can still trash a few xmas presents before the turkey has got to the sandwiches. A variant of this is the 10 minute battery duration, but this is getting rarer, to be fair. And anyway, parents never really know exactly how long they want the batteries to last... One researcher had a friend with a cunning solution to this problem:

I knew someone who kept every battery they ever had in a box and when the Christmas toys fell silent he would give the kids the "battery box" to find replacement batteries. They would spend maybe an hour sorting through and testing batteries in the toy until they found the set of batteries that had enough power in them to make the thing work for a bit longer. He did occasionally put a kosher set in the "battery box" to give the kids a fighting chance.

Toy repeats beyond parental tolerance level

There is really no excuse for this. As above, all of these toys have got more computing power than the Apollo lander. It's just a question of writing a bit more content. It's true that children like repetition, but they live with adults, who have a lower tolerance threshold. Here for once, there are some best practice examples:

The Bob the Builder phone we have at home has 60 different combinations, including 10 songs. Even I can live with 30 minutes cycling through that, especially as there is a memory game and one or two other options. But this is the exception, most electronic toys have maybe four or five options on them, and the child will then press them in turn for a day or a week, until the toy is 'accidently' dropped in the bath, or the batteries finally give up the ghost...

By way of conclusion

So, what can we do? We parents may like old fashioned wooden jigsaws, marbles, books or toys that are somehow educational or can be played in the fresh air, but the lure of flashing lights and bright colours, buttons to press and loud sounds are irrestible to the toddler psyche⁶. Perhaps rather than a total exclusion, rationing is the way forward - let them pick one electronic toy for their birthday, the rest has to be quieter? And ruthless education of grandparents and friends - if they give you something nasty, hide it till you next visit and THEN give it back to the child. Message will come through loud and clear. Another good way forward is the jumble sale - that way you can ask the vendor, and test if they seem evasive... Finally, you can always revert to precepts from earlier times - out into the garden with you, the dear fruit of my loins, and don't come back until I call you for tea!