All Your Questions About The Weird World of Kids' Toys

As an Registered Auntie, I get to watch kids’ toy trends from the backseat. I’ve bought annoying things (sorry, parent friends) and learned how to play new things (Beyblades, I rule) and passed down precious things (all of my My Little Ponies from the ‘80s). We could talk forever about the merits of various toys, past and present, but your listener questions this week underline that there’s also a tremendous amount of anxiety and class signaling absorbed by kids’ toys.

So this episode, featuring toy expert Youngna Park, has it all: light nostalgia, unpacking the obsession with wooden toys, getting to the heart of why grandparents give “junky” gifts, and, of course, talking about what kids actually like when it comes to toys. If you didn’t have Big Toy Feelings before, you will after this one.

Show Notes:

• You can find more about Youngna’s work here — and I strongly recommend subscribing to her newsletter, which always has my favorite writing about parenting and kids culture

• Here’s where you can find all of Youngna’s New York Mag age-specific gift guides, amassed in part by interviewing actual kids

• Follow Youngna’s Instagram side project for kids’ books recs

• The Fisher Price Chatter Phone!!!

• The truly preposterous dog crate I mention in the episode

• Youngna and I both love/cite Hanna Rosin’s 2014 essay The Overprotected Kid (gift link!)

• The Wall Street Journal article about Lovevery capitalizing on kids’ anxiety (no gift link, but you can Pocket)

• The amazing gift guide site that Youngna mentions is The Kids Should See This!

• Youngna sent this follow-up note re: recs for young kids:

  • For stacking cups, I can't find the exact ones my kids had but something like these. There are so many varieties in both muted scandi, and primary palettes. These ones also look cool and are made of silicon (but prob not great for the beach, then). These squeaky eggs are like a drug to small children. I think something about noise, surprise inside, fitting shapes into shapes, etc. High success rate as a gift. For first drawing stuff, these chunky paint sticks are great — vibrant, easy to hold, don't dry out.

• Recent hits with Melody’s one-year-old twin nieces include a thing we call “Long Book” and this Melissa & Doug busy board

We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

• RUNNING CULTURE (you can take this in any direction you’d like — good, bad, ambivalent, we’re talking to Raziq Rauf so it’s gonna rule)

• The rise of therapy speak, how therapy manifests on social media, etc

• Pivoting from my beloved Paul Mescal…..can we just talk about Irish Pop Culturification (including Paul)

• Budget Culture + Specifically Budget Rules You Want/Need To Destabilize or Break Entirely

• Getting into old movies!!!! Tell us why you want to get into them, why you find it difficult, and a few recent-ish movies so we can hand-pick recommendations for you

• Contemporary ideas of self-care (remember this newsletter?)

• Dad culture, whatever that means to you

• Pre-teen influencers

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

For today’s discussion: What big toy feelings did we not address? What did this discussion surface that you hadn’t thought about before?

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.