cover image Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood

Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood

Gary Cross. Harvard University Press, $31 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-674-89830-1

An image keeps coming to mind in this compelling study: two grown-ups squabbling over an ever-morphing toy. One is the American parent; the other, the American toymaker. Guess who's winning. Cross, a professor of history at Penn State, is a wise and wry guide with a keen eye for detail, taking the reader from the Noah's arks and Polly Dollies of pre-industrial America to the Killer Tomatoes of today. The pace of history moves relatively sedately through the first half of the book, as mass marketing and a more relaxed philosophy of child rearing combine to fill the American toy box. The years before WWII--the heyday of Gilbert Erector sets, Lionel trains, Dy-dee Dolls and Tinkertoys--seem especially cozy before the advent of TV. Then, with Mattel's first ads on The Mickey Mouse Club, the toy industry gains the advantage in its tug-of-war for control of the toy. Cross's narrative in turn gains in drama and piquancy as the baby boomers' BB guns, Betsy-Wetsy dolls and Slinkys become Barbies and G.I. Joes, only to make way for an invading tide of monsters, aliens, mutants and Garbage Pail Kids. In a fine closing chapter, Cross quietly asserts our parental responsibility to ""raise independent children in, rather than against, a culture of consumption."" One pertinent statistic: preschoolers in the 1980s asked for 3.4 toys at holiday time, and received 11.6. Includes 37 halftones. (Dec.)