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

By Gary Cross. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. vii plus 283pp. $29.95).

Gary Cross's thoroughly researched and thoughtful history of toys does more than examine the playthings that have amused and instructed generations of American children. It sheds light on the changing meanings of childhood, parenting, and play, while illuminating the ever-shifting balance of power among parents, children, and mass marketers in our modern consumer society.

Charting a century of change, Cross begins his analysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a revolution in mass marketing and the emergence of a child-centered family contributed to a growing market for children's playthings. The story that unfolds is essentially a narrative of declension: During the first half of the twentieth century, the toy industry produced playthings that satisfied parental desires to prepare children for adult roles and to isolate them from the potentially dangerous influences of their peers. Since the 1970s, however, the acceleration of direct marketing to children and the consolidation of the toy industry have led to the increasing commercialization of childhood and the spread of a distinct children's fantasy culture free of adults and educational value. Parents "increasingly lost control over and even understanding of the play of their children," Cross argues, as the toy industry abandoned its commitment to appeasing parental sensibilities and reduced parents to mere purchasers by selling directly to children. (p. 149)

Cross's lamentation will undoubtedly find resonance among many contemporaries who find shopping in today's warehouse toy marts a bewildering and values-challenging experience. But Cross is actually at his best when he abjures nostalgia for the seemingly more wholesome toys of the past and focuses instead on the historical dynamics that put play and commercial playthings at the center of American childhood. Noting that children's play has long been shaped by mass marketing and mass consumption, Cross links the explosive growth of the toy industry to new attitudes towards parenting and play that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As society became more mechanized and affluent and as families came to rely less on child labor, parents and childrearing experts embraced play as an outlet for children's self-expression and the path to healthy child development. Prizing play as the child's way of learning, they viewed play as "serious work" that prepared children for adulthood. Cross theorizes that the reduced size of middle-class families lent additional credence to such play advocacy. Children in smaller families, he argues, were "less likely to be surrounded by siblings and more likely to spend time alone and need distractions like toys.... In the home bereft of productive tasks and sometimes of baby siblings, playthings gave children a way to imitate adult roles." (pp. 333-34)

Cross also shows how the fantasy-oriented toy culture that prevails today had its roots in the 1930s, when toymakers began to create licensed character toys that revolved around children's celebrity idols from the movies, radio, and comic books. During the Depression, toys and premiums based on Mickey Mouse, Shirley Temple, Buck Rogers, and Superman helped revitalize sales when many toy companies were struggling for survival. Such toys gave Depression-era children, especially boys, the opportunity to enact fantasies that helped them escape the glummer realities of family life and the unpredictability of their futures. As Cross argues, timeless heroes like the cowboy star, the tough detective, and the spaceman "all ... lived in a world free from families, where a boy could forget that he was a child and that he might have had an unheroic father without a steady job." (p. 110)

Unfortunately, such engaging analysis is not sustained when Cross turns to the toy world of the postwar generations. Here his story of declension drives the narrative at the expense of a more penetrating cultural interpretation of toys and what they meant to children. We learn much about how television advertising in 1960s and 1970s introduced children to a culture of novelty dominated by fantasy toys and devoid of educational value. Worse still was the development of toy-based television programs in the 1980s - a marketing ploy the toy industry cynically defended by asserting that children needed pre-formulated story lines to help them play. Cross gives us glimpses into children's play culture, but mostly to tell us how Barbie dolls, G.I. Joes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Care Bears all divorced play from the real worlds of family and work and from children's developmental needs. Readers who want to understand what such toys tell us about a particular cultural moment or why children were drawn to them might feel shortchanged. Despite the considerable body of market research on children's play preferences - toymakers often got their toy ideas by observing children at play - we are left to wonder whether children were indeed merely mimics of television's pre-formulated play narratives, as Cross seems to imply, or whether they proved more imaginative and inventive in creating their own play worlds.

Although Cross misses an opportunity to explore the multifaceted dimensions of children's toy culture by rendering children passive historical actors, he wisely implicates parents for the excessive materialism and faddism that typifies today's toy market. Refusing to pin blame solely on merchandisers, Cross notes that parents routinely "give more than their children demand and help to create higher expectations," owing partly to the guilt of working mothers and divorced parents who have less time to spend with their children. (p. 230) He also suggests that baby boomer parents learned to tolerate escapist play as they became less certain about the adult roles, particularly sex roles, that children should follow. Though plausible, Cross provides no evidence to support this assertion, leaving one to wonder whether parents have simply reoriented their spending for children's development to computers and other non-toy purchases.

Despite the problematic narrative of declension that frames Cross's study, Kids' Stuff has much to offer. Its nuanced and accessibly written discussions highlight some of the cultural tensions inherent in rearing children in an age of mass consumption and make it an important contribution to the history of childhood, popular culture, and consumerism.

Lisa Jacobson

University of California, Santa Barbara