New Breed of Toys

Advanced placement begins in the nursery, say some perhaps overly worried child development experts: by the time a kid is ready for school, he has already reached more than half his general "achievement level" for life. So educators have awarded Santa Claus a Ph.D., and preschoolers with well-heeled, ambitious parents are acquiring toys that teach concepts of mathematics and science almost before the children can speak in whole sentences.

When the National Science Foundation reported that young children could easily learn a lot about optics, Creative Playthings, Inc. of Cranbury, N.J., invented a tough, clear plastic bag which, filled with water, makes a big and satisfying magnifying glass. The same company also devised a three-legged stool whose height is equal to the focal length of a giant lens in the middle of the seat, a triangular wood box with three peephole lenses for viewing an object's change in size, and a merry-go-round of mirrors that reflect other mirrors and spy around corners. A set of colored Plexiglas paddles demonstrates the effect of combining primary colors. A different sort of distinction is taught with perception plaques: twelve pairs of highly similar pictures of the same object that inspire the child to match the identical drawings.

Among math toys is a two-piece jigsaw puzzle with a written number on one piece and a like number of horses or flowers painted on the other. Various counting boards and bars derive from the theory of sets used in computers. A small seesaw devised by Child Guidance Toys Inc. of New York City teaches addition and subtraction by using weighted numerals that hang from each end of the bar; only the combined weight of a two and a seven, for example, will balance a nine. Playskool Manufacturing Co. of Chicago, which got many of its long-popular peg-and-hole toys from standard IQ tests, now makes a 100-bead counting board similar to the teaching materials of Montessori schools.

Many so-called educational toys are mediocre gadgets whose makers hope to cash in on the wave of interest in early childhood education. Others--typically scale models--are too detailed, or "structured," in the lingo of child psychologists, which cramps a young child's imagination. "Parents who succumb to the charms of these toys are fulfilling their own frustrated needs," says Chicago Psychoanalyst Ner Littner. Another kind of toy is truly educational but hardly new. Psychologists call them "miniature people" and say that children need them "to recreate the world around them." That's the hard way to invent a doll.

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