Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 135, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1911 — Teaching Parents What Toys to Buy [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Teaching Parents What Toys to Buy

CHICAGO. “Parents of Chicago boys and girls do not know how to, buy toys for their children." It was upon this assumption that the committee on homes of the child welfare exhibit.had on exhibition at the Coliseum a- child’s “play shop." In it there was on display an endless variety of toys, but foremost of all were the -new “do-with” toys introduced for the first time In Chicago by Miss Caroline Pratt, who had charge of the toy exhibit. Miss Pratt was in charge of the same department of the exhibit in New York. “Chicago parents are as deplorably ignorant In the matter of buying proper toys for their children as parents the country over,” she told a reporter. “They don’t know the first thing about it What they do in most cases when they go shopping in the toy department of a store is to buy toys that they like to play with themselves.” “That of course, is the reason we have a ‘play shop’ exhibit The exhibit is planned for the* education of all the parents of Chicago—but, by the way, it is the well-to-do fathers and mothers who are most ignorant es all along this line. What we expect to teach them is the real merit of a *do with’ toy. “A ‘do with’ toy is one that will teach the child how to do things. With It a boy or girls can carry out definite play schemes. It should be simple.

It teaches the child by stimulating its imaginative nature and Inventive sac ulties. Such features are lost alto gether in the elaborate mechanics. 1 toys that leave nothing for the child to do but press a button or release a catch and watch ft go. “Children of wealthy parents art not happy with their playthings. The little fellow who cannot take a step in the nursery without having to dodge an electric train or take a chance of having a toy flying machine hit him on the ear has not the opportunity to learn how to play. The playing lr all done for him by the inventor who made the toy and by his doting papa or rich bachelor uncle who bought the expensive toy for him and taught him to run it. Tho child is neglected." “What we are trying to do through our exhibit is to teach parents that their children have a normal play impulse which can be more easily gratified with a few simple toys that tead to inspire the child’s Imagination and inventive nature than by all the complicated and mechanical toys in the world.”