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Book Review: Toys and Playthings in Development and Remediation

If the child in you is still alive and well and longing to play then you will be delighted with Toys and Playthings. The authors, John and Elizabeth Newson, take you into the nursery cupboard and beyond, through hundreds of toys. They permit you to peer, tryout, gasp, sigh with nostalgia and then stare enviously at the amazing range of toys created too recently for you to remember. The old jack-in-the-box, the traditional puppet-on-a-stick and the hobby horse, parade through your mind as you forget for a precious moment in our age of achievement that toys are not only for stimulation (threadbare word) but for fun, for fantasy and for the growth of the whole child. This is one of the chief values of this book. Not only do the toys come alive, so does the whole child. Much is written in psychology about the 'whole child', but the image that comes through these same books is very often one of a little machine to be pumped with educational opportunities or alternatively, and now more fashionably, of a being that is no more than a mass of feelings. The image of the ordinary child who learns and grows through simple home play is too often ignored. The Newsons, with a background of 30 years of experience in researching ordinary and handicapped children and their own experience as parents, present a view of the growing child in the most practical way. Their concern is not with woodenly matching ages of child and toys, but with supplying the child with the particular toy he or she needs at each stage of development. Thus they start from a developmental perspective and outline the use of essential toys like blocks, jungle gyms and sandpits. They go on to describe how toys can expand the child's world of fantasy. The child creates a world in which she or he can either be a full member of the cast (e.g. in dressing up as a policeman or fairy) or where he or she can be in control of a miniature world (such as the tiny farm or doll's house). The practical side of making, buying, collecting and adapting toys is presented with the bristling vigour of the 59