Are Technology-Enabled Toys Over-the-Top?

Technology Thursday

We are fortunate to have extremely generous friends and have gotten loads of fabulous hand-me-downs for our son - clothes, toys, and other useful baby things. (That hasn't stopped me from buying too much stuff for him myself now and then, but I try to be a little bit restrained. Just a little.) One of the toys we received was a Leapfrog Learn and Groove musical toy. I haven't spent a lot of time with babies in recent years, but apparently these are all the rage.

This toy plays music and sings songs and has fun touch and grabby things for him to experiment with. He really enjoys it. I place it just out of reach to encourage him to work on crawling. When I dropped my son at daycare recently there was a mini-piano in the play area that he immediately started playing with after I showed him how to push on a key. His exersaucer has all sorts of noisemaking bits and pieces, too.

Technology and miniaturization have made these and all sorts of other gadgets possible relatively inexpensively.

Such things were just not around back when I was babysitting a couple of decades ago. I have mixed feelings about technology-enabled gadgets for young kids. On the one hand, they can provide more and varied stimuli. On the other hand, I worry sometimes that simpler toys (blocks, balls, and rattles, say) provide for more imaginative play. I'm sure there's a fine line.

However, while I'm in the midst of figuring out how to cope with an infant and working out of the house along with all the changes in our lives since he was born, I haven't had the time or energy to think very hard about this issue. But I do wonder sometimes. And I cringe a little bit at the thought that by the time he's 5 or 6 he'll probably be a little video game addict and understand our computers better than I do (and I was once a computer science major!)

How well do technology and toys go together? What are some good examples of tech-enabled toys? What are some bad ones? Are there toys you don't allow in your house? Toys that you'd give every kid you know if you could?