There are now all manner of toys for kids to relieve stress by squeezing, pulling, and poking. sangeetaskurtz reports on these fidget toys, which were growing in popularity even before the pandemic hit
Photo: Matthew Salacuse About a year ago, my 8-year-old niece was giving me a tour of her at-home desk setup, where, among glitter pens and cookie-shaped erasers, I spotted a big red stress ball. “Is that mom’s?” I asked, recognizing it as the kind of thing usually found in adults’ offices. It turned out it belonged to her, and when I wondered what she needed it for, she explained, “I’m so stressed out right now.
“The kids are obsessed with them,” says Kayla Prewitt, a Washington State–based elementary-school counselor. “I literally see 200 a day, and they’ll choose my fidgets over Play-Doh, watercolors, whatever.” Her students are usually covert about the toys, keeping them on a keychain or in a pencil case, but she’ll sometimes catch a kid trying to lug a jumbo-size pop toy into the classroom. “I guarantee every elementary-school educator has had to confiscate at least one fidget in the last year.
According to Anderson, a pop toy or a child stress ball is, on its own, no different from a blanket or stuffed animal or any object a child might hold for comfort. The fidget-toy craze, he believes, is “an old strategy meeting with a marketing machine”: “If you’re being told that your role as a parent is to provide mental-health skills to your kids, and you see something you could buy that purports to have a stress-relieving effect, you’re hitting the sweet spot for parents.
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