Chemicals for children

[beetiger]

My sister continues to buy my son more stupid toys that attempt to be hygienic/neat by replacing dirt with chemicals. Ove the last two years she's given him lots of Color Wonder stuff, which replaces colored crayon/marker/paint smudges on your wall with greasy pale yellow chemical smudges. It has the bonus effects of having a second or so delay between what your child draws and what he sees, which makes for oh-so-good visual-motor learning, of not showing what colors the fingerpaints are in advance so they get mixed together and your kid gets furious, of requiring you to continue to buy expensive special paper in order to use the toy, and of having kid art that fades in about six months.

Now she's gotten him a big set of Moon Sand, which claims to be useable indoors by replacing sand+water with sand+some chemical goop that keeps the sand-stuff at roughly the consistency of wet sand. Yech. Still messy, and gods know what's in it. After the whole Aquadots fiasco, I'm not really happy about this.
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I'm feeling incredibly misanthropic today, yet strangely at the same time I'm wanting people to pet me about it.

Comments

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

I hate to be contrary, hon, but do you have specific reason to be suspicious of the ASTM evaluation or the company that performed it, then? This is intended neither as a dismissive nor rhetorical question.

I'm not so much afraid of the chemicals -- and I am in fact allowing projectmothra to play with the toy-- I just think these are stupid toys, built for the American obsession for sanitized versions of life, and pretending things are "clean" when they aren't. This is a $20 substitute for some dirt, water, and a shovel. And I'm sure the testing of what the eval company was handed was accurate, but OTOH, I've seen the level of unacknowledged substitution that goes on in the US food industry alone. And I know several kids who ate Aquadots with no obvious immdiate effects.

OTOH, the parents I know who are most obsessive about making sure their kids only get domestically made stuff are the ones who recently went to China to adopt their kids from there. They've seen what's going on firsthand and it's scary.

OT3rdH, I'm happily doing a Smithsonian crystal-growing kit with him, and I *know* that'd be problematic if it got in his eyes and mouth. (He's not doing that unattended, though)

And OT4thH, I just bought myself a zentai from China, so I'm certainly not on the boycotting bandwagon either.

Is this sand stuff made in China or the US? I genuinely don't know, but until I track down more info I'll assume the former.
It's marked "Sand made in Sweden, assembled in China.

And I definitely believe modern kids needs a little more dirt and mess in their lives, so I applaud you, hon. :)
*grin*

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

OT4thH, I just bought myself a zentai from China, so I'm certainly not on the boycotting bandwagon either.

As the kids these days are saying, PIX OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

Once again, we find ourselves vehemently agreeing. ^_^ It does disturb me in the same way that, say, diet beverages or Olestra disturbs me. It's like... nature created HOW many fun things for you to play with that work perfectly well? Have your science, dearies, by all means, but don't turn your noses up at the rest!

Both gentlemanly and ladylike propriety forbid me from thinking too hard about OT4thH. *squirm* :)