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

[redbird]

Have you told your sister that you don't want her buying the color wonder stuff? Chemical safety issues aside, "it makes him furious because he can't tell what the colors are and they get smudged, and I think it's bad for his motor skills" seem like adequate reasons to ask her not to get them for him, and to put them aside and give him other toys if she insists.

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

*nods* She stopped once I told her I didn't like Color Wonder. On the other hand, I'm one of those people who tries to be extra-gracious about gifts that people offer me/my kids, and I really hate being directive about that kind of stuff unless I'm asked for preferences.