My three-year-old son love airplanes. He also loves trains, but that’s beside the point. This isn’t a post about my son, it’s a post about my son’s new toy airplane. It was packaged in an open-face box with a prominent “try me!” label that encouraged shoppers to interact with the cockpit/button, which makes the propeller spin and a speaker to make a crude approximation of engine noises.
When we got out of the store I tore into the cardboard, at the boy’s insistence, and handed him his new biplane. In the process of disentangling the plane from its tie-downs, some paper fell to the pavement. Didn’t want to be a litterbug, so I picked them up. One was a warranty of some sort that I dismissed out of hand. The other was instructions. This is where I figured it would tell me that I needed a screwdriver to access the batteries, and hoped there might be a mute switch of some sort.
Indeed, it laid out how to unscrew a panel to replace some button batteries, and there is no mute button aside from removing said batteries. But lo! There were additional instructions. Behold, gentle reader! How to play with a toy plane:
Thank God the folks at Mattel thought to explain the process.
I bet if it was missing they would get letters and calls “what do I do”
Sadly, meesha, I bet they include those so that when someone’s lawyer calls in because a kid has poked out their eye with it, mattel can say “he was not using it in the prescribed manner, and so we are therefore not liable.”
But seriously folks.. there was an article I saw recently from scientific american about the need for unstructured play in a kid’s life… http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-serious-need-for-play&print=true and one thing that stood out for me there was that the lack of free play as a child is something that a number of interviewed convicted killers had (along with child abuse mostly I think).
Overloading very small kids with obligations and structure is practically a form of child abuse, IMHO. My kid’s running around doing God-knows-what in the kitchen right now.
as long as you child-proof and sterilize your kitchen you are OK 🙂
If by “child-proof” you mean that I’ve told my three-year-old not to play with the gas range, I’ve got it covered. As for sterilized, I mop at least once a month, honest.