Toys and Time: Playthings and Parents’ Attitudes toward Change in Early 20th-Century America

Toys, as conveyers of meaning between parents and their children, reveal interesting changes in adult attitudes toward seasonal celebrations, rites of passage, and feelings about the past and future. From about 1900, changes in the economic roles of children and parental emotional responses to the young made toys especially important repositories of temporal meanings. While American manufacturers accommodated parents with toys that met their ambiguous feelings about change, by the 1930s toymakers began to respond to children's quite different understandings of time with playthings built around fantasy and celebrity.