Top Toys to Buy for Children (When You Secretly Hate their Parents)

Fin O'Driscoll - 14 Dec 16

I have been guilty of buying some of these presents in the past and would like to offer a formal apology to all parents I have caused to suffer. I can only say I didn’t know, well I do now and I’m here to share my wisdom with you. These are the worst things I have brought into my house and should really only be given to people you truly hate.

Hama beads – I will be eternally grateful to my kids after school club for allowing my kids ample time to hama bead their lives away. In a fit of whimsy two Christmases ago, I though it would be lovely to replicate this lovely creative activity at home. I was wrong, so so wrong. Cue half an hour of painstaking bead placement followed by one unexpected arm spasm and suddenly there are beads everywhere and an avalanche of crying. Never again. They are now sitting at the bottom of the arts and crafts drawer, never to see the light of day again.

Loom bands – Remember loom bands? These are the zombies of the kids craft world. Every time I think they’ve made their way out of our lives, they suddenly reappear, more and more of them every time I look, littering the floors in every room with their multi-coloured, hoover-resistant tangles. The ratio of effort to reward is very off – so much effort with so little to show for it. Do you remember at the height of the craze someone made a freaking wedding dress from these little rubbery bastards? I do. She must have been a member of some sort of loom band based cult. I spent five hours doing loom banding once and all I got was a long brightly coloured elastic band.

Aqua beads – I actually asked someone to buy this terrible product for our daughter. This present was a salutary lesson in the evils of advertising for her. We’d both seen the advert; the girls with the pretty hair effortlessly dropping the beads into their allocated holes and creating art and hair bands and bracelets. Bracelets? Really? Aqua beads have the tensile resilience of balsa wood. If you even look at them funny they collapse back into their component parts. Plus, they are a total grind to use. My darling daughter gets out the high tech bead dispensing wand and clicks the button to release a single bead. Nothing happens. We shake it around for a couple of minutes, to persuade the beads that they want to leave their comrades in the wand and create some art. One brave bead makes the journey and immediately pings off the table and rolls under the fridge never to be seen again. It’s followed by a bunch of companions who then flee to separate parts of the kitchen leaving me crawling round on all fours collecting them like a disgruntled vampire. (NB: Seriously, one of the recommended methods from stopping a vampire is to scatter rice or lentils on the floor because it’ll be compelled to pick them all up. I’m a bit sad they never used this strategy in Buffy.) Any activity that creates ten times as much work for the parent than the child is on my most hated list.

Magical musical wand – I know when you press that button in the shop and hear that refrain from the kid’s favourite Disney film and see the characters glistening in a magical snow globe, it looks adorable. You know they’ll love it. The problem is they will love it. They will love it so much they play it for ten days straight. It’s like having your ear worm broadcasted to the whole world. It gets worse when they’ve got more than one. Hearing 3 separate wands playing 3 separate refrains at the same time is like wandering into a fever dream.

Pie Face – Ah Pie Face, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. You got cream in your face – ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. This is cute and hilarious on Christmas Day. Who doesn’t love the sight of Grandad with a face full of cream? However, on a miserable wet Friday at the tail end of January, at 6 o’clock, when my eyes are already sliding toward that bottle of wine waiting on the worktop, the last thing I want is to drag the (most likely mouldy) whippy cream from the back of the fridge and set up a machine to help me nasally ingest it.

Hyper sexualised dolls – My daughter is still very much at the baby and barbie stage of play. God bless her rigid conformity to stereotypes. I used to hate Barbie (I was a Sindy girl as a child), I hated her shape and her vapid american breeziness, but my word, I will take that with both hands over a Bratz doll or a Monster High monstrosity. Why, exactly, are 80% of girls’ dolls wearing shoes that wouldn’t normally be seen outside a strip club? I’ve seen some nice arguments online praising Bratz and their ilk for teaching diversity and non-conformity to little girls and I’m definitely down with that, but I don’t understand why it has to be in outfits that would be considered over the top in Spearmint Rhino. If we want to share a joy in personal style and non-conformity there are plenty of positive role models we can use for inspiration: Bjork springs immediately to mind. I would pay good money for a dress up Bjork doll. (Also, I am old.)

Laser guns – If any toy that makes a ‘pew pew pew’ type noise enters my house and it doesn’t have a mute switch it will be defenestrated in under 24 hours. That is all.

Fin O'Driscoll

Writes funny

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