It happens every year. A child gets a toy that has "some assembly required." And we all know what that means: a nearby parent is going to get roped into revealing whether he or she has any engineering aptitudes. Many parents just can't deal with yet another lengthy, soul-destroying assembly project.
For a variety of reasons -- from international trading patterns to the amount of shelf space at big domestic retailers -- toys are coming in more compressed packaging these days and with more dreaded assembly required. And many adults feel less and less up to the task.
"I think it's true that toys do have more parts today," said Simmie Kerman, a co-owner of four toy stores called Barstons Child's Play, in the Washington-Baltimore area. Manufacturers, she explained, save on shipping and labor costs by packaging toys flat and unassembled. "It keeps the costs down,' she said. "It's the Ikea model."
Consumers pay less as a result, but they bear a bigger burden when they open the box.
Tim Walsh, a toy historian and author of a book called Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them, pointed to Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, a hot toy of the 1960s that was reintroduced several years ago to the delight -- and then the dismay -- of many baby boomers.
The original Rock 'Em Sock 'Ems could be lifted fully assembled out of the box and used immediately. Today’s version must be put together, and the robots are considerably smaller in stature than their predecessors. Mr. Walsh speculated that the change is partly a response to retailers' desire to cram as much merchandise as possible onto their coveted shelf space.
We generally avoid assembly required toys, other than Legos, in which the entire point of the kit is to assemble something cool. We love the Star Wars Legos where you assemble a fighter or a droid or lots of other cool things. Some of the Legos kits are really much too difficult for children.
If the parents are the ones assembling one of the advanced kits, that means that the wrong gift was purchased for the child. Legos are fantastic toys that help nurture spatial relations and engineering skills. But be careful to choose a kit that the child can assemble on his or her own. Or, just buy the child regular Legos so she can build whatever strikes her fancy.
