The reason why so many toys have to do with poop

And children are happy with that

Poop toys are increasingly spreading and children seem to enjoy that. But while adults still look disgusted or open-mouthed in front of things dealing with poop, why aren’t children worried but, without taboos, they like these toys?

Pooping toys aren’t something completely new. In 1973, American toymaker Kenner released the Baby Alive doll that pooped into a diaper. But over the last five years, there’s been a distinct shift toward toys that don’t just treat poop like a normal part of life but reveal how hilarious kids find it. In 2015, the market was flush with toys that looked like the poop emoji (the most popular emoji of that year). In 2018, both eBay and Toy Insider named “gross toys” a top trend thanks to toys such as the Doggie Doo board game, where the goal is to collect poop and Stink Bomz, which were plush characters designed to smell like farts but they are not the only ones: here we listed some of the most popular toilet-themed games.

Dean Carley, head of product development at Hasbro, has spent three decades designing toys. “Kids have always loved making poop jokes and playing with toys that poop”, Carley says. “But we’ve noticed a shift in the culture about how comfortable people are with the concept. In the past, it was more taboo, but now parents seem more accepting of their kids playing with these toys”.

It was clear that Hasbro needed to get in on the pooping action or risk losing market share. But given how many other toys try to elicit a cheap laugh, Carley’s challenge was to find a way to move beyond the gag and encourage prolonged engagement. The natural place to start was with its Fur Real brand, which are robotic pets that hit the market in the early 2000s. Every year, Carley’s team tweaks the toys to give parents a reason to buy the latest version. As technology has developed, they’ve made the creatures also bark and let kids walk them on a leash. “Then we thought: What if we made them poop?” Carley says. And thus, Fur Real Poopalots were born.

At the company’s “fun lab”, designers created prototypes of pooping cats and dogs, then brought in groups of kids to interact with them. He found that children are immediately delighted by the pooping creatures, mostly because it’s silly but also slightly taboo. “We let the kids tell us what is working through their facial expressions and their behavior”, he explains. “Their instant reaction is humor: one laughs, and they all start laughing”.

In the end, they decided that the child would feed the animal little pellets, then as they took the pet for a walk, it would poop as it went along. “We want that initial surprise, but we also want them to be able to shift to the nurturing and caring play pattern with the animal”.

In talking with child development experts, nobody is surprised that children are so drawn to pooping toys. Dr. Doris Bergen, a professor of educational psychology at Miami University of Ohio, says that at age 4 or 5, children are fascinated with poop toys because they’ve just gone through the major ordeal of toilet training. “By 4, many children feel like they have mastered it. Humans are interested in thinking about and playing around with things that were once hard for them but that they have already mastered”.

However, there is also an element of trauma in learning to control your body: “Young children realize that the performance around their body is being evaluated and they are constantly anxious about making a mistake”, says Maya Coleman, Ph.D. a clinical psychologist. “As adults, we forget how hard it is for kids to go about their day worried they might poop and people will laugh at them. The way they offload some of this tension is through jokes and play”.

Playing with toys that poop can allow them to gain a feeling of control. With a toy such as Poopalots, they might even play act the role of the parent, helping the animal work through its pooping challenges. And more generally, it makes this overwhelming, highly emotional experience less terrifying. Carley observed this when kids played in the Hasbro lab. “Kids really like showing off what the toy can do to their friends and parents”, he says. “They like being in the drivers’ seat”.

The cruelty of modern parenting is that they constantly talk to toddlers about pooping, but when the child finally masters the act, they stop them from doing so, telling them not to talk about it in polite company or at the dinner table. Pooping toys allow kids to safely explore this world.

So, pooping toys can help children process their complex relationships with their bodies. Coleman says parents can even work through this tension with their kids by playing along with them.

So, poop toys are a fun way to break a taboo even though children are innately less worried about poop than adults. However, their trauma about poop comes from their need to face the social behavior about the use of the toilet which can be difficult. So, adults imprint their idea of poop on their children when teaching them how to behave in front of others, and there it’s when the taboo grows. In the last few years, even adults are joking more about poop because it has spread into some adult fields too, and the poop emoji is one of them.

Source fastcompany.com