Fidget Spinning

One of the best parts of being a parent is the toys.  I will never apologize for this.  Playing with my kids—helping them assemble their train tracks, build their spaceships, construct the narratives in their action figure or pony-themed dramas—this has always been my forte.  I am the fun one.  My wife admits this; the kids agree.  If you want entertained, you go to dad.

If you want fed, clothed, comforted, bla, bla, bla, look elsewhere.

It occurred to me recently, however, that not all toys are created equal.  It turns out that my expertise truly lies with the “old school” kind of toys, like Legos and Star Wars.  Some of the newer distractions leave much to be desired.

For example, my son is very much into Pokémon nowadays, which is amazing to me because no one I have spoken to actually knows how to play it. 

On the surface, perhaps Pokémon does look kind of neat.  The playing cards are vivid and nicely packaged.  The Pokémon—which is short for Pocket Monster, I think—exist in a fictional world where they are captured by trainers and basically used like fighting dogs.  From all I can really gather, Pokémon is basically a cartoon cock fight.  Instead of roosters, though, pecking each others’ faces, we have pretend creatures like Electabuzz with his “thunder shock” attack going up against Magearna with his very powerful “soul blaster” move.  Needless to say, the whole thing is pretty intense.

Despite all this weirdness, though, one morning I was feeling especially parentish, and I thought, “I am going to learn how to play Pokémon.”

This did not take place. It turns out the rules are beyond complicated and seem to fluctuate every time it’s your turn, especially if you’re winning against your six-year-old son.  The C.I.A. has financed Central American coups with less strategy than what goes into playing an actual game of Pokémon.

No thanks.

Continuing, then, with the strangeness of my kids’ free time, we come to Minecraft.

When I am old and gray, I will look back and realize that my adult life could be divided into two major eras:  before my kids began to play Minecraft and afterwards.  That is how odd this game is to me.  For those readers without small children, the gist behind Minecraft is that it is a video game, technically, where you are trying to build things out of boxes.  Your head is a box, the sun is a box; it’s disorienting.  Multiple people can be building things out of boxes at the same time, and these interactions are not always polite.

For example, the following is actual dialogue from my kids.

“Why did you steal my raw chicken?”
            “Because I thought you were going to kill me.”

What?  Even more vexing than a game where raw chicken is a thing, I’m consistently reading from educational experts that Minecraft actually teaches young people valuable life skills, such as problem solving and appropriate netiquette.  As to how dumping a bucket full of square lava onto a square cow—which has happened multiple times out in our play room—translates into any non-criminal life skill, however, is beyond me.

This, then, brings us to the newest and most useless fad, not just of right now but of all time, and that is…you guessed it, the Fidget Spinner.

If you don’t know what a fidget spinner is, then walk out of your front door or turn on your television, because these contraptions are basically everywhere.

In fact, there was a point this past spring when an entire third of one of my sophomore English classes was spinning these fidgets.  These are high schoolers, mind you, bright young  minds legally capable of driving automobiles and working part time jobs that they can’t stand, and here they were, not discussing Harper Lee’s simple and profound prose, which was the assignment, but instead whizzing these contraptions between their thumbs and forefingers.

“What are you doing?”  I asked.

“These relieve stress,” a student replied.

“Whose stress?”  Your stress?”

“They keep me from tapping my finger on the desk.” Another chimed in.

“So does taking notes.”

Sadly enough, these toys were advertised as just that—stress relieving, even therapeutic tools for folks suffering from mild cases of ADHD all the way up to full blown post-traumatic stress disorder.

Which is all well and good, except that neither claim is backed up by any actual data.

A recent article from NPR, which is where I read most of my news because it’s one of the few news outlets that doesn’t make me think the world is going to explode every five minutes, interviewed Duke University psychology professor Scott Kollins about the fad.  His take on the toy’s supposed health benefits was less than enthusiastic.

“I know there’s lots of similar toys,” Kollins is quoted as saying, referring to the topic, “just like there’s lots of other games and products toward individuals who have ADHD, and there’s basically no scientific evidence that those things work…”

In other words, do not believe the hype. Fidget spinners mostly relieve stress for the good folks who market them.

In closing, however, I suppose the toy actually does have some merit.  If nothing else, they make an awesome, whirring metaphor for our contemporary society:  anxiously spinning around in circles, fascinated by the inane activity of the moment while totally ignoring the notes on the board.