I read the AP article Toys R Kids: High-Tech Playmates over on Wired News.

Make no mistake, the toy business is first and foremost a business. Their goal is to take your money, and they will seek any means available to do so, even if it provides your kids with toys that rob them of their use of their imagination.

All kinds of toys are going high-tech — industry analysts estimate that at least 75 percent of toys debuting this year will have a microchip. Jim Silver, publisher of the Toy Book, a New York-based industry magazine, now calls the toy business “the family entertainment business.”

I look at it this way: Toys that contain microchips in them do the thinking and the imagining for the kids. Instead of kids casting their stuffed animals or dolls into their own imaginary scenes, these preprogrammed toys have their stories built in. The problem is that your childs imagination could come up with an infinite number of scripts for thier toys, while the computerized toys have only a small, very limited number of scenarios. The kids replay the few, preprogrammed scenarios over and over until their bored with them. Then toss them aside.

Any parent who has observed the trance that kids get into while watching TV or playing video games knows that entertainment is not the same as imaginitive play. Quite the opposite effect really; it puts the thinking parts of the brain to sleep. So it’s a wake-up call to hear a toy industry expert say that he “now calls the toy business ‘the family entertainment business.””

In other words, the toy business is less about stimulation of your kids imaginations and healthy play, and more about entertaining your kids and putting them into the mind-numbing trance.

These new toys are also very expensive. The toy companies aren’t stupid. They know that toys that do the entertaining for the kids quickly bore the kids. Kids crave being entertained. Kids beg Mom and Dad sooner for more toys.

Try this experiment: If you’ve got young children, remove all possibility of them playing video games and watching TV for the day. Now go find a couple of very large cardboard boxes that one or two kids can comfortably sit in, give them to your kids and say, “go build a fort in the living room.” Enjoy.