Don’t Buy Toys, Invent Them! Children, Toys, and Consumption in Transylvania in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract:In nineteenth-century Romanian newspapers and magazines, the idea of children’s play was strictly combined with that of education. By encouraging and helping children to produce their own toys or to create their own plays, parents provided education and proper development to their children. Pediatricians quoted in newspapers praised villages and boroughs where children were free to run all day long, to play in the fresh air far removed from any kind of isolation, compared to their counterparts who belonged to “the bourgeois world” of the city. Similarly, children of the elite were prohibited from active and unstructured play. Wealthy children were believed to live in isolation because their parents considered them to be superior. Newspaper and magazine articles discouraged parents from buying manufactured toys, suggesting instead that children build their own toys. Educational books were the only items recommended for consumption. It was thought that fantasy and creativity stimulated children’s imaginations more than store-bought or manufactured dolls and toys.Drawing from Romanian-language newspapers and magazines, this article examines the idea of children’s leisure-related consumption at the turn of the century in a peripheral province of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. At the dawn of twentieth century, most of the authors complained about the invasion of modernity, which spoiled and altered “the old good manner and habits” related to the world of children. Authors believed that buying toys fed children’s vanity and diminished their natural desires to discover the world. Both the “official” and leisure magazines campaigned against the new fashion of buying toys and advocated for creativity and parents’ involvement. Potential child and adult consumers were discouraged from aligning themselves with the new fashion spread by the invasion of modernity.