TOYS AND TIME - PLAYTHINGS AND PARENTS ATTITUDES TOWARD CHANGE IN EARLY-20TH-CENTURY AMERICA

Toys, as conveyers of meaning between parents and their children, reve al interesting changes in adult attitudes toward seasonal celebrations , rites of passage, and feelings about the past and future. From about 1900, changes in the economic roles of children and parental emotiona l responses to the young made toys especially important repositories o f temporal meanings. While American manufacturers accommodated parents with toys that met their ambiguous feelings about change, by the 1930 s toymakers began to respond to children's quite different understandi ngs of time with playthings built around fantasy and celebrity.