Critics propose that Barbie Dolls and G.I. Joe action figures carry negative symbolic messages to young children, but Sociology Department Chairman Joel Best disagrees.

Best spoke to about 20 students and faculty about the concern that parents and academics have regarding children’s toys at a discussion Wednesday in the Mississippi Room of the Student Center titled, Too Much Fun:Toys as Social Problems.

There has always been a suspicion about leisure and recreation, he said. Where there used to be a concern about the leisure and recreation time of adolescence we now we have a concern about children’s toys.

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Best explored the history of the Barbie doll and the changing critique since its birth in 1959.

Barbie was subject to a hostile analysis from the beginning, he said. The concern in the 1950s and 1960s was that she was too mature for young girls.

In the 1970s, Barbie was condemned to the label of sex objects. Today critics focus on the portrayal and importance of thinness that girls focus on because of Barbie.

However, Best wonders how these critics arrived at these assumptions.

Barbie is hardly the only aspect that promotes thinness, he said. Most girls watch TV and see the fashion photography that illustrate slenderness. These critiques don’t involve the observation of girls and there is no attempt to interview girls.

According to Best, there are four reasons why the nature of critiques suggest troubling indications about toys. The first reason is that small children are no longer nestled in the confines of the family but spend more time with non-family members.

Women are now in the work force, so children are attending day cares. Parents think that learning music and sport are important and the amount of television that children are exposed to has increased, he said.

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Children today also have more toys, Best said. Because of the general affluence of today’s society, families can provide their children with more play items than prior times.

The third reason for concern is that toys are marketed in a fundamentally different way than they used to.

Look at the G.I. Joe cartoon series on television, he said. In effect it is a half hour commercial. Toys are manufactured to make connections with children’s programs.

Referring to a miniature plastic Oscar Meyer Wiener that Best brought with him, he said the final reason of the concern was because of the growing social movements that concern culture and values.

Many vegetarians believe that a toy like this would turn innocents into carnivores, he said.

Best also discussed the concern of video games promoting violence. Rather than negative influences, Best believes this type of activity teaches children to master complex sequences of actions.

Alex Ander, secretary of the American Studies Forum, attended the discussion because of his own experience with purchasing toys for his children.

I have two children and as a Quaker family, we are concerned with violence, he said. But we let our children make their own decisions and we talk about it.

One thing that bothers me to an extent is the colored aisles of the toy stores. If you look, the preschool aisle is red, blue and yellow, the girl aisle is pink and the aisle for boys is dark.

Best agreed that certain colors are geared toward the gender of the child, but said that the colors are actually chosen by the children.

Girls want things to be pinked up, he said. The more ruffles on an outfit, the better they think it is.

In his research of symbolic interaction, Best concluded that the message is not in the object but the meaning assigned to the object by the person playing with the object.

Often times when we function as academics we make claims we can’t really substantiate, he said. We have too much analytical fun, and I think that we would be well advised to take a different approach.