Amusing Planet: Photos of Children Around the World With Their Favorite Toys

Italian photographer's latest project entitled Toy Stories. He concludes at their age they're pretty much all the same. They just want to play. But how they play differs. He concludes children from richer countries are more selfish with their toys. He needed more time for them to warm up to sharing. In poorer countries it was easier. He has other insights to how children regard the function of their toys, for example, a child in both Texas and Malawi said their toy dinosaurs protected them from dangers of the night.

Amusing Planet provides a broken link to Gabriele Galimberti's project so I looked for it elsewhere. His own page is rather boring while other sites covering him have even more interesting photographs. Not all the kids are in their bedrooms.

Amusing Planet writes that Galimberti learned as much about the parents as he did of the children. Parents in the Middle East and Asia would push their children to be photographed even if they were nervous or upset while parents in South America were relaxed and told him he can do whatever he wants so long as the children don't mind.

South America for the win.

I noticed that around here and mentioned it to my brother one day when he was complaining about all the little Mexican kids brought along shopping. I told him, you rarely see them acting up. The parents really do include their children in everything. Shopping is a family project. You see them gathering in neighborhoods and the children are running around all over. But they are behaving. They're actually more socialized than we were. Our parents wanted us elsewhere when they were shopping and socializing. Not so with Mexican parents. It's charming. I think they have a better approach.

I notice these kids have collections of things. My younger brother had a collection of Tonka trucks and later matchbox cars with tons of racing track, and I had aquariums, but other than those we didn't have collections of things. We moved too much for that. The most enduring toy was my Etch-a-Sketch. That lasted for four moves until I wore it out. The gray powder inside didn't stick anymore. You could see right through it to the mechanism. It still worked back and forth but it couldn't draw anything.  I got really good at drawing curved lines, and writing messages with it.

Here are my favorite toys.

I must have looked like a little perv riding my firetruck, scooting around, turning the little crank that made the ladder go up and down. Up and down, up and down, scoot, scoot, scoot, "Hey, Lady, I'll save ya."