National Children's Museum

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This article is based on numerous visits to the Children's Museum over the past 2 years. The Museum can be contacted at 300 Congress Street, Boston MA 02210; Tel. (617) 426–6500.

Someone once decided that cribs, high chairs, and playpens should be decorated with pink lambs and green elves. Perhaps the decision was made after market research showed that parents were more likely to purchase a crib with a green elf than without one. Perhaps the decision was made arbitrarily in the design department of some great American baby furniture manufacturing establishment. Unfortunately, the decision stuck, and generations of children grew up with images of pink lambs and green elves. Conciliatory art pervades much of a child's life. Furniture, clothes, toys and games, books, and television programs are designed to sell more products. The desire to sell products, or to please an adult's notion of what works for a child, is pervasive. As a result, we have toys with no play value, contentless books, food with empty calories. The nation prides itself on being child centered, yet close inspection shows that what we give children is often as worthless as a green lamb is unreal. Today we have a new product, microcomputers. The money-making potential for computerrelated products brings dollar signs to the eyes of even the purest visionary-hardware, peripherals, game cartridges, courseware. Less than 12 months after introduction, Atari's VCS (Video Computer System-list price $129) dominated the market, and by the end of 1981 had penetrated 9 percent of the homes in America. The coin-op version of PacMan was expected to produce $1 billion (Simon,