Photo: Matthew Salacuse About a year ago, my 8-year-old niece was giving me a tour of her at-home desk setup, where, among glitter pens and cookie-shaped erasers, I spotted a big red stress ball. “Is that mom’s?” I asked, recognizing it as the kind of thing usually found in adults’ offices. It turned out it belonged to her, and when I wondered what she needed it for, she explained, “I’m so stressed out right now.
“The kids are obsessed with them,” says Kayla Prewitt, a Washington State–based elementary-school counselor. “I literally see 200 a day, and they’ll choose my fidgets over Play-Doh, watercolors, whatever.” Her students are usually covert about the toys, keeping them on a keychain or in a pencil case, but she’ll sometimes catch a kid trying to lug a jumbo-size pop toy into the classroom. “I guarantee every elementary-school educator has had to confiscate at least one fidget in the last year.
According to Anderson, a pop toy or a child stress ball is, on its own, no different from a blanket or stuffed animal or any object a child might hold for comfort. The fidget-toy craze, he believes, is “an old strategy meeting with a marketing machine”: “If you’re being told that your role as a parent is to provide mental-health skills to your kids, and you see something you could buy that purports to have a stress-relieving effect, you’re hitting the sweet spot for parents.
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