Forty Christmases ago, the “must have” toy of the season was a talking teddy bear called Teddy Ruxpin.
Teddy Ruxpin was, in reality, little more than an audio cassette player hidden inside a stuffed teddy bear with animatronic eyes and mouth that moved as it played back pre-recorded audio tapes.
But electronic toys have come a long way since then, and 2025’s answer to Teddy Ruxpin is far less benign: AI-powered toys.
Earlier this year, Singapore-based FoloToy released and then quickly withdrew an AI-powered teddy bear called Kumma. Selling for $99, the Kumma teddy bear integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4o chatbot to make, according to the FoloToy website, a “smart, AI-powered plush companion that goes beyond cuddles!”
Indeed, it does.
Researchers at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund discovered that conversations with Kumma quickly moved into inappropriate territory, from instructing children on where to find knives and how to light matches, to discussion of sexual fetishes, such as spanking.
The problem goes far deeper than one rogue toy, and parents would do well to carefully evaluate whether to buy any digital toys – AI-powered or not – for their children this Christmas.
Each year, toy manufacturers have pushed more and more electronic and tech toys into the marketplace, exploiting children’s fears of missing out and parents’ fears about their children being left behind at school and in a future digital workforce. These digital devices have been pitched to us as essential tools for early childhood education and learning made fun. What they promised was the technological equivalent of hiding pureed vegetables in your child’s mac and cheese — sneaking something your child “needs” but might find unpalatable into a format they enjoy.
But we are now learning just how misguided and even deceptive those promises were. There is little or no evidence that these tech toys are improving educational outcomes for the children who use them. In fact, evidence suggests quite the opposite.
Electronic toys have been found to negatively impact cognitive skills in areas that are critical for healthy development: creativity and imagination, problem-solving skills and innovative thinking, attention and focus, broad knowledge base and experiential learning.
In December 2018, the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics published an article titled, “Selecting Appropriate Toys for Young Children in the Digital Era.”
The report states that 96.9% of children have used mobile devices, and most started using them before one year of age, but the increase in screen time has taken place in association with a decrease in play, including both active play and play with toys:
“This is especially significant for young children’s development because screen time directly interferes with both play activities and parent-child interactions, and even educational media is typically watched without caregiver input… Although it has been suggested that there may be learning benefits in association with interactive media, there is presently no evidence to suggest that possible benefits of interactive media match those of active, creative, hands-on, and pretend play with more traditional toys.” [Emphasis added.]
A 2016 study in JAMA Pediatrics revealed that play with electronic toys is associated with “decreased quantity and quality of language input compared with play with books or traditional toys.”
The researchers suggest that to promote early language development, play with electronic toys should be discouraged and that parents should opt for traditional toys and book reading instead.
If tech toys contributed in any significant way to academic success, we should expect to see IQs and standardized test scores climbing throughout the past half century. But we’re not. In 2023, researchers at Northwestern University analyzed the results of nearly 400,000 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018. They found declines in three important testing categories: abstract visual puzzles, pattern recognition, and language-based problem-solving. Losses in these areas were most dramatic among 18–22-year-olds.
Likewise, the standardized test scores of American students, which had been rising for decades, began to slide around 2012 – right around the time Chromebooks and tablets became ubiquitous in classrooms, and around the time we would be graduating the first generation of kids raised on LeapFrog products.
If there is a bright spot in any of this, it is this: the cultural tide may be turning. One Virginia middle school has added a popular “Cursive Club” after school. USA Today reports that Millennial parents are raising their kids with landlines, not smartphones. And the recently-released trailer for Pixar’s Toy Story V introduces the latest villain in the franchise: “Lily Pad,” an obvious nod to LeapFrog’s “LeapPad,” and asks us to consider whether the age of toys is over.
This Christmas, consider foregoing the pull of Ed Tech, digital companions, and electronic gadgets and instead give your child or grandchild the gift of play, reading, and time together. Sometimes, the simplest, tech-free toys are still the smartest choice.
