This is a cross-post from my blog, How to Find Safe Toys.

There are no recalls so far this morning, which has given me the chance to reflect on something that’s been on my mind lately: the psychological and emotional effect of the toy recalls on kids. I know that it’s taken a big toll on my daughter. She’s sensitive anyway. She’s suffered some trauma in her short life that most kids don’t have to face, including the death, less than two years ago, of a sibling who was very close in age and her best friend.

Toys, particularly dolls and stuffed animals, have been Tara’s consolation throughout her childhood. She plays out scenarios with Barbies and Bratz and baby dolls and works through things that upset her. The fashion dolls are beautiful, feisty and popular. They don’t have to worry about bad things happening, except for the occasional wardrobe malfunction. (How DO you get those pointy little shoes to stay on Barbie’s feet and that bikini bottom would even be banned in Rio, I’m thinking.)

The baby dolls need love and nurturing, which is good practice for being a healthy grownup female. The stuffed animals surround Tara every night with soft, reassurance. With typical Tara honesty she says, “Any monster would have to get through a lot of animals before it got to me.”

Now, since the recall that forced us to deep-six Barbie’s accessories, playtime has changed at our house. At least once a day, Tara comes to me with a toy and asks if it has lead paint on it. Even when I reassure her, she’s skeptical. Like she says, no one knew that the other toys had lead paint on them until after millions were sold. So how do we know that this little dog figure from a vending machine doesn’t have lead paint on it?

Tara questions what’s in our food and wants to know where it comes from. She scrutinizes every candy bar, every can of seltzer and every package I put into my grocery cart. (We’re going to have to start shopping from mini-lists so that we have time to read all the containers.) It’s not a bad thing for kids to know where products come from or for them to be concerned about product safety. But for a ten year old to be this obsessed is not good, especially when she’s already a little anxious and sad and uncertain about life.

So, I have yet one more reason to curse the people who make the toys and the people who allowed this to happen. They’ve not only threatened my child’s very life, they’ve also taken away a support system, second only to the one our family gives her. It’s like a horror movie or a bad dream, where familiar, beloved objects or people change into monsters.

Toys aren’t just fripperies in our house. My kids don’t have that many and they love the ones they have. Or they did until they started suspecting that the things they loved could hurt them. Like grinches, the toy manufacturers who skimped on safety have stolen more than toys. They’ve stolen a part of our kids’ childhoods. We remember hula hoops, silly putty and Barbie and Ken’s wedding. What will our kids remember from their childhoods? The day Mommy tested Dora for lead paint? Taking Thomas the Tank Engine back to Toys R Us? It’s sad and very, very wrong. It needs to stop.

In A Cantankerous Call to Action on Moms Speak Up, Victoria ranted about an article she read that reported about how we’re so busy nowadays that we have to outsource our hobbies. I thought it was a really good rant, Victoria, and I’m wondering if I can get you to give me some ranting tips for a situation I keep finding myself in.

My kids are unschooled. Yeah, we’re some of those crazy, lazy people who let our kids play video games and eat junk food all day so they’ll grow up to be bums. Well, according to a lot of people we are. We’re also the latest topic du jour on talk shows and in newspaper articles where public school teachers and the NEA condemn us for wrecking our kids’ lives. The big problem seems to be that, as everyone knows, home-schooled kids just don’t get enough socialization.

I wrote about this back in September in I Got Rhythm while in the middle of negotiations with a family whose kids go to school. We’re acquaintances rather than friends with the family and the parents are always asking us how our kids get enough socialization without being in a room with 22 other kids who are being told to be quiet and not talk to each other with other kids all day.

The parents are among the vast crowd of people who confuse socializing and socialization. My kids, like most kids, are being socialized by the people closest to them. That would be me and Geekdaddy (hmm, maybe we shouldn’t go there), extended family and friends. They’ve learned most of what they know about how to successfully and appropriately interact with other people from family and friends and also from people they meet when we’re out and about.

Socializing, on the other hand, is what they do with family, friends, acquaintances, people we meet in the community and even with dogs, cats and frogs we encounter. During the Dark Ages, as they call it, when they went to school, they weren’t allowed to socialize except during their ten minute recess and twenty minute lunch and a lot of that socializing involved fending off bullies, trying to get something to eat and looking for hats and gloves.

As for socialization … Would you want your kid socialized by 22 same-age peers and one adult stranger? My mind goes back to the kid, in my daughter’s first grade class, who tripped her when she got off the bus every day for a week before I got the bus driver to do something about it. Yeah, great role model. Or the kid in my son’s third grade class, the one who tried to pull down the girls’ pants and threatened to rape them if they told anyone. (Didn’t I just see his name in the paper? No, I remember now, it was his picture and I believe he was holding a rectangle with numbers on it.)

Up until the last two hundred or so years, humans have managed to handle their kids’ socialization and socializing without public schools. As a matter of fact, if you think about it, socialization seemed to work better before there were schools to take over that role. Learning works better at home too, we’ve found. There’s no substitute for interest-led immersion in subjects that spark passion in kids. And there’s no way that they can learn as much or socialize as much in school.

Tell me you’re worried because my daughter doesn’t know her times tables. (She’ll learn them or get really good at using a calculator before she’s an adult.) Tell me my son’s writing and spelling are years behind his artistic ability. (Art is now and will be the focus of his life forever. Spelling and writing are coming along slowly, but he’ll get there or outsource it if he needs to.) Tell me you’re worried because your kids are quoting John Holt and want to stay home all day too. Just don’t tell me my kids aren’t socialized or socializing enough or I may be forced to rant.

I blogged about this minutes ago at How To Find Safe Toys and I’m still seething. It’s not so much that we have one of the leaded charm bracelets and a keyring - the latter says Number1 Mom, ironically - it’s more about the Boppy Pillow. It’s for breastfeeding mothers for Pete’s sake and has a zipper that has a high lead content and also tends to fall off if a baby pulls on it too hard.

So, let’s see, you can nurse your baby and watch her choke to death or maybe you’ll get lucky and she’ll just swallow the zipper pull, survive, and be slowly poisoned by lead. Hey, you might get to have her around until she’s a toddler if you’re lucky. Or maybe it doesn’t have that much lead in it. Maybe it’s only enough to screw up her brain, kidneys and nervous system. Maybe you’ve been using one of these for months and now you’re asking yourself if you’ve unknowingly poisoned this little person you love more than life, itself. And this from a product that’s advertised as “nursing support.”

This is just so wrong on so many levels. How many more times are we going to read about products that threaten our children? And we’re supposed to be reassured because, as one of the biggies in the consumer protection world said the other day, “we’re catching these products and that should make consumers breathe easier.”

I’m not breathing easier, are you?

In the last week, three people have asked me what I’m doing for Black Friday. What, it’s like Christmas now? One person even asked me what I was going to wear. I don’t know if they were implying that I need to dress up in case a reporter asks me how early I got in line or whether they meant I should dress down in a sweatsuit so I can sprint and jostle and elbow tall shoppers in the groin without constraints.

So what happened to Thanksgiving? Are we multitasking holidays now, the way we do everything else at once? Do any of these people really think that I’m stupid enough to stand in freezing Maine weather at four in the morning just to get a better price on Victoria’s Secret Barbie or The Diva Dolls Do Dallas on DVD with additional footage not shown in theaters?

No, come Black Friday, which always sounds like a religious holiday to me, I’ll be tucked up in my warm bed snoring loudly enough to vibrate Geekdaddy’s pocket protector. Later on Black Friday or Mauve Monday or Taupe Tuesday or some other colored day, after a leisurely breakfast of whatever the kids didn’t scarf down like locusts, Geekdaddy and I will peruse the sales online and figure out where we want to spend the miserly sum per child we budgeted for Solstice this year. I can guarantee it won’t be at a big-box.

For one thing, there are the toy recalls which have really opened my eyes to what I want in my house — not just my kids’ toy boxes and rooms. Before I reach for my wallet, I want to know where that attractively packaged but possibly lethal toy came from. I want to know who made it, how old they were, how much they got paid and whether they were treated like a human being by their employer or forced to wait to relieve their bladders until the two 5 minute bathroom breaks they get a day. And, of course, I want unleaded not leaded when I fill up my cart.

Maybe my aversion to joining the Black Friday lemming parade is part of my unschooling philosophy or my liberal far left flaming radical political beliefs. Maybe I’m just oppositional like I’m always accusing my kids of being. (You’d kick at a football game, is what my brother says about me. No, I wouldn’t!) To my mind, this whole conspicuous (by its lack of thought for the consequences) consumption orgy is yet another symptom of so much that’s wrong with society and pop culture.

We’re trained to consume from the time we’re born and told that its for our benefit. (The big corporations are just making this stuff for us out of the goodness of their little black corporate hearts. They’re almost non-profits for goodness’ sake, absent the odd billion or two.) We get our ethical standards and values from ad slogans, corporate-sponsored TV shows and even bumper stickers. Who can forget the immortal line: He who dies with the most toys wins? Makes you want to run right over to Wally World and buy three of everything so you’ll have more, doesn’t it?

But back to Black Friday and what I’m doing that day. Well, I may be writing ad copy for my safe toy blog, How to Find Safe Toys, ironic as that may sound coming from someone who just dissed commercialism and consumers. I confess that I’ve been examining my motives vis a vis affiliate sales lately. I’ve talked it over with my spiritual advisors — my Black Lab, Jetta, and my brother, Uncle Wil the Pirate CowboyHypnotist. They’re usually pretty good at helping me see whether what I’m doing is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. (You can’t beat Labs or Cowboys for that; they see everything in black and white.)

I (and they and most of my 100 closest friends who were bugged by me with a veritable snowstorm of emails) agree that one of the ways to fight this commercial stupidity is to offer people alternatives to it. Humans are always going to buy stuff. Heck, when archaeologists dig up Early Human graves, there’s stuff in there that was buried with them. Yes! Early Humans had stuff too and probably had to move to a bigger cave every few months to store it all. Like crows, human adults and children are attracted to shiny pebbles, glitz and glitter and things that whir and move. (Also to things that need batteries, but that’s another post.)

My list of safe toy companies provides an alternative to the malls and big box stores. You don’t have to wear your heels to gouge other shoppers’ insteps. You can buy dolls that don’t need contraceptives or a motel room for pretend play. Blocks and toy trains with non-toxic paint are still on the menu for toddlers who put everything in their mouths - and that would be all toddlers in my experience. (Some tweens and teens too.) Best of all, when we shop at ethical companies, we’re supporting a better world in my view. My bottom line is that I think it’s way better to buy fewer toys and better toys from companies that treat their customers and the earth with respect. And, of course, that goes for everything else, not just toys. That’s why, this Black Friday, I won’t be in line; I’ll be in bed.