ONE of the most sought-after toys this Christmas is an interactive, animatronic chick which hatches from its egg upon activation by its owner.

The Hatchimal is one of 12 toys on the Christmas Dream Toys list compiled by the Toy Retailer’s Association earlier this autumn, which also featured a selfie karaoke mic, the Lego Friends rollercoaster, Snuggles, an interactive puppy toy, and a massive Nerf gun.

These toy lists provide a portrait of society at this particular moment. They give us indications about two things. One is what the toy industry is seeking to sell us today and, if we look closer, some of the strategies being used to market to children. The other is how children and parents live today – what they are doing and what, perhaps, they are not doing.

The global toy market is currently experiencing a boom. The market research company, NPD, has said expects the UK toy industry to sell more than 400 million toys by the end of 2016 – the highest number of toys sold per year to date. A third of these, NPD predicts, will be bought during the festive period, with an average of £105 spent per child. Much of this is, as Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood and founder of Upstart, a campaign to raise the school-start age in Scotland, has pointed out, driven by “very aggressive marketing to kids and families”. This marketing has been a feature for many decades. “What it’s done,” she says, “is it has turned love into stuff. It has also turned play into stuff. Those are the two things, beyond food and shelter, children need for healthy development, love and play. Both of them have now been comprehensively hijacked by consumerism.”

The Pet Replacement

At a Toys R Us branch in Edinburgh, Fort Kinnaird, store manager Donna McNamara says that, in recent weeks she will have received between 100 and 200 calls before lunchtime asking if they have Hatchimals in stock – which they do not. “I feel their pain,” she says, “I’m looking for one myself. My nephew wants one. So I’m the bad auntie: working in Toys R Us but not able to get one.”

The runaway success of Hatchimals also leads down the path of another modern phenomenon – the unboxing video. It is a tale of children’s lives spent online, watching other kids openings toys. Four million viewers, for instance, visited the vlog of Nottingham-based eight-year-old, Tiana Wilson, to watch her unpack her Hatchimal. For those who can’t get their hands on the toy, it turns out there are plenty of other animatronic pets, from the Furby Connect to Snuggles the puppy, and the technological marvel that is CHiP the robot dog. At the Edinburgh Toys R Us, CHiP has “been proving really popular” in spite of the fact it retails at over £200. On the first night the store got them in, McNamara recalls, three people came in looking for them and they were quickly sold out.

A lot of these sought-after toys, notes McNamara, do resemble pets. “I think that’s exactly why parents are going for them. Instead of having a dog where you have to clean up after them. You don’t have to feed it."

But can animatronic pets replace what a real one offers? A 2011 study for Unicef looking at what children in the three countries Sweden, Spain and the UK thought was a “good day”, found that frequently they would volunteer time with pets. The same study found that while British kids said a good day was time spent with friends and family or pets, often outdoors, it was their time-short parents who tried to compensate by giving status brands and consumer goods.

The collectible

The biggest-selling toy of 2015 was Shopkins, a collectible series revolving around small plastic characters based on grocery store items. Last year it came from nowhere to beat all the big names in the industry. This year the Dream Toys list features its Shopkins Chef Club Hot Spot Kitchen. That collectibles are big isn’t new. They’re as old as football trading cards, older even, though the craze was taken to a whole new level over the last decade by Pokemon. Moose Toys, the makers of Shopkins have now managed to tap into an otherwise unexploited collectibles market: girls.

In Fort Kinnaird, McNamara says that collectibles, whether they be Shopkins or Pokemon, are frequently sought-after. “The kids,” she observes, “are seeing them on Youtube. Obviously that’s showing you that a lot of kids are online even though they’re really young. It shows they’re watching YouTube by the age of six or seven.”

The screen accessory

Children today were born into a selfie world and many learned to use a mobile as camera even as toddlers. SelfieMic, perhaps then seems like an inevitability. Kids like singing, they like karaoke, they like taking selfies. Essentially it’s a selfie stick with a mic attached and an app called StarMaker, and a product website that shouts messages like “be a star”. This, of course, is a common ambition for the young of today. A 2014 survey of British children’s career aspirations featured musician, celebrity and model among the most desired jobs.

Screens and their accessories are at the heart of children’s play and therefore Christmas gifting. Tablets and mobiles are common presents that don’t surface in hot toy lists. However, on this year’s Royal Mail list of the top toys asked for in Santa letters, mobile phone was the fourth most popular request.

A recent Ofcom report revealed that children’s internet use was reaching record highs, with youngsters aged 5-15 spending 15 hours each a week online, and even preschoolers, spending over eight hours a week.

The Tie-in

The recent boom in toy sales can mostly, though not totally, credited to Star Wars. Though no one particular Star Wars toy topped the biggest-selling toys lists, the Force in fact has been everywhere. Star Wars “more than doubled”, reported the NPD research group, “its enduring presence this year as the number one toy license”. Two of the key toymakers the movie franchise teamed up with were Lego and Hasbro, and off the back of that, Lego’s renaissance, which began, pertinently, with the Lego Movie, has continued.This year their Star Wars Rebel One U-Wing is on the Top 12 list of toys.

In 2016, movies represent more than 14 per cent of all toy sales. But it’s not only the Star Wars movies that are driving sales of toys. Movies and television tie-ins are to be found in almost every aisle of every store, from Paw Patrol merchandise (the Air Patroller is in the Dream Toys Top 12) through to Frozen toys and Minions spin-offs.

Author Eric Clark charted the way in which toys became part of a grand merchandising complex that connected up movies or television, some of our biggest toy manufacturers, and frequently also McDonalds, in his book The Real Story. “Marketing rules the toy industry,” he wrote. “Toys have become part of kid culture, coveted for myriad reasons divorced from play. Toys and the entertainment industry have become two sides of the same coin: children’s television programmes and some movies exist only because of product tie-in and are structured to maximise sales of those products.”

Trad play

One toy list published recently, however, tells a slightly different story from those issued by toy retailers, and that is the annual Royal Mail list of what children are looking for in their Santa request letters. The first three on its list are, perhaps surprisingly, not tech toys, but traditional ones: Lego, a bike, a scooter.

What’s interesting about this, is that these are exactly the toys that Sue Palmer, child play expert, would approve of. Lego, she observes, have even put £4 million into a professorship in children’s play and learning at Cambridge University.

“Parents,” says Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, “need to know that the best toys are the old-fashioned ones like bats and balls and skipping ropes. I’m a fan of scooters and bikes, because they will get them outdoors and moving.”

It’s Palmer’s view that “any manufactured toy apart from the simplest things, are really not the best things for children to play with from a developmental point of view.” She believes that currently we are all “colluding in robbing our kids of something they really need which is outdoor, active social play”.

Daft family games like PieFace Showdown and Silly Sausage are also rising in popularity. According to NPD the fastest growing category in the period up to September 2016 was Games and Puzzles. All this suggests that even in these times there is a yearning for the traditional and the analogue, that childhood is not yet about to go entirely digital.