What famed psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott was talking about, when he spoke of transitional objects and space, was an idea fundamental to the development of a healthy child. This thing, this transitional object, helps a baby or toddler see and understand the world. It is the first "not-me" thing. It allows a child to see herself separate from her mother. It allows the child to feel her own independence. This thing is the bridge which leads to playing, socialisation and learning skills, then on to art, religion and even culture, some believe.
This thing can be anything. We all remember it, don't we? In the Peanuts cartoons, Linus needs his security blanket. Piglet needed Winnie the Pooh. It can be anything indeed, but it is usually called a toy. A teddy bear, a stuffed animal, a doll, a favourite truck.
After a period, several years perhaps, the child usually leaves, at his own pace, the thing behind, the frayed teddy with the one button eye, "relegated to the limbo of half-forgotten things at the bottom of a chest of drawers, or at the back of the toy cupboard," wrote Winnicott. The child will move on, perhaps to another toy, a different doll.
Later, beginning at around age six, our little child will want to collect things . . . rocks, seashells, butterflies. He will take pride in what he has amassed, carefully carrying his treasures off to school, showing these prizes to admiring classmates. They will be impressed with our little hero's ability to acquire, dazzled by his prowess.
OK, stop the story right here. What year is this? What archaic fantasy? A toy cuddled and clutched for years and years? A sweet anthology of objects collected from nature? Last week in New York's Long Island, a nine-year-old boy stabbed a classmate in a fight over a collection of Pokemon cards. There are reports that a six-year-old logged on to a Pokemon website and printed counterfeit copies of the cards to swap. Hasbro is scrambling to meet the demands of consumers who want the Pokemon toys. Nintendo has sold four million cartridges for the game in the US since 1998. And Burger King managers in California and Texas cringed when children were in tears when the fast food outlets ran short of the Pokemon toys being given out in a promotion.
This is the cold world of The Toy in 1999. It is a world that would appear to give cold comfort to Donald Winnicott. But it is not a world that is giving much solace to an embattled Californian executive named Jill Barad. But we are ahead of ourselves.
The idea of the fad toy, the must-have item that sends kids into frenzy, is reckoned by most marketing experts to have begun in the mid-1980s with the Cabbage Patch doll. But the intensity has grown exponentially, radically changing both the nature of the billion-pound toy business and, some experts believe, the very nature of children.
The process begins in February in New York City at the industry's annual toy fair. Manufacturers show their wares, hoping that the "wow" factor will distinguish one product from the other, as the all-important Christmas season approaches. "There's sort of a lottery mentality," says Chris Byrne, author of the The Toy Report, an industry newsletter. In late 1996 and 1997, parents desperately sought Tickle Me Elmo, a giggling stuffed toy based on a character from Sesame Street. More than a million Tickle Me Elmos were sold in a two-month period. By 1998, sales trickled to 50,000 a month.
Last year it was Furbys. Shops ran short, and people began bidding at online auctions on websites such as eBay. Today, eBay tells the story. More than 1,360 Furby items are for sale, most selling for less than their former retail price. The fad is over.
What is fuelling this phenomenon is a baby boom in the US, the largest generation to flood the market since the end of the second World War. More than 30 million babies have been born in the US since 1990. But that is not the whole story, and the numbers that do tell the story are startling. These children are the wealthiest generation in the history of the world. Combining pocket-money, earnings and gifts, children under 14-years-old spend an estimated $20 billion (£15 billion) a year in the US, according to Businessweek magazine.
From the moment children are born, it seems they're in somebody's marketing plan. Mothers will be targeted with samples of baby products while they're still in hospital and by the time a child is 20 months old, she will begin to recognise brand names. By the age of seven, she will watch some 20,000 commercials on television each year. At 12, her name will already be registered in the major marketing data banks.
Product advertising aimed specifically at children, through magazines, television and Internet websites, grew more than 50 per cent from 1993 to 1996, and now totals more than two billion pounds worldwide.