The Chronic Consumer

My four-year-old son gets one hour of quiet time per day (30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon) during which he is only allowed to read, draw, color, or play with toys that don’t have batteries. I think it’s important for him to be “unplugged” like this, so I enforce quiet time pretty strictly.

I also make an effort to buy him a good mix of toys that would be appropriate for quiet time, which is why I recently purchased a View-Master 3D Viewer.

I had a View-Master when I was a kid, and remember that I never got tired of looking at my Dumbo, Bambi, and Snow White reels. I figured my son would enjoy the updated version, so long as he had some interesting reels to look at. I hoped that dinosaurs, Thomas the Tank Engine, SpongeBob SquarePants, sea creatures, and African safari animals would keep him busy for a bit.

The updated View-Master is fairly simple for even young children (like my son) to use. Once I taught him which way to put the reels in so the pictures would show up properly, he was able to change them out himself whenever he wanted. The lever to advance the reels is nice and big, making it easy for my son to push it in order to scroll through the pictures.

The View-Master also comes with a clip that can attach to a neck strap or belt loop or whatever, but my son has never used it.

When we first got the View-Master, my son really enjoyed playing with it. But now that it’s been a few weeks and he’s seen all of his reels several times, he has pretty much cast the toy aside and hasn’t touched it in a while — not even during quiet time.

The View-Master only cost $5.99 at Wal-Mart, so it’s not as though I’m out a bundle of money here. But still… it would have been nice for the toy to retain its attraction for a bit longer. I guess I’ll just have to keep buying new reels for it!