I’m going to talk about the F-word. Teachers all over America don’t want this
used in their classroom. Parents everywhere can agree that it has no place at the dinner table.
FIDGET SPINNER. Ugh!
My son, who does not have ADHD, nor does he have anxiety,
asked my husband to buy him this new toy everyone else had. Twelve bucks and two days later,
the fidget spinner arrived via Amazon.
My son showed it to me, and I have to say, I didn’t understand this toy. I asked him to show me how it works. He pinched his thumb and forefinger in the
center, and spun the arms of the spinner. It spun for a long time; I’d say 4
minutes or so.
“Now what,” I asked.
He put it on his chin and spun it. There wasn’t much else.
“You can do all kinds of tricks with it,” he said.
Proud of his purchase for his beaming son, my husband said
that they are actually used by kids who need help staying focused in class.
They spin it and it helps them focus. It was a quick layman’s
description. My son never once told me
it was to help him focus, stay calm or fidget less. To him, it was just a toy.
Now, I think the best kinds of toys, require imagination.
I look at a fidget
spinner and I see a toy plane in a little girl’s hand. She’s blowing air out of her mouth between
her two pressed together vibrating lips, while she’s making the sound of the
propeller powered by a massive diesel engine.
The plane is flying a flock of tourists past an active volcano. Suddenly the volcano erupts and molten hot lava
is spewing everywhere.
The co-pilot yells,
“Pull up! Pull up!”
The pilot pulls up and
maneuvers the plane through the cloudy sky. She sees a seemingly safe landing runway, just between two cliffs.
It’s a dangerously narrow chasm, but this 7 year old girl is determined to bring
her passengers to safety. Cupping her
hand over her mouth, she drops her voice and says, “Folks, I’m going to bring
the plane in for a landing. Hold onto your peanuts - this could get bumping!”
The pilot starts the ascent and just as the
plane squeezes into the chasm the plane begins to shake.
"Folks, it’s me again. You know, the pilot? I apologize for the
turbulence. There’s no need to be
alarmed.”
Then suddenly, a
colossal ape, comes out of nowhere, blows out a primal growl, and swipes
angrily at the plane, knocking the engine out.
“I take it back. We’re
going down, folks. Hold on!”
Air is sputtering out
of her mouth as the propeller comes to a stop. The seven year old pilot is in
trouble, she loses control of the plane.
The plane ends up in a flat spin. Passengers are screaming, kids are
throwing up their peanuts, teenagers are snapchatting their goodbyes; the
co-pilot has passed out from the G-force.
It’s up to the pint-sized pilot to get control. She’s able to slow it
down. (Don’t ask me how? It’s all in her imagination.) The plane comes in for a
hard landing and just as the nose of the plane hits the ground, the propeller
is flung from the plane. It takes out a couple trees and disappears into the
landscape.
Miraculously, the
passengers are safe, the co-pilot is awake, and the pilot is very proud of
herself. Everyone safely exits the plane to assess the damage. She’s in rough
shape. No working engine, there’s hull damage and where in the world has the
propeller gone?
I know where it is. It’s in a small box in the back of a UPS
truck. Someone forgot to put it on a toy plane and instead Amazon is shipping
it out to a kid who just convinced his dad to buy it for him, so he can sit in
a room and spin it on his knee.
Over the course of a couple days, I started asking other
moms and googling what the fidget spinners are good for. I played out several scenarios,
as moms will often do about how my son’s new fascination will get him into
trouble at school.
I drew a hard line in the sand. I said, “Listen, I don’t want you to
bring this thing to school. Do you hear me? I am certain that your teacher will
not want you using this in class.”
He agreed to only use it at the after-school program he's enrolled in.
Liar, liar, pants on
fire! A month later, his teacher
confiscated it. Turns out, she banned them from her class. She has a one-day confiscation rule, so she
returned it to him the next day. I only know about this little infraction
because Mrs. D. called me to tell me about my son getting into, what she called
“End-of-school-year trouble”.
Promoted as a tool to help kids calm themselves or keep
focused in class, fidget spinners have shown up in classrooms all over
America. Suddenly every child needs or wants one. Some parents called
“bullshit” on this right away, saying that their child does not need to fidget.
My
kid is not on the spectrum. He doesn’t have ADHD. There is nothing wrong with
her. It goes on and on.
When I was a kid, we sat up straight in class with out folded hands
on the desk ahead of us. Some teachers wouldn’t begin or continue a lesson
until everyone was in this position. Focus
was something that teachers demanded and a good portion of the time, they got
it… to a degree. We all remember how it used to be, but I'm not sure remember how it really was. We still fidgeted. For me, it was bouncing
my knee up and down. Today, I doodle. If I’m on the phone with you, I’m
doodling. Geometric shapes, trees, patterns, giant penises. (That last example
might be an untruth.)
What do you do to stay focused? Do you bite
your nails? Chew gum? Tap your fingers?
Click your pen? Think about it,
you probably need to fidget in order to stay on task or pay attention in a
meeting. There is no shame in it. And there is no shame in a child needing
something to help them remain focused in school.
In doing some research, I came across an article about Shira
Mechanic, a 27 year old occupational therapist, who is also on the autism
spectrum. She was interviewed by Amy
Zimmer, a columnist at a New York based, online community news site called
DNAInfo.com. You can read the full interview here.
Mechanic credits her career success to the very fidget spinners
and "fidgets" she used in all of her graduate classes.
In response to fidget spinner backlash, Mechanic stated, “Fidgets aren’t appropriate for all
students and generally work best when they are introduced to an individual in
the context of using them as tools and in response to their specific sensory
needs.”
This makes sense. Even though they’re called fidget spinners,
my son and now my daughter, only knows them as toys – not tools. Perhaps I’m
wrong. Perhaps fidget spinners can be helpful in a classroom setting. However,
too many children are on the fidget spinner bandwagon without a ticket.
Teachers everywhere have banned these spinners for a
multitude of reasons. The biggest reason
that they have been banned from schools is because they are not helping kids
stay focused while the entire class is too distracted by them. One child
takes out their spinner and gives it a whirl. Next thing a teacher knows, all
of the other kids want to get a look at Susie’s spinner. What color is it? Does
hers spin for a long time? Is it one of the spinners that blink? Can she
balance it on her finger?
The good news for a lot of parents is that you can walk into
a supermarket and find these spinners on an endcap for $3.99. The Wharton NJ Shoprite has such a display
right by their service counter. The bad news is the cheap spinners don’t spin
as quietly as the $12 or $15 spinners, so as parents have run out to buy the
super cheap spinners, all they’ve done is send their kids to school with noisy
spinners that can't be hidden.
In speaking with several of my mom-friends, some of them
special education teachers and some are parents of children with ADHD, I’ve
learned that they too see the current spinning fidget toy as more of a
classroom-wide distraction, than a help to one child.
That Occupational Therapist, who happens to be on the
spectrum I mentioned? She is also an entrepreneur, who started an ETSY based
Fidget Club in 2014. Today, you can
visit her online fidget store here. In browsing her online store, and others, I’ve
come up with 5 of my favorite alternatives to spinning fidgets.
1. Bead on a necklace. Seriously, a simple bead or two on a string,
around your child’s neck. This is a DIY fidget. The child can twiddle the bead between his or
her fingers and it won’t fall on the floor and cause a distraction. Or they can
pull it from side to side while there’s a quick moment in the lesson, where they
might otherwise be day dream.
2. Squeezibo: It looks and feels like a big marshmallow. It is just like a stress ball; used for
squeezing to help a child ease tension or stress. There are a variety to choose. Some look like little animal faces that I'm sure kids would get a kick out of. $7.99 at Fidget Club.
3. Neon Inside Out Ball: It looks like a normal plastic rubber ball, but can be turned inside out to a
spiky stretchy ball. This is especially
great for sensory seeking kids who need tactile stimulation. $2.75 at Fidget
Club.
4. Tangles: Basically, a very simple way to keep
idle hands busy. It fits in the palm of your hand as you tangle and untangle
it. I can see a child using this under
their desk, out of view from other kids – they don’t even need to look at it
because it is just something to keep busy fingers happy.
5. Marble Sleeve: Another tool to keep fidgety hands busy, and it can also be used under the desk
to keep from distracting other children in the classroom is a marble inside a sleeve. Simply move the
marble from one end of the sleeve to the next.
There are so many others to choose from, like tactile
textured pens, stretchy bands etc, but I can see them all becoming a
distraction to other kids in class, thereby ending up on the teachers banned
list.
I know the school year is coming to a close, so you’ll have
all summer long to think about which fidget devices your child can really use
as a tool in the classroom. Unless of course the fidget device craze is
replaced by something completely different, which is entirely possible.
By the way, I may or may not have doodled a dozen penises while you read this long post.
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