Abstract
This study investigates the impact of the South Korean TV show Catch! Teenieping: Fairies of Emotion and its associated merchandise on children's play and values. A survey of 100 mothers and an analysis of existing literature reveal the excessive time and expenses that children, particularly young girls, spend on Teenieping play, in spite of the play being primarily imitative and potentially limiting developmental benefits. Such commercial success led to an imbalance in children’s play. Additionally, Teenieping merchandise functions as a status symbol, contributing to materialistic attitudes among children. To address these issues, this study proposes a framework of Place, Material, Topic, and Player for parents to evaluate and curate children's play to ensure a balanced play experience and content diversity in both aesthetics and topics. How balance and diversity in play can improve children’s relationships to nature, peers and adults is discussed.
Keywords
Transmedia storytelling; Character toys; Children’s play; Materialistic attitudes
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.13
Citation
Kim, M.,and Hahn, Y.(2025) Balancing children’s play with plastic–materialistic character toys, in Brandt, E., Markussen, T., Berglund, E., Julier, G., Linde, P. (eds.), Nordes 2025: Relational Design, 6-8 August, Oslo, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.13
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Balancing children’s play with plastic–materialistic character toys
This study investigates the impact of the South Korean TV show Catch! Teenieping: Fairies of Emotion and its associated merchandise on children's play and values. A survey of 100 mothers and an analysis of existing literature reveal the excessive time and expenses that children, particularly young girls, spend on Teenieping play, in spite of the play being primarily imitative and potentially limiting developmental benefits. Such commercial success led to an imbalance in children’s play. Additionally, Teenieping merchandise functions as a status symbol, contributing to materialistic attitudes among children. To address these issues, this study proposes a framework of Place, Material, Topic, and Player for parents to evaluate and curate children's play to ensure a balanced play experience and content diversity in both aesthetics and topics. How balance and diversity in play can improve children’s relationships to nature, peers and adults is discussed.