‘Feeling a bit stressed or anxious? Want to practise more mindfulness? Looking for good vibes and your best mellow and chill?’ This is not an advert for a life coach but the official sales pitch for NeeDohs, the much-coveted new children’s toys. These are not mere playthings, you see. Thanks to the ADHD-ification of childhood, they are ‘sensory fidgets’.
NeeDohs are produced by American manufacturer Schylling. They are ‘the original sensory squish toy’, but others have appeared on the market, such as squishy ‘original viral dumplings’, produced by RMS International. Squishies are the latest craze – brightly coloured blobs of plastic to squash, squeeze, stretch and supposedly help children who have trouble focusing.
Squishy, stretchy toys aren’t really new. I remember getting gel-filled ‘smiley men’ in party bags to fling around when I was a child. But they were never marketed as sensory aids to help me with my wellness. Nor were these little pieces of plastic in extraordinary demand. Squishies are.
Outside the Funky Fidgets Shop in Darlington at 10 a.m. last Saturday, a young boy called Harley was first in the queue. He had been there for three hours to bag himself a NeeDoh. Behind him the queue snaked around the corner. Almost every child waited for hours. (And who says they can’t focus?)
Even adults are crossing the country to hunt down a toy. Comments on the shop’s social media pages are filled with people planning road trips: ‘Can you tell me if it is worth travelling five hours to try to get a NeeDoh?’ Limits are placed on how many one person can buy, to block the scalpers who would otherwise sweep the lot and sell them at triple the price on eBay. ‘Release drops’ come every few weeks to keep stocks up.
There are several varieties of NeeDohs. A fuzzball with shag-rug fibres attached; a ‘dream drop’ shaped like a teardrop. The item that kicked off the craze is the ‘Nice Cube’ – a clear blue square with a ‘super solid squish’. Then there is the ‘original viral dumpling’ that has, its packaging reads, reached ‘over one million views!’ The gel-filled blob is roughly the size of a hand and makes a satisfying blobbing sound when squeezed. It has a ‘kawaii’ (cute) smiley face and blushed anime cheeks. If that wasn’t irresistible enough for children, you don’t know which colour you’ll get until you buy it and open its plastic dim sum box: pink, green, yellow, or possibly the rare glitter dumpling. It is the perfect retail trap – keep buying to complete the set, accumulating four orange and two blue, still no glitter. Such is the demand, Tesco sells them with a security tag attached.
The depressing truth about squishies is that their popularity owes a lot to our modern obsession with mental health and wellness. Yes, toy manufacturers have always tried to flog plastic tat to children, but at least they didn’t tell them that they might be plagued with anxiety or stress.
A final word of warning. Inevitably, there are cheap, knock-off squishies. Don’t squeeze them too hard. Counterfeit versions are failing basic safety standards. Many have been found to contain toxic chemicals and high levels of benzene, which is carcinogenic. Not so kawaii.
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