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During the past two centuries, educators, psychologists, toy companies and parents like us have acted, implicitly or otherwise, as if the purpose of play is to optimise children for adulthood.
在过去的两个世纪里，教育工作者、心理学家、玩具公司和像我们这样的父母，或含蓄或直接，表现得好像玩游戏的目的是为了让孩子在成年期变得更优秀。
The dominant model for how to do that has been the schoolhouse, with its reading, writing, and arithmetic.
实现这一目的的主导模式一直是依靠学校的阅读、写作与算术。
The more book learning we could doll up as play, and then cram into our children, the better.
我们把书本知识包装成游戏塞给孩子得越多，效果就越好。
Then, with the rise of neuroscience in the second half of the 20th century, toys were increasingly marketed and purchased for the purpose of building better brains in order to build more competitive and successful grownups – to make Homo sapiens that were a little more sapient.
接着，随着神经科学在二十世纪下半叶的兴起，玩具越来越多地被买卖，目的是为了培养更好的大脑，培养更具竞争力和更成功的成年人--让智人变得更聪明一些。
The pressure to do that has been felt most intensely with the youngest kids, aged five and under, and in recent decades the market has bestowed upon us such brands as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius and Fat Brain (tagline: “Toys that Matter to Their Gray Matter”).
实现这一目的的压力在年龄最小的孩子(5岁及以下的孩子)身上表现得最为强烈。近几十年来，市场给予我们的品牌包括“小小爱因斯坦”、“天才宝宝”以及“硕脑”(品牌口号: “玩具对他们的大脑灰质至关重要”)。
By 2020, the broad category of educational toys was making nearly $65bn (￡55bn) worldwide, a figure that is forecast to double within the decade.
到2020年，各类益智玩具的全球销售额接近650亿美元(合550亿英镑)，这一数字预计将在十年内翻一番。
Toys that teach – from the Speak & Spell and the See & Say to an entire phylum of learn-to-code robots – now pervade many young lives.
从“说与拼”、“看与说”到教整套编码的机器人，这些早教玩具现在已经渗透到许多年幼的生命中。
“This generation of parents is asking toys to provide an end product, and that end product is prosperity,” Richard Gottlieb, an influential toy industry consultant, told me.
“这一代父母要求玩具提供最终产品，而这个最终产品就是成功，”理查德·戈特利布告诉我，他是一位颇具影响力的玩具业顾问。
“They want toys to get their children into Harvard.”
“他们想要通过玩具让孩子考进哈佛。”
But the “bathe your toddler in ABCs and 123s” version of child development has recently come under threat.
但是，“让你刚学步的小孩沉浸在字母和数字”中，这个版本的儿童发展最近受到了威胁。
In its place, a vision of childhood and its playthings that is more archaic and even anarchic is emerging.
取而代之的则是一种更为古早、甚至无秩序的童年和玩具构想。
“The model has been, ‘If I get toys that do schoolish things, then that’s good,’” Alison Gopnik, a leading developmental psychologist, told me.
“这种模式一直是，‘如果我得到的玩具能做学校式的事情，那就很好，’”著名发展心理学家艾莉森·戈普尼克告诉我。
“But that really goes against what the developmental science is telling us.”
“但这确实与发展科学告诉我们的相悖。”
The Christmas and birthday upshot is that young children are far more cognitively sophisticated than many toys on the Amazon results page or the Hamleys shelves assume.
圣诞节和生日的结果是，幼儿的认知能力比亚马逊销售结果页面上的许多玩具或哈姆利货架上的许多玩具认为的要复杂得多。
For decades, we’ve been getting our children, and their toys, all wrong.
几十年来，我们一直误解我们的孩子与他们的玩具。
