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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.
在过去两个世纪，教育工作者、心理学家、玩具公司和像我们这样的父母，以或含蓄或直接的方式，表现得好像玩耍的目的就是为了让孩子变成最优秀的大人。
The dominant model for how to do that has been the schoolhouse, with its reading, writing, and arithmetic. The more book learning we could doll up as play, and then cram into our children, the better.
实现这一目的的主导模式一直是依靠学校的阅读、写作和算术课。我们把越多的书本知识包装成游戏塞给孩子，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兴起，人们推销和购买玩具的目的越来越多地变成培养更好的大脑，继而培养出更具竞争力和更成功的成年人--让智人变得更睿智一些。
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岁及以下的儿童)身上表现得最为强烈。近几十年来，市场献给我们的品牌包括"小爱因斯坦""天才宝宝"以及"硕脑"(品牌口号: "对大脑灰质至关重要的玩具")。
By 2020, the broad category of educational toys was making nearly $65bn (￡55bn) worldwide, a figure that is forecast to double within the decade. 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.
到2020年，益智玩具大类的全球销售额接近650亿美元(合550亿英镑)，这一数字预计将在十年内翻一番。从"讲与拼"的小键盘和"看与说"的识图玩具，到一整个门类的用于学习编码的机器人，这些早教玩具现在已经渗透到许多小孩子的生活中。
"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. "They want toys to get their children into Harvard."
"这一代父母要求玩具提供一种最终产品，这个最终产品就是人生富足，"理查德·戈特利布向我表示，他是一位颇具影响力的玩具行业顾问。"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. In its place, a vision of childhood and its playthings that is more archaic and even anarchic is emerging.
但是，"让你的小孩沉浸在字母和数字中"的儿童发展理论最近受到了威胁。取而代之，一种更为古早，甚至无秩序的对童年和玩具的想象正在兴起。
"The model has been, ‘If I get toys that do schoolish things, then that's good,'" Alison Gopnik, a leading developmental psychologist, told me. "But that really goes against what the developmental science is telling us."
"（儿童发展）模式一直是，‘如果玩具能教孩子学东西，那很好'，"顶尖发展心理学家艾莉森·戈普尼克向我表示，"但这其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.
圣诞节和生日时的最终结局是，幼儿的认知能力比亚马逊商品页面或哈姆利货架上的许多玩具以为的要复杂精妙得多。
For decades, we've been getting our children, and their toys, all wrong.
几十年来，我们对孩子和他们的玩具的看法一直是错误的。
