Psychologist Dr. Susan Linn, founder of Fairplay and author of Consuming Kids and The Case for Make Believe, argues that marketing to children quietly takes over the one thing play exists to build: a child's own imagination. This article looks at her case and what a commercial-free toy shelf changes.
Susan Linn is a psychologist who has spent her career on a question most of us never think to ask: what happens to children's play when it becomes a marketing opportunity? She is the founder of Fairplay, the advocacy organisation formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which works to protect children from the commercial pressures that now reach into nearly every corner of early life. She is also the author of two books that frame the argument from both ends: Consuming Kids, on what the marketing industry does to childhood, and The Case for Make Believe, on what childhood loses when pretend play is crowded out.
That combination is why she is worth listening to. Linn brings the clinical perspective of a psychologist who takes children's imaginative life seriously as a developmental force, together with years spent examining how the business of selling to children actually works. She is not arguing that toys are bad or that companies are villains. Her point is more precise: when a toy comes pre-loaded with a brand, a character and a storyline, something is taken from the child before the play has even begun.
Linn's core claim runs like this. Creative play, the kind where a child invents the characters, the plot and the rules, is not decoration on top of development. It is one of the main engines of it: the place where young children process feelings, rehearse language, test ideas and discover that they can make something from nothing. And that engine has one critical requirement. The child has to be the author. The value of pretend play comes precisely from the fact that the story is the child's own.
Marketing to children, she argues, erodes exactly that. A branded character does not arrive on the toy shelf empty-handed. It arrives with a script: a name, a voice, a personality, a set of catchphrases and a back catalogue of episodes the child has already watched. So when the child picks it up, the most natural thing in the world is not to invent, but to re-enact. The imaginative work, the authorship, has been done in advance by a studio, and the child's role shrinks from writer to performer of someone else's material. Multiply that across a toy box, a wardrobe, a lunchbox and a bedroom wall, and a child can spend much of their play life inside stories they did not write.
Her answer is not to take play away but to hand it back: commercial-free, open-ended play materials, the kind that come with no franchise attached, protect the child's authorship of their own imagination. A plain block, an unbranded animal, a simple boat: these have no script to follow, so the child must supply one, and supplying it is the development. Through Fairplay's ongoing work, Linn and her colleagues press this case publicly: childhood works best when children, not marketers, are the authors of their play.
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It is worth being honest about what kind of claim this is. Linn's argument is built on clinical insight and a close reading of how marketing works, rather than on a single trial with a percentage attached. What you can do is test it against your own sitting-room floor, and most parents who do will recognise it instantly: the franchise toy gets played the same way every time, in the character's voice, along the show's plot lines, while the anonymous wooden animal is a pirate on Monday, a patient on Tuesday and somebody's baby by the weekend.
For a parent of a child under five, the practical reading is reassuringly modest. It does not mean a beloved character toy is poison, or that one branded birthday present undoes anything. Under-fives are at the absolute peak of pretend play, which makes this the window where authorship matters most, and the lever is simply the balance of the shelf. A toy box dominated by characters with ready-made scripts will tend to produce re-enactment. A toy box weighted towards open-ended, unbranded things will tend to produce invention, because invention is the only way to play with them. You do not need to police the play. You only need to stock the shelf so that the child's own story is the path of least resistance.
Picture the difference in two ducks. The first is a character duck from a programme: it has a name the child did not choose, a voice an actor recorded, and twenty episodes of canon. Put it in a three year old's hands and you can usually predict the next five minutes, because they have already been broadcast. The second is a plain wooden duck, smooth-edged, solid in the palm, with a painted eye and no further opinions. It has no franchise, no script and no episode to re-enact, and on a given afternoon it may not even be a duck: it has been a dragon, a baby, a policeman and a loaf of bread before teatime. Every one of those was written, cast and directed by the child.
This is the quiet argument for the traditional toy shelf, and it feels different in the room. The play is slower to start, because nothing is pre-loaded, and then it runs longer, because the child is following an idea rather than a transcript. A small hand stacks beech blocks into a tower that is also a castle that is also, suddenly, a cave for the duck. The blocks knock together with that low wooden click. The tower wobbles, the child holds their breath, and the story bends to absorb the collapse. Nobody on a screen ever decided what happens next, so the child has to, and does, and that deciding is the muscle being built. Jaques London has been making toys on exactly this principle since 1795, longer than the advertising industry has existed: simple, well-made, open-ended wooden toys with no character attached →, which is another way of saying toys that leave the entire story to the child.
If you want to feel Linn's principle in your own home, the test is simple. Choose one stretch of the afternoon, put the character toys out of sight, and leave three or four unbranded things where the child will find them: a few blocks, a length of cloth, a plain wooden animal or two →. Say nothing. The first minutes may be aimless, and then a story will start that you have never heard before, because until that moment it did not exist. That story is the thing Linn has spent her career defending.
The best starting point for Linn's thinking is Fairplay, the organisation she founded, which sets out the case for a childhood shaped by children rather than marketers. On this site, our guide to pretend play covers why made-up stories matter so much before five, the open-ended toys guide shows what a script-free shelf looks like in practice, and why real play matters sets out the wider evidence this library is built on.
Harmful is the wrong frame, and Linn's argument is more precise than that. A character toy is not a poison; it is simply pre-written. It tends to invite re-enactment of stories the child already knows rather than invention of new ones, and the cost only becomes meaningful when most of the toy shelf works that way. One favourite character in a box of open-ended things is a friend. A box full of them is a script library.
No. A strong pull towards characters usually reflects what is most visible, on screens and on the shelf, rather than a fixed preference. You do not need a purge, which mostly produces grief. Quietly improve the balance instead: leave plain, open-ended toys out where they will be found, and keep the character toys for some of the time rather than all of it. Pretend play is robust; given material with no script, children of any age begin writing again.
Both, which is Linn's point. The toy is where the marketing lands. Advertising to children works by attaching characters to feelings and then attaching products to characters, so by the time the toy reaches the child it carries the whole commercial story with it. Choosing unbranded play materials is the simplest way a parent can step outside that loop, because a toy with no franchise has nothing to sell and nothing to re-enact.
Far less than you might fear, especially under five. Young children play together around what is in front of them, and a shared game invented on the spot needs no canon at all. A child with a strong pretending muscle joins any game going, including the franchise ones, because they can improvise. Knowing the episodes is a much thinner social skill than being able to make up the next part of the story.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.