IHSS Blog Toys and Tipping Points

 A toy that I played with when I was a kid was a nerf gun. I don't remember its specific name but I used to play with it a lot. I first found it when I went to a toy store to buy a birthday gift. I saw it in a box on a shelf and I thought it looked really cool. On top of that, a lot of kids in my neighborhood had a lot of nerf guns and I wanted to play with them. Back then, nerf guns were mostly bought by boys, and seeing as I was a boy, I thought it was appropriate for me to buy it. It also helped that all the children in my neighborhood who had a nerf gun, so I was fairly confident that I would really enjoy playing with the nerf gun. When I finally bought the gun, I played it with it for a week straight. Unfortunately, I didn't have a long attention span and ended up not playing it for a long time. It had a large barrel that contained a lot of "bullets", this made it incredibly fun to shoot it for a long time, but it also took really long to reload due to the large size of the barrel. The nerf gun was also incredibly large which made it really awkward for a 7-year-old boy like me to carry it around for long periods of time. A lot of the bullets also got lost through me using it throughout the house, which limited the fun I had when using the nerf gun. All of this combined made it less fun for me to use it as the days passed by and eventually, I left it in the cupboard collecting dust for years to come. I didn't even play the nerf guns with the kids in the neighborhood. In the end, I barely played with the nerf gun despite society norms making it essential for boys to play it.