MomsRising.org has created a great-sounding SMS-based service to help you avoid toxic toys while you’re shopping:

Send a SMS/text message to 41411 with the text, “healthytoys [search term/toy name]” — where [search term] is the name of a toy, type of toy, manufacturer, or retailer. This will let you know if a toy contains toxic chemicals or not.

Example: Text “healthytoys alphabet pal” to 41411 to find out the toxics rating for the Alphabet Pal by Leap Frog, sold at Walmart. You can also search by retailer (text “healthytoys walmart” to 41411) or manufacturer (text “healthytoys leap frog” to 41411).

We’ll respond instantly with the results, based on recent comprehensive tests by HealthyToys.com. The results will indicate whether the toy or product had a low, medium, or high detection of toxic chemicals.

Here’s a short video clip showing a child-friendly train car in Tokyo. It’s too good to be true, especially in a country where pressure to keep public areas quiet — including train cars — is tremendous.

For me, the most striking things about Tokyo were its silence and its cleanliness. It is all the more noticeable when you come from Israel, where, sadly, love of the land is not always demonstrated by litter control.

In Tokyo, a city of over 12,000,000 residents (not counting workers who come in daily), I saw one — ONE — piece of litter in the street during a 10-day visit. And that was an empty beer can blowing down the street in a typhoon. It’s refreshing and remarkable, although I’m sure there’s a price to pay, as there is in any very clean environment.

[Amusing: en route to a meeting, we collected a granola bar wrapper which we had to carry for 15 minutes through Tokyo Station before finding a trash bin. So very, very clean, and yet so few places to dispose of litter!]

More great pictures of the children’s train at Deputy Dog.

Rabbi Yitzchak Adlerstein provides a link on Cross-Currents to “Are Our Children Too Worldly?”, a paper by Rabbi Dr. Aharon Hersh Fried (the download link is here).

This is a very important paper. I don’t wish to quote from it, because I see how easy it could be for his ideas to be taken out of context. On such a sensitive topic as judging the appropriateness of our educational methods, it’s only natural that we will tend to instinctively respond from the gut. We are liable to approach an essay like this one from our own bias: whether it be overprotective (”He calls that religious?! How dare he quote gedolim on this!”) or liberal (”You see! This proves those ultra-Orthodox people are narrow-minded/uneducated/kept in the dark by their rabbis.”)

Nonetheless, if you can read this paper with a wide open mind to really hear what Rabbi Fried is saying (that an intellectually and religiously honest educational path in Torah is the means to further cultivate a love of Torah life), then you should read it. If you can’t, don’t. Rabbi Fried’s objections to indiscriminate blanket “protection” of children from the “outside world” call to mind the attempt to defend France with the Maginot Line: For as long as it keeps the enemy at bay, it works, but as soon as it is circumvented or breached, the situation is worse than ever, with the “protective” wall itself working against you.

My experience (as a teacher, mother, and interested observer of other people’s children) is that most American (non-Orthodox) kids are not over-protected from society, but rather are under-protected. Still, if you aren’t Jewish, or aren’t religious, but are very involved in your children’s education, you may also find the case made here to be of interest.