In today’s world full of screens, parents have to work hard to set boundaries and to enforce them.  Screens are everywhere and most times, children binge on video games, Netflix, or YouTube or some form of social media.  These technologies also forcing our kids into more mature content sooner, given the difficult of controlling some of this.

Drew is the marketing director of at Tonies, a company that created a brightly colored, screen-free smart speaker for kids, the Toniebox.   They married technology together with physical kid’s toys or figurines that they call ‘Tonies’.  Whether it be a Lion King toy or a Cars toy, they have lots of these Tonies that kids can play with and place on top of a magnet, to open up a whole new world of story-telling adventures and imagination.

Tonies originally launched in Germany in 2016 and is currently one of the fastest growing toy brands in Europe.  They have launched recently in North America and have already sold over 1.7m Tonieboxes.

In this episode, Drew talks to us about - Why removing the screen is critical to the creative development process and how we can use the power of storytelling to empower children to be creators, authors, and performers.   He also talks about how purely instruction-based toys prevent our kids from developing their creativity. 

Visit https://wishslate.com/podcasts for Episode Transcript & Links to Resources