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Why your kid is obsessed with squishy toys

The rise of NeeDohs, dumplings, and other fidget toys, explained.

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

The NeeDoh Nice Cube is a lump of soft plastic a little over 2 inches tall. It comes in blue, pink, or purple, and retails for $5.99. When you squeeze it, it produces a pleasing, squishy sensation, subtly relieving the stress of the day and replacing it with a sense of calm and peace.

At least, I have to assume it does. The Nice Cube — and other NeeDoh variants, like globs, donuts, and kittens — are so popular that it’s become nearly impossible to get your hands on one. The toys are sold out at toy stores. The manufacturer, Schylling, no longer sells them through its website. Full-grown adults are practically coming to blows over them.

“They just showed up in force, especially in the last part of the school year,” Ginger Eikmeier, a Nebraska high school teacher, told me. “You see a couple of students with NeeDohs, and then it just kind of spreads.”

Runaway toy crazes always have an element of randomness to them. “Nobody can plan for a fad,” toy researcher and analyst Chris Byrne told me.

At the same time, the popularity of NeeDoh is part of a larger trend: the rise of sensory and “fidget” toys over the past decade. While kids (and adults) have always fidgeted, the marketing of toys explicitly for this purpose has exploded in recent years, as objects for squeezing, popping, stroking, and shaping fill kids’ bedrooms and classrooms alike. Retailers are jumping on the bandwagon, with millennial mall staple Claire’s rolling out a summer slate of ASMR-friendly sensory items in an effort to appeal to a new generation of shoppers.

“Yes, NeeDoh has been incredibly successful, but we’re also seeing tremendous enthusiasm around squishies, fidgets, slime, and other tactile collectibles,” Michelle Goad, chief brand officer at Claire’s, told me in an email.

On one level, the power of fidget toys is not that deep: “It’s just fun to squish them,” Harper, 11, told me. But experts also point to a bigger message behind the rise of NeeDoh and its ilk — one that has implications for kids’ lives far beyond the toy store.

The history of fidget toys

Squishy toys are far........

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