Manufacturers design remote control toys for a variety of age levels. As long as your child, or grandchild, has enough dexterity to operate the controls, there’s an RC toy out there to give that child a fun time. But sometimes you might wonder about the durability of that toy.
Over the weekend two of my grandkids blessed rolling code transmitter me with a visit. My eleven -year-old granddaughter, and five-year-old grandson spent both Saturday and Sunday at my house. The grandson didn’t bring anything to play with, so I got out a couple of radio control toys, a monster truck, and a racing car, and handed over the controls to the kids.
A few minutes later I wondered a little about my decision to turn them loose with those remote control vehicles. My grandson apparently thought that race car was destined for demolition derbies. He proceeded to drive that car into every stationary object he could hit, and he especially targeted the monster truck as his sister steered it around those same objects.
This particular race car has a designer’s designated operating age of 3-years and older, so I wasn’t prepared for how a five year old would operate it. My other grandkids, those who have played with my RC models before, are teenagers, and they drive the vehicles non-aggressively, as did my 11-year old granddaughter this weekend.
But my 5-year old grandson was all crash and burn.
I explained to him that he was running the wrong kind of race with this car. “It’s not made to run over things, it’s made for speeding to the finish line without hitting anything,” I told him.
He didn’t like that idea, I guess, because he’d try steering around things for a while, but not for long. Missing stuff must’ve bored him, and soon he’d be right back to ramming, and crashing.
Another thing I noticed is once he started operation of that remote control he quickly became excited. He started running around chasing after the car, not paying much attention to where his control unit’s antennae went, or what it hit. He punched that antennae right into furniture, and walls, and bent it a couple times. Not a real big deal. I straightened the antennae back out, and finally told him just to leave it telescoped in so it wouldn’t hang up on anything. That worked a bit better.
My granddaughter quickly mastered steering the vehicles, and did a good job of operating the radio control – at least when her brother wasn’t running into her model with his. She got frustrated with him a time or two though.
Yes, there’s a RC toy for most any age kid, you just need understanding that the way the kids play differs with their age.
Sure, the older kids get rough sometimes, but my experience tells me that once they near, and pass into, their teen years (at least 11 or older), they drive like they’re practicing for a driver’s license, and real world driving.
When you pull out those remotes for the younger kids I suggest you make them your most rugged models. At the end of the weekend I inspected the radio control vehicles. They had scrapes and nicks, but overall didn’t suffer the heavy damage I feared.
And those grandkids sure had a lot of fun with those remote control toys.