The Importance of MESH

by Rachele Harmuth, Dr. Deborah Gilboa and Richard Derr. Interviewed by Nick Truss

STEM and STEAM are household acronyms for toy industry and children’s health professionals, and have been for years.Entering broader vernacular in the early naughts, STEM found a very comfortable place in toys as a handy way to distiguish educational math, science, and engineering toys from the crowd, o ering them a special category they greatly deserved.

Less recognizable, perhaps, is the term MESH. Unlike STEM, MESH was born from within the toy industry, taking shape quite recently. MESH emerged when new issues were discovered with kids and parents, in large part from the tumult and distress of the past few years. To provide a brief history and valuable insight into this burgeoning toy term, we reached out to three individuals who are pioneering research into MESH and raising awareness: Rachele Harmuth, Head of inkFun (a division of Ravensburger), Dr. Deborah Gilboa, resilience expert, family physician, and proli c consultant, and Rick Derr, President of KidsPoint, Inc. dba/Learning Express Toys.

How did the MESH idea get started?

Rachele: “ e development of MESH started about eight months ago. I had just joined inkFun as their new head and was really excited about our brand and understanding how we were relevant to the marketplace. inkFun has had such a strong STEM o ering, so we assumed that was what we would be discussing. However, in talking with retailers, we learned that STEM was less and less what people were looking for, and was not the main focus of conversations they were currently having with consumers. at made us take a big step back and say, ‘Wow, we need to really understand what is happening for parents and kids right now.’ So we put the conversations about our brand aside for a while and just dug into understanding what was happening for families. It was clear that children’s mental health was the top concern.”

“We started researching and found staggering statistics on the increase in mental health issues for all ages of children. It was to a level that in October of 2021 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry declared a national state of emergency in children’s mental health. In these organizations’ combined 125 years of existence, this has never happened before.”

“As we understood the breadth and depth of this issue, we knew that we needed to bring in an expert who could help us understand it. We reached out to one of the top experts in children’s resilience in the country, Deborah Gilboa, MD (Dr. G). With Dr. G, we dug into three questions:”

1. What is actually happening right now with children’s mental health?

Dr. Gilboa: “Although the issue of mental health in kids was not new, the trends have been changing in startling and dire ways. Parents and educators are more worried about children’s mental well being than ever before, and they are right to be so concerned. Suicidality [risk of suicide] is sharply rising, with a shocking 40% of teen girls telling the CDC that they’ve felt hopeless several days in the past two weeks for the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, just as an example. By every metric we have, kids are getting more anxious, more sad, and less mentally well.”

“ e good news is, actually, to be found in fact that parents and educators are so worried. For the rst time, parents are more concerned about their child’s mental health than they are even about academic success. Educators, adults at home, and even policy makers are putting children’s mental health at the forefront. e many conversations happening give us an entryway for introducing new solutions to receptive people.”

2. What are the skills kids need to grow and improve their resiliency and mental health?

Dr. G identi ed 8 skills that research shows are essential in the development of higher resilience. ese are problem solving, perseverance, adaptation, con ict resolution, selfregulation, self-advocacy, communication strategies and cognitive skills.

Dr. Gilboa: “ ere are aspects of resilience that are built on traits (these don’t change much over time) and past experience, but the best news is that most of resilience can be intentionally developed in children. Resilience is the ability to navigate change and move through it towards a positive goal. When we give children the opportunity and guidance to build those skills – when they’re struggling and when they’re not – they end up less likely to engage in self-harm behaviors and far more willing to notice when they’re struggling, speak up, problem solve, and ask their grownups for help.”

3. How can we build those skills through play?

Rachele: “By focusing on the 8 identi ed skills, we reviewed games and toys that intentionally built these skills. We found 4 main types of products that build these skills through play. ey are products that focus on the following:”

· Problem-solving

Problem-solving requires practice. erefore it is essential that kids experience solving problems for themselves. Using play improves kids’ problem-solving ability and their con dence in themselves as problem-solvers will make them safer and stronger as they grow. Toys and games that help players build this skill:

· O er challenges.

· Give opportunities to think about di erent solutions.

· Allow those attempts to impact the course of play.

· Storytelling

Storytelling play strengthens insight into how a character is feeling or reacting, which builds empathy for oneself and other people. is, in turn, helps someone understand how to e ectively communicate their own experiences. Chances to explain to others what stories they have created or recreated in play o ers practice that they can rely on later in more di cult communication circumstances. Storytelling play leads to strong self-advocacy, which has been proven to be a life-saving skill when mental health issues arise.

·Increasing challenge over the duration of play

Toys and games that get harder as you go serve several key functions. Firstly, they teach the value of perseverance. ese opportunities show that succeeding the rst time isn’t a reasonable expectation, but that repetition and learning increases chances of success.

ey also build tolerance for frustration. It is easier to give up than to keep going in most situations. Toys and games that use fun as a motivator can help players nd the path forward even without a guarantee of success.