Aqua Dots from Spin Master is undergoing a voluntary recall after it was discovered in Australia (where the product is sold as Bindeez) that the beads that are meant to be glued together were coated with a substance that metabolized into the date rape drug GHB. Three children who swallowed some of the beads had to be hospitalized after suffering seizures.

Thankfully, they're all OK. (Update: Kids in the United States are falling ill.)

Lead paint, magnets that come detached, GHB -- what are kids supposed to play with?

This year's growing list of toy recalls is prompting independent toy companies to step in with safer alternatives that promise to improve children's minds with minimal risk to their health.

Peter Emmenegger, owner of online toy store INQUISITIVEkid says parents today are inadvertently undermining a child's creative thinking and development when purchasing popular "licensed" toys and high-tech smart games.

"Video games and passive plastic toys restrict children's progress by stifling their creativity and imagination, and hindering their social skills," Emmenegger said.

He argues that "licensed" toys -- toys based solely on popular television or movie characters -- tell children how to play by directing them to known themes associated with the character, effectively crushing the child's creative thinking in favour of imitation.

OK, so what works?

Diane Bergeron, professor of early childhood education at the George Brown School of Early Childhood, agrees that minimalist toys, such as wooden blocks, and unstructured play function as a catalyst for creative thinking.

"When a child is playing with blocks, they are essentially constructing their own vision and building a castle of their own imagination," Bergeron told CTV.ca.

"Then the child is able to construct their own vision of the larger world made small."

Makes sense. Since this is a blog and is supposed to be a personal account, let me share what I did with the kids today.

My oldest is six. We've made three different dioramas in the past. She wanted to do another today, but I didn't have any boxes to use as the frame. So instead I cut and folded some craft paper we keep on hand and bound it together to make a book of ten pages. Instead of a diorama of Goldilocks, we made our own picture book, and she practised her writing by making captions for all her drawings. We also discussed how to plot the story in pictures, includng how to build tension by drawing a picture of the bears returning to the house but still at a distance before Goldilocks entered the bedroom for her nap.

The other three are all three, so for them it was simpler stuff. A large cardboard box in the garage was pulled into the basement and made into the obligatory fort with, count 'em, two entrances -- the main front entrance and a secret back door.

After, small paper bags became hand puppets with the kids drawing their own crayon puppet faces, and the kids took turns going behind the couch, two or three at a time, to put on puppet shows for the rest of us.

Not everything is low tech. The PVR has plenty of episodes of Spongebob Squarepants for winding down time, and we all had a good laugh at Patrick (today we watched a parody of The Fantastic Voyage, which made me laugh).

No video games though. I like video games, but at this age, I prefer them to play with toys with a clear mechanical connection between cause and effect. I remember spending lots of times looking at the gears and belts and such when I was a kid, figuring out how things worked, and getting an intuitive sense of how physical world works beyond eating and sleeping. Virtual simulations of reality miss that critical element. I spent ten minutes explaining to my oldest why corrugated cardboard is so stiff (a question prompted by the fort from earlier today). She would never have thought to ask that if we were playing a video game version of King of the Castle.

It's tough, though. It takes a lot of time and a lot of patience to play that way. But I think it's worth it. And I worry a lot less about what they're playing with.

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