It’s Teddy Bear Day.
Kids of all kinds have loved and been loved by this OG stuffie, even if there was a time when Very Concerned People thought the teddy bear could imperil the nation’s future!
You might find this idea especially odd, seeing as how the teddy bear was named after President Theodore Roosevelt.
How the heck could we have a national crisis courtesy of a stuffed animal that was inspired by the time that the 26th President refused to shoot a bear?
According to Smithsonian, some voices in the early 1900s felt that kids (especially young girls) should be playing with dolls instead of bears.
Dolls were supposed to be realistic; dolls were supposed to be lifelike.
And most importantly to these critics, dolls were useful; they helped young ladies practice caring for babies and children, just as they were meant to do as adults.
If kids were playing with fuzzy toy bears, they weren’t taking care of proxy babies and birth rates would start to fall all over the country.
This was an actual argument people made, but of course this wasn’t the argument that won out.
The trend in the early part of the 20th Century was to let kids be kids a little longer.
Kids were more and more likely to go to school than to factory jobs; parents were encouraged to be more permissive (and to buy some of the many toys that manufacturers were bringing to the marketplace).
In the 1920s, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh became famous, and the bears-and-kids alliance never looked back.
There have been zillions of teddy bears ever since, and somehow humans haven’t forgotten how to raise kids.
Visit the average household and you might find a few teddy bears.
South Dakota used to be home to a collection that brought that average way up: Teddy Bear Town in Hill City had more than 11,000 bears of every shape and size.
The owners announced a few years back that the bears were henceforth “hibernating.”
The Teddy Bear Was Once Seen as a Dangerous Influence on Young Children (Smithsonian)
The World’s Largest Indoor Teddy Bear Collection Is Right Here In South Dakota At Teddy Bear Town (Only In Your State)