In defence of loom bands, the kid craze of 2014

What’s not to love about rainbow loom bands? As the summer holidays stretch seemingly into infinity, there are endless hours to be filled – and parental sanity to be saved – with a bag of the brightly-coloured circles that have become 2014’s biggest craze.

In an age when it’s hard to find a toy which competes with a DVD or a computer game, they’re a good old-fashioned toy: creative, mentally stimulating, and – surprisingly given their rainbow hues – as popular with boys as girls. (We know this because both the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have been pictured sporting the bracelets).

So I don’t really want to hear a word said against them or their ingenious inventor, Malaysian immigrant Cheong Choon Ng.

But the siren voices have begun already. Some schools have banned them, arguing they lead to aggressive behaviour in the playground as children become obsessed with swapping them, or simply that they’re a distraction.

And now, we hear that they could even become a threat to marine wildlife.

This morning’s Plymouth Herald carries the story that kids dropping loom bands on beaches could have “tragic consequences” for animals and seabirds.

And then there are alarming tales about children whose fingers have turned blue after they fell asleep mid-loom-making. Not to mention the awful fate of the child who was blinded by his brother after a rainbow loom pinged into his eye.

After that story (in the Mirror earlier this month), Dr Anne-Marie Houlder, chair of a Clinical Commissioning Group in Staffordshire, was quoted saying: “They could be a choking hazard or cause circulatory problems if children swallow or wrap them round their fingers for any length of time.”

But hang on a minute. A pot of paint could be hazardous if drunk rather than applied with a paint-brush. A tube of glitter could be pretty dangerous if shaken into someone’s eyes.

And all those plastic bags and ring-pulls littering the beaches are proving disastrous for marine conservation too.

The problem here is not the toy itself but how it’s being played with.

So I’ll still be enthusiastically letting my kids loose on the rainbow looms this summer, but I hope they might notice when their fingers start to turn blue, that they won’t use them as catapults, and think twice before dropping them in a rock pool.

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