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The NeeDoh Nice Cube is a lump of soft plastic a little over 2 inches tall. It comes in blue, pink, or purple, and retails for $5.99. When you squeeze it, it produces a pleasing, squishy sensation, subtly relieving the stress of the day and replacing it with a sense of calm and peace.
At least, I have to assume it does. The Nice Cube — and other NeeDoh variants, like globs, donuts, and kittens — are so popular that it’s become nearly impossible to get your hands on one. The toys are sold out at toy stores. The manufacturer, Schylling, no longer sells them through its website. Full-grown adults are practically coming to blows over them.
“They just showed up in force, especially in the last part of the school year,” Ginger Eikmeier, a Nebraska high school teacher, told me. “You see a couple of students with NeeDohs, and then it just kind of spreads.”
Runaway toy crazes always have an element of randomness to them. “Nobody can plan for a fad,” toy researcher and analyst Chris Byrne told me.
At the same time, the popularity of NeeDoh is part of a larger trend: the rise of sensory and “fidget” toys over the past decade. While kids (and adults) have always fidgeted, the marketing of toys explicitly for this purpose has exploded in recent years, as objects for squeezing, popping, stroking, and shaping fill kids’ bedrooms and classrooms alike. Retailers are jumping on the bandwagon, with millennial mall staple Claire’s rolling out a summer slate of ASMR-friendly sensory items in an effort to appeal to a new generation of shoppers.
“Yes, NeeDoh has been incredibly successful, but we’re also seeing tremendous enthusiasm around squishies, fidgets, slime, and other tactile collectibles,” Michelle Goad, chief brand officer at Claire’s, told me in an email.
On one level, the power of fidget toys is not that deep: “It’s just fun to squish them,” Harper, 11, told me. But experts also point to a bigger message behind the rise of NeeDoh and its ilk — one that has implications for kids’ lives far beyond the toy store.
The history of fidget toys
Squishy toys are far from new. “The first slime generation was in the 1960s,” Byrne told me. Creepy Crawlers, for example — bug-shaped doodads that kids could make at home using a substance called PlastiGoop — debuted in 1964.
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Stretch Armstrong, a stretchy, goo-filled wrestler guy, was released in 1976 and was still popular in the 1990s, when a rumor circulated in my brother’s baseball league that a kid had eaten some of the goo and spontaneously grown 6 inches. (The mixture was apparently corn syrup cut with glass and wood particles. Don’t eat it.)
The fascination continued through the ’90s, with Nickelodeon Gak and its various offshoots. All of these goopy creations were fun to squeeze, of course; that was the entire point. But the idea of toys explicitly designed for fidgeting or sensory play came around later, perhaps with the popularity of the fidget spinner in the late 2010s.
The first fidget spinner was actually designed in the ’90s by a mom dealing with a muscle-weakening autoimmune disease that affected her ability to play with her daughter. But the clicky little toy didn’t become a craze until 2017, when it took playgrounds by storm, got banned in many schools (a rite of passage for any viral toy), and helped launch a discourse about the role of fidgeting in kids’ lives.
There’s still little definitive research on the benefits or drawbacks of fidgeting for kids, said Katherine Isbister, a professor of computational media at UC Santa Cruz who studies fidgeting. But many people with ADHD or autism say that playing with an object can help them relax or concentrate.
Occupational therapists are generally pro-fidget, as long as the toys don’t distract other children, Isbister said. And research shows that movement can help people stay alert enough to complete a task or listen to a lecture, Mark Rapport, a clinical psychologist who has studied attention, told me in an email.
The 2010s were also a time of growing awareness around ADHD and autism, and, Isbister pointed out, greater attention to social-emotional learning in schools. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that toys once marketed as slightly gross or transgressive (see, for example, Gurglin’ Gutz), started to get a more positive spin as fidget items.
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Around the same time, interest in ASMR — autonomous sensory meridian response, or a “tingly” sensation some people get when watching certain videos or hearing certain sounds — was rising on social media. Videos of people squishing slime occupy a huge niche in the ASMR ecosystem, a fact Claire’s hopes to capitalize on this year with its A Girl SMR campaign, featuring slimes, squishy toys, and special booths where kids can create their own ASMR videos.
The company has been “tracking the rise of sensory-driven items that kids were hunting for, collecting, and sharing online,” Goad told me. “Many of those products happen to create incredibly satisfying ASMR moments too, whether that’s tapping their faux nails on glass, hearing candy crunch, or peeling open a fresh slime container.”
Or squeezing a NeeDoh. The mall chain sold out its entire spring inventory of the toys — numbering in the tens of thousands — over just four days in March, Goad said.
Why kids love fidgets so much
Kids often describe NeeDohs as sources of stress relief. “I’m kind of a perfectionist, so everything always has to be perfect, and then there’s always drama with my friends, and I want my schoolwork to be good, and then I have sports that I’m stressing about,” Harper told me. But you can’t be a perfectionist about squishing an ice cube.
She has a variety of the NeeDoh toys, including a mini pink cube and a purple gumdrop.
For Ella, 14, the toys may satisfy a need for movement and connection. “I bring them to class sometimes, because you can’t really get up and move around while you’re sitting at a desk in a classroom, so it’s just another way to fidget,” she said. And “because a lot of people ask for your NeeDoh, it kind of is a conversation icebreaker.”
Teachers are less excited about students using NeeDohs as an icebreaker, especially because the cubes can, in fact, break. But fidgets, squishy cubes, and other “sensory” play experiences may be especially popular now, because they offer a counterweight to the forces that otherwise dominate kids’ lives. Playing with a squishy toy is “a very different experience than touching a screen,” Byrne said.
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“People experience so much of their day through their cell phone, whereas when I was a kid, you were actually sewing, or you were crafting,” Isbister said. “You had a lot more hand-eye coordination and fine motor stuff you were just doing as a matter of course.”
“Kids probably need more messy, fine-motor type play,” Isbister said — especially as kindergarten and the lower grades get more academic, with less time for Play-Doh and other hands-on pursuits. Parents can help fill the void by encouraging more tactile activities, like making mud pies or sandcastles, Isbister said.
Another option: Recruit your children to help you do the dishes or clean the bathtub. “It’s kind of messy,” Isbister said. “There’s water involved.”
My children are unlikely to be convinced that helping me with chores counts as playtime. I have, however, learned something about sensory play from their example.
I may not have been able to secure a Nice Cube for this story, but my family did acquire a Squishy Dumpling — a dumpling-shaped toy with a cute little face and a filling made of soft plastic beads — before they got too popular. I’ve been squeezing it the entire time I’ve been writing this story, and I have found myself more focused and less distracted than usual. I’ve also been reaching for my phone a bit less.
I didn’t think of myself as someone particularly deprived of sensory stimulation (I do clean up a lot of messes), but this toy has given me the dumpling-squeezing experience I didn’t know I needed, and made me think of ways to add more tactile experiences to my life.
If nothing else, the rise of fidget toys has helped destigmatize the human need to squeeze stuff. “I think it’s great that we no longer see fidgeting as a bad sign or something bad,” Isbister said. “People realize they need these different kinds of sensory stimulation.”
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