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By Jack Beresford
Senior Reporter
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Eliza Karazah can still remember the moment her husband, Balpreet, introduced their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Sabar, to the concept of dinosaurs.
“Sabar was sick back in the spring and, to cheer him up, my husband came home with a 15-pack of miniature plastic models,” she told Newsweek. “So began the Dino-mance.”
In an era when screen time is a source of concern for parents everywhere, imaginative play not only offers a welcome alternative but also carries a raft of developmental benefits for young children.
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A 2020 study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience found evidence that imaginative play can help support children's social and emotional development.
Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the team monitored the brain activity of 33 children aged 4 to 8 and discovered that playing with dolls activated the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), a brain region associated with empathy and social information processing, even when children were playing alone.
The researchers also found significantly less activation in this area when children played solo tablet games, suggesting that pretend play may provide unique opportunities for youngsters to practice understanding other people's thoughts and feelings.
Seeing Sabar transported to another world by this pack of dinosaurs was a joy to behold for Karazah.
“As soon as those little guys landed on the couch, no other toy existed to him,” she said. “He’d play with all of them at once. They’d come with him all over the house. All 15.”
Soon, Sabar’s interest in dinosaurs would seep into every other aspect of his life.
“We thought it was sweet at first,” Karazah said. “He would not only play with them, he wanted to wear clothes with them, watch movies with them. He’d see a dinosaur and it was like seeing a celebrity. He’d become a dinosaur. Dinosaurs were the Beatles to him.”
Though this interest didn’t extend to screen time at first, eventually Sabar began to consume more and more dinosaur media.
“It became the only genre he’d watch. Dinosaur movies, documentaries, YouTube videos. If the TV was on, a dinosaur was on the screen,” Karazah said.
Sabar watched a few minutes of Jurassic Park (none of the scary parts), took in The Land Before Time (none of the sad parts), and developed a keen interest in dinosaur documentaries and dino-led specials of favorite shows like Sesame Street.
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Why Dinosaur Fixations Are So Common
This kind of obsession isn’t uncommon in young children. Kaitlynn Blyth is a childhood development expert, family life educator, and member of the National Council on Family Relations.
She is also the founder and CEO of Happy Day Play, a New York-based family learning company that offers play-based classes, events, and educational resources designed to support children's development and help parents navigate the early years.
“It is very common for kids to become obsessive about toys and topics,” she told Newsweek. “At this age, a child is working out how the world sorts itself, and dinosaurs hand him an enormous system of names, sizes, and categories he can actually master. For a pre-schooler, being the expert in the room is a rare feeling, and it is a feeling of empowerment.”
Blyth points to the findings of a 2007 study published in the journal Developmental Psychology that found nearly one in three children develops an “extremely intense interest” in a particular topic, with vehicles and dinosaurs among the most common subjects.
The researchers found that these passions were significantly more common in boys, though many girls developed them as well. Parents involved in the study reported the fascination lasting anywhere from six months to three years, and for most kids it fades once school starts and the world gets bigger.
Karazah says Sabar’s interest in dinosaurs began to take a more negative turn around the time his younger brother was born.
“I was recovering from my C-section, and my husband was taking care of me while my angel in-laws took care of our toddler,” she said. “That meant being completely spoiled. Spoiled to him is all dinosaur media all the time. He demanded it downstairs, and I was upstairs. The rest is prehistoric history.”
Karazah jokes that she started losing Sabar to method acting as he began to imitate the behavior of the dinosaurs he was so enthralled by.
“He became Daniel Day-Dino,” she said.
But there was an edge to his imaginative play.
“His associations with dinosaurs were angry and forceful and loud and physical,” Karazah said. “He was violent all day. Playfully violent, but he couldn’t regulate himself.”
Attempts were made to divert his interests elsewhere.
“We would take him outside as much as possible,” Karazah said. “If he was in the backyard or at the park or store, maybe he’d not think of, you know what.”
However, invariably, his mind would turn to dinosaurs.
“He’d think of you know what. And stomp and scream and headbutt and hit,” she said.
It wasn’t just that Sabar was playing at being a dinosaur, either. Karazah says he began to use his dinosaur toys as “weapons” against the family.
“At first he’d just smash them into each other,” she said. “Then he started hurling them at us. Hitting us with them. He cut his grandpa’s cheek with a pterodactyl.”
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The Extinction Event
The incident with his grandfather proved the final straw.
Sabar was cut off from all dino-related media. Then they began the slow process of weaning him off his dinosaur toys.
“First the sharp ones. Then the big ones. Then the tiny ones. Then they were extinct,” Karazah said.
Reflecting on the situation Karazah and her family faced, Blyth argues there is a “real upside” to a child developing this kind of strong interest at an early age.
“Early interests in topics like dinosaurs are linked to stronger persistence, attention, and information processing,” she said.
However, Blyth acknowledges that the real “danger” of Sabar’s obsession was the “behavior” that came with it.
“A child pretending to be a dinosaur is trying on what it feels like to be huge and powerful, which makes sense for someone who spends most of his day being small and told where to go,” she said. “Roaring and stomping is ordinary, normal play. Hurting people is the line, and a toy used as a weapon crosses it.”
Blyth is unsure whether banning dinosaurs entirely is the answer, though.
“A ban removes the setting where the behavior happened,” she said. “The child still needs an adult to teach him what to do with the feeling underneath it, because that feeling will come out somewhere else once the dinosaurs are gone.”
Her advice would be simple: play dinosaurs with him.
“When an adult is inside the play, the adult gets to shape the story,” she said. “One dinosaur gets hurt and the others take care of him. Your child learns the rule while he’s still playing, which is when he can actually take it in.”
Blyth suspects, however, that Sabar’s behavior may be rooted in the “big changes” happening at home following the arrival of his younger brother.
“It’s almost like the child was using dinosaurs as a form of play therapy to release emotions regarding the major change happening around him because he couldn't verbalize or process what was happening,” she said.
Karazah says the process of weaning Sabar off dinosaurs is still ongoing.
“It’s night and day. He wakes up happy. He paints and dances and hugs us. He has toddler tantrums, but we can meet him at a human level,” she said.
“Before, he wouldn’t use language to express his feelings, he’d roar. Now he tells us he’s sad or happy or scared. He plays with us. He plays solo. He sometimes reverts to stomping and roaring because that’s just ingrained in him. That’s our dino dude. But we ignore it. And we get back to words.”
Reflecting on their experience, Karazah points to screen time and the fact they were busy dealing with a newborn as the main reasons why his interest in dinosaurs took such a difficult turn.
“I don’t hate dinosaurs. They aren’t the issue,” she said. “The issue was the screen time. The dealing with a newborn in the house. He associates dinosaurs with violence because that’s what we showed him. It’s not their fault. It’s ours.”
She’s pleased to report that, for the most part, the house is much more peaceful now. She hasn’t ruled out bringing dinosaurs back into the fold either.
“I want to thoughtfully reintroduce them when we are all ready,” she said. “But for now, they are remaining extinct.”
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Marc Vargas and Emma Lee-Sang
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