It must be enormously tough to be a kid today. It’s bad enough they’re under peer pressure to use drugs and alcohol and engage in other risky behavior at ever-younger ages. And it’s no small thing that “sexual predator” has slipped as casually into their vernacular as “monster,” “goblin” and other demons to be feared, due largely to a massive overreaction by the Iowa Legislature, which believes strangers are lurking at every corner ready to leap out and molest children, and has forced convicted sex offenders to live leper-like in colonies where children supposedly will never venture.

But even childhood bogymen and other psyche-scarring incidents pale in comparison with the trauma associated with trying to open their birthday presents. What is up with all those metal twisties and other excessive packaging materials? As I often do when trying to complete what should be simple tasks, I felt the inadequacy of not having an engineering degree the other evening as I helped my 6-year-old friend Sam liberate his new action figure from its cardboard box. Correct that. It was a cardboard box that was encased in heavy-gauge plastic that Sam had managed to rip into small shards that, if carried while running, almost certainly would have poked out an eye. What we have in the packaging of children’s toys today is child abuse by proxy.

I finally used wire cutters to free the doll, only to discover its little dart gun was covered with plastic that was secured by what appeared to be several 100-foot rolls of tape that stuck to my hands like flypaper, and a taut line of monofilament around the doll’s girth to hold its arms in place.

I was mindful of young ears during the 20-minute ordeal and somehow managed to suppress the phrases that were coined for just such occasions as unwrapping children’s toys, separating wire hangers and trying to free yourself from an auger once it has chewed off half of your arm. My worst verbal sin was to wonder aloud how the kids suffering from attention deficit disorder manage to get past the Berlin Wall of packaging without needing an extra little shot of Ritalin.

Life was a lot simpler when I was a kid. We played with a lot of things that weren’t technically toys and never came in a box. I have a vague but nevertheless accurate memory of using the clods of dirt turned over when the potatoes were dug in the fall as props in our re-enactment of the first Thanksgiving. I was Pocahontas, my brother was John Smith and a big slab of dirt was a turkey. That’s either brilliantly imaginative or sadly pathetic.

The most technologically advanced toy we ever had was a talking 2-foot-tall Suzy Smart doll who was dressed in schoolgirl plaid and came with a chalkboard easel and a desk. She added, subtracted, spelled and did other smart things until one day, she suddenly turned mute. It didn’t occur to us that our mother had removed the battery from the small of her back. Suzy may have been smart, but her incessant ciphering may have put Mom on the brink of uttering some of the same words appropriate only in auger accidents.

Suzy Smart didn’t come in a box. We found her sitting at her little desk near the Christmas tree, as if she’d been studying there all night. Santa wrapped other kids’ toys in boxes covered in bright colors and festooned with bows and ribbons, but not ours. I never questioned it. I just assumed Santa knew we were children whose interaction with scissors should be limited. If only today’s toy manufacturers were as savvy.