How Toys Affect Child Development

Here at Kids' Care Club, we believe that early years are learning years. Young children are both quick learners and highly impressionable, with a heightened ability to take in information. That's why we recognize the importance of the work that early childhood educators do every day in our schools that has a significant, lasting impact on children's cognitive and social development.

Recognizing the potential of this sensitive learning period, and integrating developmentally appropriate activities into their daily routine is sure to maximize the development of children's cognitive skills. One of the most important ways we make learning fun to foster your child's development every day is through play.

How Toys Affect Child Development
How do toys affect cognitive development?Research shows that 90% of this preschool-aged play in the US involves toys! When your child is playing with toys, they're developing new ideas, modeling what they've seen by adults, and being challenged and stimulating their cognitive and language development.

Toys impact children's behavior in many different ways, but primarily influence and guide children's thinking, how they interact socially with their peers, and how toys impact their creativity.

Let's learn how toys affect child development.

1. Toys help Children Think
Cognitive development is the increased ability to process information to understand how the world works. For children, environments that push them to think, explore, and figure things out bolster the most amount of cognitive development. Toys are the perfect mediators to encourage these different thinking skills.

We see children exploring the world through different means in our classrooms every day. We see children in the toy kitchen exploring different roles, cars being pushed into a stack of blocks to explore cause and effect, puzzles challenging one's problem-solving abilities, and engaging in symbolic play through fun ways like using a banana to talk into the phone. All of these activities satiate and encourage your child's curiosity to discover how the world works.

2. Toys Promote Positive Socialization
Toys encourage socialization. Most often, toys require more than one person to play with, urging that children interact with one another. This teaches children to take turns, how to work as a team, handle the losses and play fair with one another.

Pretend games, such as playing superheroes, keep young minds active and encourage them to imagine themselves in various scenarios in a unique role. The interaction and presence of other children help to carry out their vision of a pretend world, where they communicate and share toys to carry it out successfully.

Other types of play, such as building blocks, require teamwork and children having to verbalize what they have or intend to build. Your child will learn how they can be much more efficient and get a task done when working together! We see this theme across nature exploration, art projects, and any other activities that encourage collaboration.

To the same extent that toys promote positive socialization with one another, it's essential to recognize the power of social conditioning that toys can have on your child. That's why we provide toys that are both culturally and gender diverse and encourage families to do the same.

Toys that are gender-typed, such as red race cars and pink kitchen sets, can exclude children from important learning experiences. For example, research shows that construction toys and toy vehicles elicit some of the highest quality play across gender, but excluding girls from playing from this can do harm and reinforce stereotypes that exclude girls. Instead, opt for more neutral, less gendered toys. Examples are blocks, musical instruments, play dough, and puzzles. By using a range of toys, you can see both neutral and gender-specific toys give your child a play experience that is well-rounded.

3. Toys Spark Creativity
Toys allow your child to get creative and encourage their imagination. Researchers find that children are more willing to improvise and create when given toys. We encourage the use of any toys you may have access to, but open-ended toys allow children to create their own world. This is also also known as parallel play.

In fact, NAEYC shows that for toys, the more simple they are, the better. The highest-scoring toys are the classics, the ones that have stood the test of time and may be those that you have played with as a child. These include hardwood blocks, wooden vehicles, road signs, wooden construction toys, and more!

You don't have to spend a lot of money, or buy the latest trending toys, to foster creativity in your little one. Since the classics are open-ended and not restricted to a specific use, unlike toys that may represent specific movie or TV characters, your child's creativity isn't confined. Colored blocks, which date back to the 1800s, are still used