What good are children’s toys?
To help you make a sound investment in your child’s choice of toys, keep in mind the importance and benefits of play that a carefully selected toy can enhance. Toys are tools for play, and when you provide your child with the best tools for play, their play experience will foster essential skills. Many toys are not very good tools for playing. Any toy that is unsafe, uninteresting to your child, breaks easily, and has no developmental value with use is not a good tool to play with. The best toys are interesting and fun for your child to play with and are successfully designed to promote essential growth and development.
Finding the best toys requires some general knowledge, selective shopping, and an appreciation of the old saying, “you get what you pay for.” In the long run, paying more for a well-designed toy made from better materials is also much better value. Look for award-winning toys that have been shown to foster skills like sequencing, matching, sorting, counting, hand-eye coordination, memory, visual recognition, touch, problem solving, emotions, pattern recognition, and fine motor skills. As children get older, they move toward toys that enhance skills such as introductory basic math, science, construction, and engineering.
The right toy for the right play experience will also help grow your child’s imagination, which can be stimulated through storytelling, dramatic play, themes, role-playing, and pretend play. Some of these same toys and activities that help develop your child’s imagination can also help them better recognize, understand, and process emotions. Children actually learn to express their feelings through healthy play before they can put them into words. The joy and laughter of children at play is worth the price of a quality toy that encourages such delight.
A well-chosen toy can also help children learn to better interact with others as they play alongside other children and develop social skills. Some toys are specifically designed for group play for this very purpose. It is good that children enjoy playing alone, and it is equally important that children learn to play well with others and enjoy doing so.
The right toys can do wonders in helping to bring all these skills and developments to life through constructive and enjoyable play. Now, let’s ask the question once again, “What good are children’s toys?” The answer is simple: a carefully selected toy, well designed and thoughtfully crafted, can be a whole new world of goodness for your child as an excellent tool for beneficial play that helps your child grow in many important ways.
Choosing the right toys for your child should be important to you because play is important to your child’s growth and development. Keep in mind that not all toys are the same. Beware of junk toys that don’t last and have no developmental benefit built into their design. You will rarely find the best toys in the clearance aisle or at a garage sale. Toys that are a good investment for your child are high-quality toys made for years of use. These are the toys that create cherished childhood memories and are often passed down to the next generation.