Mary Smith

They may well mess up the house and become a serious trip hazard to anyone over two feet tall, but children’s toys bring so many benefits above and beyond simply giving your little one something to do with their day that the clean up and the end of the it all will be more than worth it.

We all know children’s brains are like sponges. As opposed to the kind of sponge that lets lots of stuff come dripping out, like many of us start to feel like as we get older, these sponges are ones that soak up anything everything from the world around them. Imagine you learning a whole new language in such a short time!

So, whilst they may come into this world a blank, if very beautiful, canvas, everything around them starts to fill in those blanks extremely quickly. One of the benefits of children’s toys is that, whilst also simply giving them something fun to do in those days before they have to conform to structure like the rest of us, they also help them learn some extremely valuable things along the way.

The most obvious things adults will notice that children have learnt is the ability to babble utter nonsense, then learn to crawl, then finally to walk and talk, but all the way along that long and infinitely rewarding route, they are learning new things every day from social skills to problem solving right through to basic numeracy and literacy.

Most toys these days are educational toys in one way or another and have been designed to offer fun and learning in equal and mutually conducive measures.

Whilst children are using their aural and optical senses on a daily basis, offering them toys that help advance them quicker and in a more focused way will help speed up everything from reactions to their ability to grasp simple language. Other toys will help with balance and coordination right through to understanding simple premises such as size and shape.

Educational toys will also help to stimulate the child’s imagination. Sitting them in front of a computer or TV all day will do very little for them in being able to form ideas for themselves, and so instead the right toys will help increase their ability to create mentally, not just physically.

However, expecting the toys to do it all on their own might be expecting a little too much. It is a wise idea for parents to play with their child as much as possible to help increase their awareness of social interaction and adequately prepare them for when they head out to playgroup or school.

In all, the most obvious and great benefit of toys is that they will help children learn without them even realising it. As we get older the opportunities for this to happen to us get fewer and fewer as learning slowly gets intermingled with hard work and excessive effort. So let them enjoy all the learning they can whilst it’s still so much fun.