The Influence of Children’s Toys

Everyone has a toy that they favoured when they were younger. This is usually the one that you took to bed with you or carried with you wherever you went. Most people had a favoured category of toy also, such as planes, army men or dolls. New findings from the London institute of Psychology have shown that they toys we play with when we are younger have a massive impact on us as adults. Below we examine some of the more interesting points the research highlighted.

1. Those children who were encouraged to play with educational toys did not become more intelligent, but were more analytical in their approach to problems in later life. The research showed that learning toys developed patience and taught people to break down a problem into its simplest parts in order to overcome tasks

2. Children that favoured playing with toys that looked like humans (such as dolls), tended to have more advanced interaction skills and could communicate better as an adult. It is thought that by having a face that children could talk to whenever they wanted encouraged them to vocalise their thoughts and share their problems with their toys.

3. Probably the most controversial of the research’s findings was that the adults who accrued the greatest wealth and had most confidence, where those who had access to toys at all times when they were growing up. This means if children played with bath toys, took toys out and about with them and had access to toys at friends houses etc, they became more successful in later life.

An important point to note with this research however is that it is not clear which way round the influencing factors occurred. What is meant by this is do children become influenced by the toys they play with or do they pick certain toys because of the type of people they already are? In reality its probably somewhere in the middle, but nevertheless the research is still quite revealing.