Look back at your childhood. Look way back. Do you see yourself holding your favorite toy to your chest? What was it? Was it a dinosaur? Was it a soldier? Was it a doll?
No matter what it was, it was your favorite toy. You played with it. You slept with it. You took baths with it. You went on vacations with it. You and your toy were inseparable.
What you probably didn’t know at that time, and might not know even now, is that toys importance in your life. You don’t know just how much that toy influenced your intellectual growth. Yes, that’s right! Toys play a huge part in improving children’s abilities and skills.
Here’s how your toys affected you and how toys affect children of all ages all over the world.
MOTOR SKILLS
When children play with toys, they are using and practicing their fine and gross motor skills. Whether they are fighting imaginary wars with their toy soldiers, or braiding and combing their dolls, they use all their senses to make sense of the world around them. Small toys like cartoon characters, dolls, dinosaurs, or anything like that help with their fine motor skills. Bigger toys like tricycles, toy carts, a wooden pony, help with their gross motor skills.
Children also learn about balance as well as hand-eye-coordination when playing with toys.
EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
When children are playing with toys, they create entire stories around them. The soldier could be fighting the bad men, the doll could be driving to her friend’s house, and so on. This enhances their creativity and boosts their imagination.
Children also learn to express their emotions through creative play. They role play familiar situations that they’ve encountered before or they invent fantastic worlds that leads to abstraction. This greatly helps with the maturation of their personality.
Adults usually think that a toy is something that comes out of a store, but that’s not the case with children. To them a toy can be anything from a good birthday present, a set of keys, an empty cup, some toilet paper, or anything that can be included in their play. Basically anything that can spark their imagination is a toy.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
When children use toys to recreate familiar situations, they learn the necessary social skills that they will need in the future. Toys also help children learn and practice new vocabulary.
If a child invites another child to play, it calls them to newer experiences and they learn about respect, cooperation, sharing and conducting a civil conversation. When children put their toys back after play, they learn about organizational skills.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Different types of toys like board games and memory games help promote children’s cognitive skills. When children concentrate on the games, memorize the positions of the cards, or apply problem solving skills, they learn to be autonomous. This further helps them approach math and science in their advanced years.
Did you know all these benefits of playing with toys? Well, now you do.
So, let your kids select their own toys and play with them to discover the world that they live in. This will not only help their development but also enhance their self-esteem. Your children will grow up to be confident and sure of themselves.
