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Posted on September 9, 2010When it comes to educational toys, parents nowadays face a cornucopia of options that might sometimes threaten to break the bank! For no business has ever gone under selling things to parents that are touted as being beneficial to their children. And given the modern-day social phenomenon of the helicopter parent, ever-doting and ever-present, the makers of educational toys know that anything marketed as somehow providing children with an advantage, often intellectual, is as sure a money-maker as anything ever tried.
Of course, not every single product is going to be a best-seller. But the chances of success increase when it comes to those purportedly designed to teach or help kids learn. But if you think about it, educational toys have always been around. After all, what are jigsaw puzzles?
And so we come upon one of the greatest controversies in child psychology. Just what makes a toy educational? Aren’t toys, by definition, educational to begin with? To be certain, the more complex a toy the greater the likelihood that it is educational – that it teaches, or could be learned from.
But because play is an inherent part of human nature, and any object manipulated in a spirit of entertainment could be a toy, does it not follow that just about anything can be turned into a toy – and an educational one at that?
Sure. But there do exist toys which are obviously a lot more educational than others. Lego-type building blocks clearly involve motor and cognitive skills. But some thing like a programmable robot kit is clearly significantly more “educational” in comparison. Obviously, it all would depend on the age of the child.
And so, in a strange way, it all comes down to the child anyway – toys certainly help, but never mistake education with learning itself, a fallacy all too easily seen in people who are primarily focused on factors outside the self.
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