The Toys You Play With As a Child Influences Your Life
You can probably remember your favorite toy when you were a child. Most often this is the one you couldn’t leave the house without and had pride of place on your bed. 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 didn’t 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 interesting finding from the research was that children who always had access to toys wherever they were, not only had more confidence in later life but had better earnings. 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.
There is of course the argument of unknown cause and effect which could undermine this research potentially. What this means for example is does the child who plays with the doll become more interactive, or did they pick the doll because they favoured interaction in the first place? In reality its probably somewhere in the middle, but nevertheless the research is still quite revealing.