Toys That Are Good for Kids

Simple wooden toys have been found to improve children’s problem-solving abilities. (Anastasiia Krivenok/Getty Images)

These days, a walk down a department store toy aisle brings some shocks.

Garish colors and lights flash at you, while canned sound effects crackle through the air. Everything is overdone and overblown—and heavily trademarked. Monstrous, demonic-looking figures leer off the shelves of the boys’ section, while the girls’ section is filled with teen dolls dressed like strippers or prostitutes. And little Asher is melting down because Mom won’t let him buy the latest action figure based off last summer’s movie (of dubious moral character). As if that isn’t enough, most of what you see is manufactured overseas and made of cheap plastic or other petroleum products.

What happened to toys with real educational, imaginative, and aesthetic value? What happened to wholesomeness and beauty in the objects that color a child’s earliest experiences of the world?

Well, fortunately, they still exist, even if they’re rarer than they once were. Here’s a list of time-tested toys that foster children’s motor skills, imagination, enjoyment, inventiveness, and contact with the goodness of reality.

Wooden Toys

Open-ended toys stimulate creativity. (ronstik/Getty Images)

While simple wooden blocks, trains, or animals may seem dull to us compared with flashy electronic toys, there are many reasons to prefer the former over the latter.

Educator John Senior described the first stage of education as “gymnastic,” a term referring to the raw encounter with the physical world that children need to have. “The student studies how his body moves and functions, and practices the use of his body to help his mind develop,” Senior writes. It’s a necessary grounding for the healthy development of imagination and, later, reason.

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Toys for the youngest children fall squarely within the gymnastic stage of education: They ought to, first of all, be fun. In addition, they should develop motor skills, coordination, and a “feel” for physical reality, which is the foundation for all later learning. Toys for slightly older children should begin to engage the imagination and memory as well, filling it with beautiful and meaningful images that become the raw material for thought, building toward a healthy intelligence.

According to Senior, “The first necessity is getting ourselves and our children into ‘naked’ contact with the world God made, not just in school, as study, but habitually in our whole way of life.” In order to foster this contact with the world, Senior recommends homes filled with “natural materials, simple and attractive, with harmonious wood furnishings and handmade objects.”

Senior’s philosophy is backed up by research conducted at the Center for Early Childhood Education in Connecticut. Simpler wooden toys make sense in light of a traditional philosophy of the human person and education, and consequently, they make kids smarter, it turns out.

Simple wooden toys improve children’s social, creative, and problem-solving abilities. Professor Jeffrey Trawick-Smith at the Center for Early Childhood Education said, “Some of the toys that look most interesting to adults aren’t particularly effective in promoting development.” In his analysis of different types of toys, he found that basic hardwood blocks, wooden vehicles and road signs, and traditional construction toys scored the highest in promoting positive play behaviors. “These toys are relatively open-ended, so children can use them in multiple ways,” according to Mr. Trawick-Smith. This stimulates creativity and problem-solving.

In addition, research from Northern Arizona University found that books and traditional toys such as puzzles or blocks enhanced children’s communication and language skills more than electronic toys did. One reason for this is that when babies use electronic toys, there’s less parent–child interaction, which is important for language development.

Add to all this the fact that wooden toys tend to be more durable than their plastic counterparts, and a solid case can be made in favor of getting your kids or grandkids good old-fashioned blocks, animals, puzzles, and vehicles made out of wood.

Building Toys

Invented around 1916 by John Lloyd Wright, son of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, based on a construction project that his father was working on, Lincoln Logs are one of the oldest building toys you can find. The simple log-shaped wooden blocks have notches that make them fit together snugly in all of the configurations your child can dream up.

Because of the log cabin aesthetic, they’re perfect for recreating American frontier structures, such as Fort Lincoln, a building that Lincoln Logs provides a blueprint for. Incidentally, structured block play such as this expands spatial reasoning and has been linked to improved math scores in children as young as 3 years old.

Similar construction-type sets include Magna-Tiles and Tinkertoys. Of course, the most famous construction toy is Lego. But if you’re trying to avoid plastic and expensive, overly commercialized items, you may want to stick with Lincoln Logs.

History-Based Toys

My wife informs me that I must include paper dolls on this list of toys. She and her sisters and cousins expended countless hours playing with their ever-increasing collection of historical paper dolls when they were children. She tells me that the best paper doll artists are Tom Tierney and Kathy Lawrence. Shockingly, I have no personal experience of paper dolls: For me, no toy was interesting unless it involved vehicles, adventures, or battles, and I saw no point in spending my time changing the outfits of pieces of paper. Now, however, I have a deeper appreciation for the artistry and historical research that goes into paper dolls. And, no doubt, there must be something that a child could do with them, although exactly what it is still escapes me.

For my part, I much preferred to build cities, castles, navies, and armies using Playmobil’s historical sets, primarily their Roman, pirate, and knight collections. While some of these sets are hard to find now, the German-based company still makes a number of history-based toys, and although they’re plastic, they’re higher quality than most petroleum-based playthings.

History-based toys are an excellent way for kids to learn about the past while engaging their imagination and creativity.

Classic Outdoor Toys

There’s a reason that “the little red wagon” has become a symbol of childhood, a nostalgic icon of long summer days spent playing out of doors. A sturdy red wagon, such as the classic one from Radio Flyer, is a versatile toy. Children can wrangle Dad into giving them a ride in it, or they can pull one another. They can imagine that they’re pioneers traversing the Great Plains, or they can carry supplies for a fort into the woods with it. (For lighter loads, the old-fashioned Tonka steel dump truck can serve the purpose well.) Tricycles and bikes pair well with a wagon. Radio Flyer makes a tricycle in its signature red that matches the wagon. Other classic outdoor toys include badminton sets, tire swings, tents, and rubber-band-powered airplane gliders.

All of these selections will get kids outdoors, instead of inside, bewitched by screens. This contact with the outdoors is critical for our individual and societal health. As journalist Richard Louv writes in “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” “At the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature.”

That’s why one of the best “toys” is simply a walk in the woods, which can be full of miniature adventures such as the discovery of feathers, insects, amphibians, rocks, or—in the case of boys—a stick that instantly transforms into a sword.

Toys That Aren’t Toys

One of the most memorable gifts that I received as a child was a toolbox, from my parents, with real tools in it that were kid-sized rather than full-sized. I recall being delighted that these were real tools that I could actually use for little buildings projects. It made me feel more grown-up and responsible, while also giving me an excellent introduction to the proper use of a hammer, screwdriver, tape measure, and even a handsaw. I still have some of those tools.

Options in this category include tools, a BB gun, camping equipment, a bow and arrow, binoculars, a vacuum cleaner, a musical instrument, painting supplies, a sewing machine, and cooking utensils.

For older children, this can be a great option because it urges them to enter a little into the adult world, which, for the right child, will be more exciting than just another toy to add to their play world. It could be a welcome surprise that upends the expectation of just another doll or another Lego set.

Naturally, some children won’t have the maturity for such gifts, or they may just really prefer the Lego set. And that’s fine. Safety must be taken into account, of course. But some responsible children will be excited to begin interacting “with the real world,” and they will value, too, their elders’ sign of trust and love that accompanies these gifts.