Can we give children toys to fire their imaginations this Christmas?

Can we give children toys to fire their imaginations this Christmas?

All I want for Christmas is… cardboard. The Makedo Freeplay Kit for One in action (Picture: Makedo)

It’s Christmas time, and there’s no need to be afraid. Unless, of course, if you are a parent.

There are few things in modern life more terrifying than the quest to find your child the right Christmas present. Go for something too simple and your child will be teased until next Christmas for being the only one in the class with building blocks while everyone else is tapping away on their iPads.

But splash out the cash on something big, shiny, bleepy and expensive and you could be left with a noisy toy that quickly bores your little precious and barrages your ear drums. It’s a minefield out there.

‘If I have a limited amount of money, as most people do, I want to get as much as I can for what I spend,’ said Jenn Choi, a 42-year-old mother-of-two from New York who is editor of the blog , ‘So if something is very cute and very pretty and very colourful and shiny, but then my child will master it after a month, then what’s the purpose of getting that toy?’

Choi’s two sons – aged 6 and 9 – help her with toy reviews on her site along with six other children of friends.

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In a post last weed, Choi warned that parents are buying their children all the wrong toys and that specialty toy shops are a happier and more stimulating hunting ground than that offered by major toy retailers. ‘Toy stores, it turns out, are the worst place to buy toys,’ she wrote.

Choi told Metro the best toys are focused on what the child can do with them and not what they can do for the child. She has little time for button-bashing robots which blare out irritating noises.

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 ‘Basically, it’s a cause and effect,’ she said. ‘I press this button and then this sound comes out. Or I press this button then this lights up. Where do you go after that? You can get bored. I don’t really like things that are loud. I’ve actually put tape over the speakers!’

She prefers open-ended toys that allow children to create something without boundaries. In this sense, a pile of simple wooden blocks can be just as powerful as an iPad.

The ideal toy ‘should be a tool for the child to use his imagination to do whatever he wants with it’, said Choi.

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However, she doesn’t see technology as some kind of negative element in toys – on the contrary, if done right, it can fire children’s imaginations even more. She doesn’t see tablets and games consoles as the enemy – her children both play games on them – but there are other more intricate tech toys out there.

She mentioned Squishy Circuits (where children can shape play dough into whatever they choose and make it conduct electricity) – and Sifteo cubes (a set of small blocks with clickable colour screens to play games on) as two examples of toys which offer children ‘great brain-building moments’.

She said Squishy Circuits does ‘involve technology but at the same time it’s intuitive’. She added: ‘There are very few iPad games that really encourage the use of both of your hands. But to play a Sifteo game very well you need to use both of your hands. Using both of your hands is very calming, which is something you don’t hear about when you’re talking about video games. You’re being focused but not hyper-focused because you’re in control of yourself.’

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There is also an onus on parents to jump into the toy-playing experience. Putting the toy in the child’s hands then leaving them to it isn’t enough, says Choi. In fact, a child can change their opinion on a game if they see their parent playing it.

‘I find that sometimes if I tell my kids to play with something that sounds like absolute nonsense,’ said Choi. ‘You can’t tell a child to play. But if your child is not inspired to play for some reason and wants to be entertained, I think we have to understand that. I will then sit down and start playing and all of a sudden it becomes completely fabulous to them and they just want to get involved.’

She said the simple act of play lets us discover things about ourselves and those closest to us. It also prepares us for adult life.

‘Play is really important. You have to be given a chance to make mistakes. You have to be given a chance to try things out. Toys let you do that in a non-stressful way. Those skills can be applied directly to future work experiences.’

Games and toys can entertain children but they also help children learn. ‘One of my children may not be great at reading,’ said Choi. ‘But I’ve found a reading game called word Around that he absolutely loves and does really well in. And he was also able to learn about how he can read in a really interesting, very strange way.

‘When he sees words that are in a horizontal line, he sort of gets lost. But for some reason when he sees it in a circle, he is enticed by the challenge and then he starts sounding out the words really fast in his head.’

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She believes children deserve a bit of a break and the chance to think creatively and ask questions. ‘They’re not given a lot of opportunities to think for themselves these days. They have a lot of homework, they have a rigid curriculum at school and so there’s not a lot of time for inquiry for them. I don’t think they’re used to it. We have to learn to challenge them in a really positive way.’