You can probably remember your favorite toy when you were a child. It’ll be the one you took with you everywhere you went and had a hissy fit about whenever you couldn’t find it. Maybe without even knowing it, you probably had a type of toy that you played with most, be it balls or building block or perhaps it was toy cooking apparatus. These choices may have affected you more than you realise, as new research from the London Psychology Institute suggests we are strongly influenced in later life by our childhood toys. Lets take a better look at the main 3 findings from the study.
1. Those children who were encouraged to play with educational toys did not become more intelligent, but were more analytical in their approach to problems in later life. The research showed that learning toys promoted patience and taught people to break down a problem into its simplest parts in order to overcome tasks
2. Those children who played mostly with toys such as dolls or action men etc (toys that had human characteristics) displayed greater communication abilities and could interact better with those around them as adults. I has been suggested that any object that vaguely replicates a human encourages children to communicate with it and share any musings that they have with it.
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. For example, did the boy become more analytical by playing with his puzzle, or did he choose the puzzle because he was more analytical by nature? Most experts tend to think that its a bit of both, which means that the study still provides some valid findings.