Don't buy this for your grandkids this Christmas
Before you rack your brain for good gift ideas for your grandkids, a new study has made an interesting discovery when it comes to kids playing with toys.
A study published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development has found that toddlers play better when they have fewer toys.
“It’s kind of a story of less is more," said the study’s co-author Alexia E. Metz, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of Toledo.
To conduct the study, researchers at the University of Toledo gave toddlers aged 18 to 30 months either four or 16 toys to play with. Then the researchers sat back and observed how the toddlers responded to the toys.
“They did play better, if we qualify it as longer incidences of play and with more creativity, when there were only four toys in the room,” Dr. Metz said.
“When there were 16, they’d just bounce from toy to toy, and they were sort of superficial in the way they explored it and then move on to the next.”
To assess creativity, researchers used verbs to describe the type of play they observed.
The researchers found that the toddlers would begin playing with “exploratory actions” such as dumping, pulling, pushing, stacking, putting in and taking out. Once they became familiar with the toy, they moved on to sophisticated play which involves pretending, calling and hammering.
When there were only four toys, the children engaged in broader types of play in general and still engaged in sophisticated play.
“We decided to do the study because we have some reservations about little kids being referred to as attention deficit, when it may be that they’re just immature in their development," she said.
“They’re just at a natural stage in their development, and then we plunk them down into this overwhelming environment. Our study doesn’t say that's what’s happening, but it suggests that one of your first passes when you’re concerned about attention deficit [with your kids] is to simplify their environment.”