The Effect of Toys on a Person's Psychological Development

The Effect of Toys on a Person's Psychological Development

You probably remember your favorite game from early childhood—many people do. The game most likely involved your favorite toy, perhaps a truck, or a doll. In fact, when you think about memories from your childhood, toys should be among the first things to come to mind to evoke a strong image of early childhood. Toys have been greatly underestimated by their possessors and especially by adults, dismissed as the "supporting role" in indoor or outdoor pastimes, which they literally are. However, toys affect a person's psychological development to a higher degree than we may realize.

Toys are a child's tools for exploring, for learning about the world. The child uses toys not only for amusement, but for practice. Next to his imagination, a child's toys have the most considerable influence as to which kind of game he will play. Balls and toy guns are usually seen as playthings for little boys, while dolls and jump ropes are more associated with little girls. Whichever kind of toy a child chooses to play with can reveal much about the makeup of his mind and about his personality. (Newson and Newson 98) The type of game that a child plays also tells an observer of that child's temperament.

There are "two major types of play: construction play and illusion play" (Neuman 69), both terms of which are fairly self-explanatory. Under these two categories, there are different approaches to the method of playing. A child is either a "dramatist" or a "patterner." While children in the first group tend to take on roles in dramatic games or games of strategy in order to prepare for solving problems in life, children in the second are more like artists and bui...

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...with girl toys and boy toys. If parents want to make sure their children don't grow up to be too violent, they should avoid buying toys that trigger aggressive tendencies—it's difficult to play house with G. I. Joe's or wrestling dolls. Next to parents, toys are the most important things in a child's life.

Bibliography:

Croswell, T. R. "Amusements of Worchester School Children." Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VI,

1898-1899: 314-371.

Erikson, Erik H. Toys and Reasons. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Neuman, Eva A. The Elements of Play. New York: MSS Information, 1971.

Newson, John, and Elizabeth Newson. Toys and Playthings in Development and Remediation.

New York: Pantheon, 1979.

Reynolds, Gretchen, and Elizabeth Jones. Master Players: Master Players: Learning from

Children at Play. New York: Teachers College, 1997.