Effects Of Toys On Child Development

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Effect of Toys on Development
Today’s parents may feel overwhelmed when they see the plethora of toys for children in stores. The choice of toys for children requires a deliberate approach because toys significantly affect the further life of our children. The purpose of this paper is to consider how toys affect children’s development, socialization, gender roles, and gender identity. These issues are considered from the perspective of cognitive development from a psychological aspect.
Overall, toys create numerous opportunities for children to acquire, practice, and perfect new physical and mental skills. Playing with toys, children achieve milestones across their fine motor, gross motor, cognitive, and social-emotional domains. Different toys encourage children’s development in one or some of these areas and allow them to create new play agendas. For instance, puzzles develop children’s problem-solving ability as well as improve their fine motor skills while dress-up clothes nurture social-emotional and cognitive domains in children.
Cognitive theories of gender-role acquisition stem from the idea that children socialize themselves into their gender roles through playing with toys. Toys turn out to be the main source of information about how the representatives of each sex should act, look, and think in order to
Toys teach children gender stereotypes, develop gender identity, and help them socialize. In a word, playing with toys can be seen as a repetition of children’s future life. Children intuitively prefer the toys that fit their gender needs – boys prefer to play with toy weapon while girls prefer to play with dolls. If a child is deprived of an opportunity to play with toys, he or she ends up with a significant gap in his or her mental development and socialization skills. This is why parents should allow their children play with their favorite

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