Why Wooden Toys Are A Better Investment For Your Young Learner

Wondering if wooden toys are a good choice for your kids? This mom lists reasons aplenty on why wooden toys are a good investment for your kids, how they help in honing their essential skills and why they are easy on the wallet too! Swipe left to read now.
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As parents, one of the biggest challenges we face is while making decisions for our children, especially in the first few years of their lives. We try our best to pick the best available fabric, safest food options and most importantly, the right kind of toys that will give enough scope for skill development. Here’s where the biggest task lies. What do we go for? The market is flooded with options of various kinds. Right from organic to ‘lab-tested’ we get them all presented on a silver platter making it even the more confusing to add one to our cart. So, how does one make the best call in a situation like this? By relying on experience.

Rewind to the past:

As children, we grew up in a time where there was less exposure to a lot of information. Food was always homecooked with ‘outside food’ equaling to a treat of all kinds. We read children’s edition of newspapers every Sunday, trying our best to take in as much as we could before an elder sibling took the paper away from us. We lived in a time when ‘play’ meant running outside, chasing kites or kicking footballs in glee. A little further rewind to our baby years; we didn’t have silicone teethers or ‘scientifically tested brain enhancing activity kits’. We used to trot around the house sitting on our wooden horse, feeling like the ruler of the world. Our little brothers/sisters had a wooden rattle with a face painted on it. Motor skills were attributed to how well you could stack wooden blocks without the tower tumbling down.

So, what is with all this rewind you ask? Well, I think it is because we are now living in a world filled with huge plastic building blocks and activity sets that might just be more than required for the little ones. While plastic, silicone toys may be easier on the pocket and seem like they’d last long, they pose a huge amount of threat to the development of the child.

I know, you are showing me the certificate issued by some top lab sitting in some far corner of the world, run by adults as to how the super shiny, battery run device you just got your child is the best.

But, let’s pause for a minute. Scroll down to read how wooden toys are a far better investment in terms and a pro-nature choice:

 

  • Wooden toys are more natural in feel, allowing the child to experience the natural surface of the medium. A plastic toy, on the other hand, has smoothened rounded edges that give almost zero scope for ‘touch and feel’.
  • Wooden toys are made with less processing, thereby leaving them close to their natural state. Colours, when added to wooden toys are most often natural based colours, thereby appearing easy on the eye. These colours don’t pose a threat when the child mouths the toy too. On the other hand, plastic toys are loud in colour and appearance making them ‘more than natural’
  • While a plastic toy has a defined structure and a predefined character to it, a wooden toy encourages open play and creative thinking. A wooden block could become a chair for a doll to sit on or it could become a brick to make a house. A rainbow stacker could be just that or it could become a see-saw or even an underpass for toy trucks to go through. The options are endless.
  • Toys that don’t need much maintenance are a better option because you don’t have to bother replacing batteries or checking for tiny parts that could fall apart when dropped. Using such low maintenance natural toys allows the child to play freely without the fear of it breaking or getting damaged. Their longevity is so much more that wooden toys are passed on from father to son, becoming an heirloom of sorts.

One could go on about the benefits of natural, wooden toys but what really needs to be seen is how eco-friendly our choices are. We, in turn, support small artisan toy makers who dedicate their lives to making these wooden toys by hand, even spending hours together to paint these toys to perfection.

So, the next time you get to buy a toy as a gift or for your little one, think about it as a treasure to be cherished for years to come.

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