Why it’s better to give few toys to children

On birthdays and holidays like Christmas, the quality of the gift matters more than the quantity.

If there's one thing worse than wasting money to appear to have purchasing power, it's wasting money by spending too many gifts and toys for children. wasting money by spending a lot of gifts and toys for very young children that are not even children who won't even benefit from this sacrifice.

But giving lots of toys is not just a way to keep the expense from turning into greater happiness for the little ones. In fact, there is reason to believe that being too "nice" with the amount of gifts, for example on a birthday or at Christmas, not only does not add stimulation and satisfaction, it detracts. Why does this happen? Let's take a look.

The excesses of gifts and toys to children.

There are a lot of socially normalized customs and habits that lead us to bet everything on abundance when it comes to giving gifts to children. It is a kind of ritual that involves not only the desire to please the little ones in the house.

There is also an obsession to make it seem that as parents we are not able to provide all the necessary care to shape the child's life. the necessary care to give shape to the cherished happy childhood.. From this point of view, buying lots of toys means playing it safe, leaving no flank uncovered.

However, the logic of the mind is somewhat more complex than the simple activity of adding up gifts that separately cause well-being in those who consume them. This is, at least, what is indicated by a study whose results have been published in the scientific journal Infant Behavior and Development and deals with the case of children just a few months old.

How was the research conducted?

For this study, small children of both sexes whose ages were between 18 and 30 months were used. These experimental subjects were divided into two different groups to test how the quantity of toys influences the quality of play. Each of the members of the first group was given a total of 4 toys. was given a total of 4 toysThe second group was given a total of 16 toys each.

From these experimental conditions, the research team was able to see how the quality of play, measured by the time spent playing and the variety of activities carried out with the toys, was much higher in the group where only a few toys were available to the children. Why does this happen? The key is indecision and distraction, as we shall see.as we will see.

The importance of focusing on the game

Something as simple as having several stimuli at your fingertips, not just a few, can completely change the way we think, and the way we think. In the case of young children, who do not have a sufficiently developed nervous system is not sufficiently developed to cope with a lot of to deal with a lot of information at once, having too many choices can become something that prevents them from focusing on something (and the ability to focus on something is more limited the younger you are).

That's why, when it comes to gift giving, less is more. Something as simple as the absence of many gifts is a positive value, because it makes it possible for the option that really matters to appear: to connect emotionally with the toy, to give it a meaning that has importance for oneself, even if it is in the virtual world of one's own imagination.

After all, play is all about imaginingAnd for this it is essential that not everything is already done, that there is no room for fantasizing. In the same way that a novel allows us to create a fictional world to measure unlike what happens when these stories are taken to the big screen, the smallest of the house have fun exercising their creativity from the presence of the minimum necessary means to start a stimulating and meaningful story. Excesses are just a brake to be avoided.

Bibliographical references:

Dauch, C., Imwalle, M., Ocasio, B., Metz, A. E. (2017). The influence of the number of toys in the environment on toddlers. Infant Behavior and Development. 27;50:78-87.