How Toys Can Shape Your Psychology

You can probably remember your favorite toy when you were a child. It’ll be the one you took with you everywhere you went and had a hissy fit about whenever you couldn’t find it. Most people had a favoured category of toy also, such as planes, army men or dolls. These choices may have affected you more than you realise, as new research from the London Psychology Institute suggests we are strongly influenced in later life by our childhood toys. Lets take a better look at the main 3 findings from the study.

1. Those children who were encouraged to play with educational toys did not become more intelligent, but were more analytical in their approach to problems in later life. The research showed that learning toys promoted patience and taught people to break down a problem into its simplest parts in order to overcome tasks

2. Those children who played mostly with toys such as dolls or action men etc (toys that had human characteristics) displayed greater communication abilities and could interact better with those around them as adults. I has been suggested that any object that vaguely replicates a human encourages children to communicate with it and share any musings that they have with it.

3. Probably the most interesting finding from the research was that children who always had access to toys wherever they were, not only had more confidence in later life but had better earnings. This means if children played with bath toys, took toys out and about with them and had access to toys at friends houses etc, they became more successful in later life.

Whilst this research is very interesting, it is worth bearing in mind that it is not always easy to tell where the cause and effect lies. What is meant by this is do children become influenced by the toys they play with or do they pick certain toys because of the type of people they already are? Most experts tend to think that its a bit of both, which means that the study still provides some valid findings.