Verified by 
Albert Einstein famously said, “Play is the highest form of research.” Our brains are wired to play, and they are wired to learn through play. I cover NY Toy Fair every year for my Targeted Parenting Institute and for my parenting column, looking for toys and games that facilitate this research. I call those “hackable” toys because we can hack them to teach kids specific life lessons, or they encourage specific neurodevelopmental capacities. So, what makes a toy hackable? And what’s a “good toy?” I have some very clear rules about toys and games.
- The play encourages development of a neurodevelopmental capacity.
- The play encourages development of a self-regulation capacity.
- The toy is constructed well.
- The toy is honest.
1. The play encourages development of a neurodevelopmental capacity.
When I’m looking at a game or toy, I want to think about the neurodevelopmental capacity that the child would need to rely on in order to play the game. For example, a puzzle or maze game requires the child to use private speech to help solve the puzzle.
I saw a great totem stacking toy, My First Totem, that requires a toddler to stack blocks and other components to match a pattern card. Each block had a different design on each side, such as a happy face or sad face. In order to match the pattern, the child has to talk himself through it.
One of the most influential thinkers about the development of cognition in children was Lev Vygotsky. He believed that a child’s capacity to engage in private speech influences that child’s cognitive development. So, as the child “talks himself through” stacking the totem, both his language and speech development increases.
At a slightly more advanced level, the game Buildzi has two players try to build a pattern out of brightly colored plastic shapes to match the pattern on a card. Think Tetris, but in real life and very fast-paced! This game also requires a certain level of private speech, as players need to talk themselves through the pattern to construct it.
Both of these toys also help children with their visuospatial skills, their fine motor control, and their ability to attend to visual detail in problem-solving. Most importantly, they’re fun. The child doesn’t feel that he’s increasing his visuospatial and self-talk capacity. He’s just engaging in that form of research known as play! Of course, the more he plays these games, the stronger those skills become, and that can generalize to other educational domains.
2. The play encourages the development of a self-regulation capacity.
Think of all the valuable life lessons children learn when playing even a simple, beginner game. For example, a game like Candy Land teaches children how to play a board game, allows them to rehearse taking turns, and helps kids cope with disappointment. When playing a game like Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, or Hi Ho! Cherry-O with kids, talk about those skills.
“It’s hard to take turns, but those are the rules of the game. Everyone has more fun that way!”
We can also talk about how to deal with the disappointment of not winning, rehearse being a “good loser” by congratulating the winner ("I’m so happy for you! Thanks for playing. Good game!") I call that skill “winning at losing,” and it’s one to point out to children. (For more about creating a parenting plan to teach self-regulation skills, click here, here, here, and here.)
More complex games have a frustration tolerance component, especially as a child navigates the learning curve. It’s easy to just throw in the towel and stop playing, but the more you practice, the better you get. Skill-based games like Perfection! or Whac-A-Mole help children learn to calm down, manage frustration, and keep trying. I saw a few new games that are frustrating to learn, but they look like so much fun, they seem worth it. One was a karate-themed board breaking game that asked for pattern recognition and duplication before you can “break” the board. The game looks so cool that it’s worth tolerating frustration in order to master it. Similarly, the game Pizza Party Throwdown had children using a spring to “flip” toppings onto a cardboard pizza pie that slowly rotates. Frustrating to learn, but it looks so appealing that it’s worth the effort. I played it, and although I found it frustrating at first, it was so much fun to play that I just had to keep persevering until I mastered it.
The key is to point out to the child that she’s managing her frustration and persevering, even though she’s not yet succeeding. Let her know that the same capacity she’s using to accomplish this can help her the next time she’s stuck on a math problem or having a frustrating conversation with a friend. Just as she can manage her frustration to master the game, she’ll be able to master her frustration in school and in the social environment as well.
3. The toy is constructed well.
I recommend that parents invest in better quality toys. The temptation to purchase some cheaply made game or toy is understandable. Parenting is expensive, after all! But children feel deeply about their toys. They play with them, they love them, and they have a relationship with them. Think of the way A.A. Milne so beautifully brings that relationship to life with Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear.
The capacity to enter a secret, imaginative world with a beloved doll or action figure, the ability to imagine yourself storming a castle or solving a mystery – that’s an important building block for the psyche. Flimsy, poorly constructed toys interrupt that process. It’s heartbreaking for a child to build a relationship with a toy, only to have it fall apart. To that 5-year-old, a doll has actual reality. How would you feel if your baby suddenly lost a foot, or if the wheel suddenly fell off your family car? It would be pretty upsetting, no? In the child’s world, that doll or toy car or play-set is real, and it's heartbreaking when it falls apart. We do much better buying fewer toys that are better constructed.
4. The toy is honest.
Gamification is big nowadays. I saw so many games developed to teach anger management or frustration tolerance or empathy skills. To me, those are “life-coaches in a box.” If the toy developer sat down and said “How do I teach anger management but turn it into a game?” that’s not a real game. Maybe that’s useful in school counseling or speech therapy, but it’s deceptive. If you’re playing an “anger management” or “social skills” game with kids, make sure they know that the goal isn’t to have a blast playing the game, the goal is to learn a skill in a more entertaining fashion. Don’t lie to a child by pretending that the game is merely for fun.
When I look for a game that I can use to teach a skill, I want that game designer to have been thinking “What would be a fun experience?” Then, I might use that experience to teach a skill. For example, I saw a bubble wand that made stronger and more durable soap bubbles. I might use those soap bubbles to teach a child how to control their breathing during a panic attack, but that wasn’t the stated purpose of the toy. The toy was just meant to be fun.
As the world becomes more technological, we are losing our capacity to play, and that’s a shame. Play helps children develop so many cognitive and emotional capacities, and when we play with our children, we can help guide their development. Let’s shut our smartphones, unplug our kids' devices, and sit down for some old-fashioned play. Let’s not play around with our children’s ability to play around.
© Robyn Koslowitz, 2020
References
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
