To think wooden toys aren't necessarily better than plastic

[BleepingSooty]

I was reading a blog where the author told a story about how she had an unexpected visitor and was worried because her son's toys were still lying out in the living room. Rather than be put out by the mess, the visitor praised her for being such an excellent mother for buying her son wooden toys. She then went on to list the benefits of wooden toys and how they last longer and have more educational value. She did make an exception for Lego.

Now, my kids are very hard on their toys so I feel somewhat qualified in this subject. We have had a mixture of wooden toys and plastic, cheap toys and expensive (mostly gifts) and I have to say I see no difference. The wooden toys break just as much as the plastic ones. We especially have problems with paint flaking off. I also don't get how wooden toys have more educational value at all.

I know I probably should have written this on her blog but don't want to upset her. And yes, her blog is a tad self absorbed but I love reading it!

It depends on how they use it-I can 't see that they are calming- and they hurt more if thrown! If you have too many toys you can rotate them. It depends on the DC -mine loved Lego and it got a lot of use. They can be imaginative with anything-the material is unimportant. The brio train set was probably our best toy ever.

My DS has both plastic and wooden toys. He plays with both equally. That said, he would still rather take all of the tins/utensils/packets out of my kitchen cupboards and play with those instead...

If a child walks into a room full of brightly coloured toys that quite possibly flash and bleep and come apart into many pieces, it will seem more chaotic, a room with natural coloured wooden toys will be calming to look at & be in, purely because neutral colours and visually more calming then bright colours.
I completely agree, the material in unimportant when it comes to how a toy or object is imaginatively used.

(Sorry about typos!)

Because my dd is autistic, her imagination is not all that good so need toys that encourage and help with that. Wooden toys are not as good as plastic toys with sunday effects for her. For example dd has a Disney princess mega blocks castle, has music tat plays. This seems to make her want to play with it and helps set the scene for her role play that. Wooden castle would not have,

It really depends all kids are different and play in different ways. In te early days the noisy fisher price toys were a goods end in keeping dd apply so I could get on with chores or have a cup of tea

Sorry auto correct all over th place today

I genuinely don't get the issue. Children will decide for themselves what they like and that will get played with.

We have some lovely wooden toys and a large amount of plastic crap. On the rare occasion that the toy corner gets tidied properly, some of the wooden toys are mainly used for hiding piles of plastic crap behind, because they look nice and make me feel all organic and traditional.

DS1 generally disassembles any toy, plastic or wooden, and takes the various bits off to play some entirely random game with. For example the wooden pirates from the pirate ship have been stripped and put in a shopping basket, while parts of a Bob the Builder game are apparently "lawn mowers for mowing".

Small children don't need to be discerning about their toys - they just need to be engaged by them. I had lots of playmobile and fisher price, as well as a handmade wooden dollshouse. The playmobile outlasted the dollshouse and I can't ever remember thinking "Mmm, nice wood. Die, bad plastic, die!"

Wooden toys do more damage when smashed into furniture.

last longer - more educational!!! what a load of nonsense.
lego will survive radiation fallout and global warming while wood dies a death ... and i definitely wouldn't describe lego as educational. All the engineers despaired when it was introduced (as an alternative to meccano) - you don't need any skill to put lego together - simply brute force

Makes no difference at all imo. Best purchase for mine as babies was the leapfrog DJ booth. That was as plasticky and tacky as they come alright but it meant I could have a poo in peace.

I do love a bit of brio though.

With regards to the whole wooden chairs and cleaning in nurseries , we dont have wooden chairs we cant afford them but we do have a couple of adult community playthings ones (rediculous price but got a discount at the time) they have a coating on them that makes them just as easy to clean however kids chair from ikea in the role play area = month old and getting chucked as it wasnt designed to with stand 60 kids.

And TheBigJessie .. Biogaurds what we use seems quite good ?

I think if you do buy wooden buy investment bits or buy second hand if you dont want to pay out. Aslong as they are in good knick stick em in a box and children wont know any different. Haba and myriad are both really reliable.

Community playthings kids chairs are smooth unless u look at those rediculous baby ones with straps etc.

Were a charity pre-school and have to invest our money wisely on toys that will last and wooden always has worked best for us. Plus if it does break it is easier to fix.

Also we couldnt afford the batteries that come with most noisy things ! And a room of up to 60 children all playing with noisy stuff wouldnt provide a conducive learning enviroment.

In any sense , I think to an extent breakability shouldnt be part of it for 3+ as we should be teaching our children to be mindful of their things whatever its made out of. So many kids at pre-school have the attitude of its broke , chuck it , buy a new one Ive even had children tell me to go to the toy shop to replace things theyve broken ...... Just dosnt fly with me they do need a sense of responsibility

I've tended to go for wood for big things where there's a choice, plastic for small things (with the exception of doll's house furniture, which seems strange in plastic because most furniture is made of wood, so plastic furniture loses the attractiveness of being a miniature version of the real thing).

Handy tip for those who claim that wooden toys aren't played with but just stay on the mantelpiece - take them off the mantelpiece!

Ha ha, what a load of pretentious yummy mummy nonsense. If you are consider educational value surely having toys in a variety of materials to explore the different feels, chewability, noises when banged together/against siblings heads is more educational.
If its the electronic flashy lights/ annoying music aspects of plastic toys that people object to though, that I can sympathise with!

Fantastic link, Fluffanstuff - I absolutely love marble runs. I just have to wait until DS grows out of putting everything in his mouth....

Generally, I prefer buying wooden toys for DS - I like the look and feel of them, and provided that you're careful to buy quality ones, they do tend to last well. But a cheap toy made from wood certainly isn't any better than a quality plastic one. And DS plays with a lot of his wooden toys, especially the wooden vehicles.

DS also has plenty of plastic and fabric toys as well.

And the main thing I dislike about his plastic toys, is that a lot of them are battery powered, with bright lights and loud noises. Aside from the cost of the batteries, if DS is playing with these for too long, I find the lights and noises get kind of overwhelming after a while. This is the main reason I try to steer people towards wooden presents if they ask for ideas. It's simpler than saying that I think some plastic toys (without batteries) are fine, and welcomed, but I don't want other plastic toys (with batteries).

(The fisher-price star stacker being the exception here. The classical songs that plays are very soothing)

Might change lonely one he is older and discovers noisy toys

I agree with kungfupannda- there is no issue.Children decide for themselves and all that matters is the play value. It is so sad when parents put adult preferences first.

I obviously wasn't making myself clear, piglet

DS already has a number of noisy toys, largely thanks to various well-meaning friends and relatives who sadly didn't ask us for present guidance.

They're mostly okay in small doses, some being better than others, but they can get very irritating if DS decides that one of the noisy toys is gong to be his favourite toy of the day.

The fisher price love to play puppy is currently my most hated toy. It can be turned on very very easily, bursts into song if anyone so much as brushes against it, and makes my skin crawl because it's somehow very sinister.

And if we've shoved it to the back of a deep dark cupboard, the kind, thoughtful, childless friend who gave it to DS asks where it is whenever she visits our house.

I buy wooden toys for me, and sometimes the DSs like them too. There's the argument about wood=sustainable v. plastic=more wasteful, but I have no figures to back that up. I like the feel and smell of wood though, over plastic. DS1 liked a lot of his wooden toys (and we 'forgot' to put batteries in most of the chirping plastic ones he was given); DS2 loves all-singing, all-dancing plastic tat.

Agree that some wooden toys compliment some plastic ones nicely. One of DS1's favourite play lay-outs is to have his wooden Thomas railway run the gamut of all his plastic dinosaurs.

Wooden toys hurt a lot more than plastic when they're lobbed at someone, though.

Plastic is o.k. for older children Babies need to use all their senses to 'play' with their toys. All plastic tends to be the same five bright colours, smells the same, feels the same and tastes the same - and generally has the same irritating noises! Give me natural materials for little ones every time. So much more imagination need too - with the exception of Lego.

I think it's partly snobbishness and partly a current "fashion" for wooden toys.

I was born in 1975 and ALL the toys I can remember playing with as a child were plastic.

I remember my plastic fisher price play people very fondly. And the plastic fisher price garage and cars.

I had building blocks made of tin, and a red plastic train track.

I had a fisher price "TV" that played music and had a moving scene, and a fisher price record player with plastic records - the equivalent of modern Vtech noisy toys

I played for hours with them as a young child.

Then I moved on to lego, playmobil, baby dolls, barbie dolls, a dog that barked and walked and My Little Pony.

I loved them all and spent hours and hours making up imaginative games with them.

I honestly can't recall a single toy made of wood, and I don't feel in any way deprived because of it. And my imagination is as fertile as ever

thunksheadontable wrote:

I seem to remember hearing someone I know who is early years talk about it >being good to have a range of textures for sensory exploration - so plastic, >wooden, metal and even porcelain e.g. tea sets, or crocheted soft toys as >well as fluffy/flannel. I think most people probably do have this range - don't >think wood in and of itself is "better", it's just nice to have experience of lots >of different materials.

We have a mix - beautiful, wood-dyed (so no chipping paint) wooden toys for my son's birthdays and Christmas presents, and quite a bit (!) of vintage Fisher Price toys, which are a mixture of wood and plastic. They have been played with by children for 30-40 years so they must have done something right there. Son also has a porcelain china tea set that he broke because he kept banging the cups together. I saw the shards all over the carpet while hanging out the clothes one day and raced back in!..... it was a lesson in not banging breakable toys together though. He was quite said when I had to put the pieces in the bin - but he learned that things (even nice things) can break. He'll get a plastic set for now, and another porcelain set when he's a little bit older.

DS plays with his felt and fabric food in his wooden oven every single day. He also likes his plastic Fisher Price toys. He likes his colourful, dyed wood stacking rings - when he was small they were just a stacking toy, then he learned to roll them, then to count them, and now they are "CD"s. So that toy has been played with daily for 15 months and was well worth the money.

We like toys that have good quality materials, made by people in fair conditions and making a good wage - and also stuff that has stood the test of time. Some toys meet these conditions, and others do not.

fluffanstuff wrote:

In any sense , I think to an extent breakability shouldnt be part of it for 3+ as we should be teaching our children to be mindful of their things whatever its made out of. So many kids at pre-school have the attitude of its broke , chuck it , buy a new one Ive even had children tell me to go to the toy shop to replace things theyve broken ...... Just dosnt fly with me they do need a sense of responsibility

*
We heard our son saying that after he started at Nursery, so each time something needed to be mended, we had him watch and help us. DP is quite good at DIY and carpentry, and I do a lot of things with textiles. So now DS says, "Will you mend this?" and it does so sound so much better than "We'll buy another".

There is a whole school of thought that plastics are toxic and you should minimise your child's contact with them. It's a very popular thing here where I live in the US. You can get glass baby bottles, everything baby-related is BPA-free and you can buy feeding bowls, spoons etc made of plant materials rather than plastic. I hadn't come across this idea before moving here but it is apparently an idea that is gaining ground, that excess chemicals, plastics are causing illnesses in children. As a result, I now feel guilty whenever I see DS chewing on his plastic toys!

I guess it's no more wacky than some of the other child health trends out there...

I do prefer wooden toys if I can get them as I think they look nicer but DS couldn't care less. His favourite birthday present was a loud, plastic green frog for his bath that plays music when you press its stomach

We had a mix of both and my kids are rough on toys but the wooden ones lasted better on the whole and were much easier to mend if they broke.

I do think they were better value, most of our wooden toys got played with for hours and hours and I have kept the best ones to hopefully pass down. There have been some fantastic plastic toys though... e.g. nothing is as good as lego in our house.