Click-A-Brick Brand Manager Agrees With Researchers That Say Toys Not Educational Unless Parents Participate

Researchers have delivered their verdict on so-called educational toys and the consensus is that toys do have the potential to help with a child’s learning, but only if parents actually get engaged with their kids. And Click-A-Brick co-founder and brand manager Georg de Gorostiza says this couldn’t be more true.

With the continued rise of electronic toys and games for children -- even children under the age of 3 -- parents are bombarded with the word “educational” when it comes to all sorts of electronic, touch screen toys (or apps for tablets and smartphones meant for children). But, according to researchers, merely being interactive is not the same as being educational.

As reported in the The Washington Post, Lydia Plowman, a faculty member of the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education, and her colleague Joanna McPake, conducted a study on so-called educational electronic toys and say it’s a myth that a toy -- electronic or otherwise -- can be educational for children on its own.

Another researcher, Nicola Yelland, who is a Professor of Education at Victoria University, says almost any toy has the potential to be educational as long as parents get involved with their children at least some of the time during play.

“Toys are marketed at being educational, playing at the heart strings of parents,” Yelland is quoted by The Washington Post as saying. “They’re called brain boosting toys or toys that will result in making your child a genius. … But what I’m saying is that it’s not the toys per se.”

The opinion of researchers comes as no surprise to Click-A-Brick brand manager Georg de Gorostiza, who has always advocated that parents should be engaged with their children as they build and create with the company’s building block toy.

“Right from the moment we first saw the design of them, we realized Click-A-Brick was something that parents and children could enjoy together,” de Gorostiza said. “We’ve always been huge advocates of parent-child interaction with this toy and reading these expert opinions on the matter just validates that belief for us. We don’t just want parents to hand their children Click-A-Brick to ‘keep them busy,’ we really want parents to sit with their kids and help them develop their creative thinking and problem solving skills as they interact together. I couldn’t agree more with Professor Yelland about the need for parents to get involved if they really want their kids to be able to learn from using an educational toy.”