Why Your Kid Ignores All The Learning Toys You Buy (And What To Try Instead)
I was sorting out the playroom closet last Saturday, knee-deep in half-finished art projects and outgrown dress-up clothes, when I hit the stack I’ve been avoiding: all the learning toys I’ve bought in the last two years that my 4-year-old daughter Mia has never touched once. The glow-in-the-dark alphabet puzzle I grabbed after a mom group thread raved about it. The counting cookie matching set, still in its original shrink wrap except for the one cookie I pulled out to show Mia the first day. The $32 phonics farm game that arrived three weeks ago, its tiles still sealed in the plastic bag. Mia was ten feet away, cutting holes in the empty Amazon box the phonics game came in, turning it into a rocket ship. I held up the game to her and asked if she wanted to try it, and she didn’t even look up. “No, I’m busy,” she said.
I’ve had this same conversation with three other mom friends in the last month, all of us complaining about the same thing: we drop good money on toys marketed as educational, we get excited about helping our kids build skills before preschool or kindergarten, and they’d rather play with the packaging than the toy itself. I used to think it was me—maybe I wasn’t introducing it right, maybe Mia was just stubborn, maybe I needed to buy an even fancier one that would catch her attention. Then I talked to my sister, who’s been a preschool teacher for 12 years, and she said something that stopped me in my tracks. “Most of those toys aren’t made for kids,” she said. “They’re made for you. They check a box for what parents think learning should look like, not what kids actually do to learn.”
She asked me what Mia spends the most time playing with, when no one’s telling her what to do. I thought about it: she sorts the acorns she collects on our after-dinner walks by size on the porch step. She pours water back and forth between measuring cups in the sink while I wash dishes, trying to fill all the cups to the same line. She builds ramps for her toy cars out of old cereal boxes and the old encyclopedias I got at a garage sale. She counts every step we climb up to our apartment, over and over. None of that requires a single branded learning toy. All of it is counting, sorting, physics, problem solving—all the skills those expensive toys are supposed to teach.
I started testing small changes after that, and most of them didn’t cost me any extra money. First, I stopped pushing the “learning” part of any toy I bring out. If I want Mia to engage with something that teaches letters, I don’t sit her down at the table and say “let’s learn our ABCs today”. I leave one or two letter magnets on the fridge next to her drawing pad, and that’s it. Last week I dug out the alphabet puzzle I’d had stashed away, left it on the coffee table while I folded laundry, and didn’t say a word about it. Ten minutes later, Mia came over, moved a few pieces around, asked me what the “B” stood for, we talked about how her best friend’s name starts with B, and that was that. She didn’t finish the whole puzzle, but she engaged with it more than she ever did when I tried to walk her through every step the first day I brought it home.
Another thing I do now: before I buy any toy labeled educational, I ask myself one question: does this fit into the play Mia already does? If she’s obsessed with playing restaurant right now, a cheap dry erase board to write “orders” on makes way more sense than a spelling game that requires sitting still. She already wants to write down what her stuffed animals are ordering, so she’ll ask me what letters go with what, instead of me forcing her to do something that doesn’t fit her game. If she loves collecting rocks, a $1 set of divided drawers from the dollar store works way better for sorting practice than a $20 bear sorting set that she doesn’t care about. I just set the drawers next to her rock pile and say I found extra storage if she wants it, and she does the rest.
I still have that big stack of ignored learning toys in the back of the closet, by the way. I haven’t donated them yet, which is fine. I rotate one out every couple of weeks, leave it out without fanfare, and see what happens. A couple of weeks ago, I left the counting cookie set out on the play shelf. Mia didn’t use it to match numbers to cookies, like the box says. She used the cookies as food for her stuffed rabbit’s tea party. That’s okay. She still ended up passing me three cookies for my tea, so that counted as counting practice anyway, even if it wasn’t what the box intended.
I still slip up sometimes. I’ll see a learning toy pop up on my Instagram feed, and I’ll feel that little twitch of “oh, this will help her get ready for kindergarten” and almost click add to cart. I’ve gotten better at stopping, though. I think about the paper towel roll Mia is currently turning into a telescope, how she asked me yesterday why you can see farther through it than you can without it, how we counted how many blades of grass were in a tiny clump on the lawn last weekend. None of that was planned, none of it came in a box labeled educational. It’s just play, which is the way kids learn best.
Right now, she’s calling me from the living room to come see her new rocket ship, the one made out of the phonics game box. It has a window cut out, and a paper steering wheel taped to the inside. I’m going to go look at it. I don’t need a fancy learning toy to know that this is the good stuff.
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