What is the big deal about playability?
If you haven’t heard, playability is all about how play activities can help advance your child’s skills in the early years of development and can be defined in the following areas; creative play, manipulation play, physical play, role play and cognitive development.
My first reaction to the concept was “I don’t need somebody to tell me how to play with my child” but then I realised that even though some things sound obvious, like “the wheel” and psychiatry, sometimes we can all do with having the obvious pointed out to us.
Collectively we spend a lot less time playing and interacting with our children than we did even 20 years ago. Only a small percentage manage to spend a single hour of the day interacting with their children and their toys & games in comparison to 80% of adults back in the 1980’s.Playability information can not only be used to find toys that will help your child develop in their early years but can claw back some of that parent-child play time we love and cherish.
Whilst there aren’t any hard and fast rules about how your child will or should develop there are things to look out for and toys/activities that can help aid that development. The great thing about toys is that they’re toys, they’re meant to be fun and isn’t that what learning’s meant to be? I wish I’d had that philosophy when I was growing up.
There is so much information around this topic that I’m not even going to try and detail it here. What you notice when you start looking into the available information is that there are so many toys which specifically target the areas that we’re looking to develop. That doesn’t imply that the toys have been developed because of the guidelines, it’s largely down to the fact that children like to do certain activities at certain stages of their development. The obvious examples are the plethora of brightly coloured soft toys for babies. Not only do they stand out in a visual sense but many have bells, crinkly bits, squeakers, different textures, teething rings and more. They’re the Swiss army knives of baby development tools but nowhere near as dangerous.
So; with all of the toys available nowadays how do we choose which ones to buy and which ones to leave on the shelf? That’s a question that nobody can answer except your child who, from the word go, has had their own opinions about what constitutes a good toy, one that’s worth playing with for more than 5 minutes. As soon as they reach a certain age they will probably insist that only a PlayStation or a Wii will do it for them anyway. That’s not to say that they’re not good toys in their own right, there’s just so much more and no one toy can cover all bases. In the mean time we can claim back some of that play time and be reassured that we’re doing the best we can for the ones we love.
If you want to find toys that meet with age and playability criteria it’s a lot more difficult than finding the information in isolation. I’m hoping that the increased use of technology will mean that this information becomes more widely available and linked to products enabling it to be included in website searches alongside age, price, category and keyword criteria.
Making use of available playability information gives us the tools to help our children develop. That’s what I see my role as a parent; encouraging and helping my child make the most of his abilities and talents as he grows up. And I for one am glad that our government also have this at the heart of their philosophy and hope that resellers will do soon too.
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