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Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time
- jstummbillig 11mo agoI really wish people would declare ages when talking about kid toys. Anywho, any banger toy recommendation for a 1yo?
- bombcar 11mo agoLiterally something to bang, like a toy hammer. Or take them to a library that has toys, see what they play with, and then go buy that.
- evan_ 11mo agoThese little wooden shaker eggs went over quite well with my 18mo nephew: https://www.amazon.com/HABA-Musical-Eggs-Acoustic-Germany/dp/B00BF3D666/ https://www.amazon.com/HABA-Musical-Eggs-Acoustic-Germany/dp... He's also enjoying the Mega Bloks someone got him though he's mostly just sticking them together and throwing them.
- relaxing 11mo agoBoard books. Adult reads, let the child turn the pages. Simple kinetic toys, of the sort where you put a ball in a hole and it pops out somewhere else. Same pleasure as a marble run, without the choking hazard. Adult mimicry toys, like play kitchen, doctors bag, etc. With the right setup and creative inspiration they can learn to putter about inventing simple tasks and executing them.
- TheCleric 11mo agoIt would have been helpful if I had seen this BEFORE Christmas. lol
- cosmicgadget 11mo agoOn the bright side, you have 365 days advance notice!
- bmacho 11mo agotl;dr: - play-time and clean-up-time are 2 dimensions of toys, and you can use these dimensions when you are considering to buy a toy - author likes magnetic building toys (???) - amazon ref links to buy those magnetic building toys
- happytoexplain 11mo agoI'm not following the implication/purpose of this post.
- bmacho 11mo agoI don't get it? Isn't this how "tl;dr" posts work? I've read it, I've found it a waste of time, so I gave a warning/summary so people coming after me know what to expect? Am I doing it wrong?
- dotancohen 11mo agoIt looks like the author examined every toy inspired by Lego, other than Lego itself. For me the big problem with Lego was not clean up time. For me the big problem with Lego was stepping on them barefoot. How do these other toys compare?
- phantasmish 11mo agoBig problem with modern LEGO for me is that so many modern sets are almost all teensy-tiny pieces, so they look good on the box—the adult-aimed ones have always been like this since they started targeting that market, but now it’s like 95% of all their sets; also, they seem to hate exposed nubs, which is silly if the set is for play. Larger (like tall 6x2) bricks are uncommon outside buckets, and a lot of larger pieces like dedicated wall-sections or big vehicle nose-bits or car undercarriages are now rare. The result is that my old sets are a mix of everything from large contoured structural plates down to tiny pieces, but my kids’ bins of legos are like 98% tiny pieces. They use them less than I did, I think because it’s hard to sort through the loose pieces when they’re mostly very small, and with less variety there aren’t as many large pieces to use as jumping-off points to start a build, and making, say, a house-height wall or the front of a space ship is slower than when we had more bricks that could kinda short-hand those pieces and let you skip the middle, if you will, to focus on both the big-picture and fine details. I doubt I’d have liked Lego so much if mine had looked like theirs.
- johanvts 11mo agoBuy the ‘classic’ line, the big boxes are great value also.
- phantasmish 11mo agoYeah, I’ve noticed the classic line showing up on shelves and they seem a ton better, but I don’t recall seeing them several years ago when we were doing lots of Lego-buying. Really limited selection and mostly big, expensive sets too, not many mid-sized ones. But glad to see them releasing sets that seem more focused on play than sitting on a shelf.
- phantasmish 11mo agoCan confirm that Magnatiles, specifically, were maybe the best value for the dollar we ever got out of toys for our kids. Idk if the quality has held up but our kids abused the hell out of the things and it took them years to finally break just a couple of them (the largest ones are the most vulnerable). They have incredible range, good for babies but still seeing use as a supporting toy up to their tweens. Kinda pricey but if the quality is still as good as it was years ago (can’t say, the ~3 sets we bought over a couple years held up so well we never bought any more) they’re easily worth it. We have tons of Lego too but these were far better play-value for the dollar. Not even close. Can’t say if the knockoff brands are as good. (Can’t vouch for any of the rest of these but those giant magnetic tiles look potentially like a much better investment than dedicated e.g. kitchen playsets, way more versatile)
- sokoloff 11mo agoThis was the first toy I expected to see on the list. Can agree that, though they are somewhat expensive, our kids played with them frequently for the better part of a decade and then we passed them along to cousins who completed the decade of play and then some. We got some fabric bins to store them in, which made cleanup a 2 minute affair if adults helped or 5 minutes if the kids did it alone. Highly recommend.
- jakeydus 11mo agoI never thought of playing make believe as just being the dm for kids but that’s really fun.
- showerst 11mo agoFWIW I bought some 2 years ago and the quality is still very high.
- germinalphrase 11mo agoWe have bought a bunch of them secondhand. They arrive already scratched up, but who cares.
- r0m4n0 11mo agoThis year the family favorite everyone was fighting to play including the adults was the new litebrite touch https://amzn.to/3MROaJs https://amzn.to/3MROaJs Really satisfying to click the buttons and see the super bright lights as a young kid. The games like mirror were easy yet technical which had us all competing for high scores. Definitely well thought out Everyone appreciated it didn’t involve cleanup of any little plastic pieces like the original litebright
- derwiki 11mo agoAlso makes it usable for a smaller child! Great rec, thank you
- tsoukase 11mo agoFor small(ish) kids there is a certain correlation between play- and clean-up-time. If there was a toy which deviated, it would become blockbuster and there are hardly any such. Electronic screens are popular as nannies because of this. Personally I choose all types in rotation. One toy of high duration is Play-Doh but afterwards needs a cleaning machine.
- avereveard 11mo agoElectronics are popualar also because there's a higher proportion of only child and parents have only so much time to dedicate to child play
- tsoukase 11mo agoTrue, not only for single child but for many with different sex, large age difference or simply careless parents.
- mrob 11mo agoThe set of toys I spent the most time playing with was a big bag of wooden blocks my grandfather gave me when I was very small. They are well designed, with a good selection of different shapes, e.g. it has cylinders and arches and thin planks as well as cuboids. They got a lot of use because they're so flexible in combining with other toys, e.g. you can build roads and garages for toy cars, or obstacle courses for rolling marbles. The edges and corners are rounded and the wood tough enough that clean-up was just dropping them back into the bag. I've since given them to a nephew and I'm happy to see he gets just as much entertainment out of them as I did. Plain wooden blocks can represent almost anything. There are no batteries or moving parts to fail. Mine got a little bit of surface wear but they still work just as well as they did when they were new and small children don't care about perfect appearance. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting passed down to another generation and continue to provide the same entertainment. I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.
- itishappy 11mo ago100% agree. Box of blocks cannot be beat. My sister and I used the hell out of ours: we built towers, cantilevers, mazes, Rube Goldberg devices, houses for rodents, vehicles, elaborate locks, catapults, you name it. They're still in the same condition as day 1, ready for our children. Bonus: You can roll a lot more down those long rubber racetracks than just cars. Bonus 2: Why did these go away? https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/chubs-baby-wipes-stackable-blocks-lot-1807071469 https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/chubs-baby-wipes-stac...
- vunderba 11mo agoSame. We had a kids’ play table (low to the ground and rectangular) that we’d prop up with a few blocks under one end to give it a slight incline. We’d spend hours covering the surface with blocks in different positions to simulate a pinball table. Then we’d take a large marble and use two long triangular blocks as flippers to “play” on it. Tilting was NOT advised.
- andyjohnson0 11mo ago> I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children. As a parent I very much agree. And for grown-up children too. On my desk I have a small tin containing small wooden blocks and planks, arches, etc. I get lots of play value from them - when my thinking is blocked, or if I just want to fool around and not think at all. I'm in my mid fifties. And over at my climbing club's off-grid climbing hut we have a big box of over-sized, home made jenga blocks. Pretty-much everyone plays with them: not only jenga, but also just building structures or giant domino runs or whatever. We all need to play sometimes.
- mjlee 11mo agoMagna tiles are my favourite of my kid’s toys. Bonus adult points - how do they work? How is it the tiles always stick to each other no matter the orientation? Easy once you know, but it took me (and friends with physics degrees) a little thinking to get.
- mingus88 11mo agoAlso, did you see the huge tiles? Wow! I had no idea but my kids would love building forts and rooms
- mjlee 11mo agoI know! I definitely need those. For the kids, of course.
- jstummbillig 11mo agoRight
- ivanjermakov 11mo agoQuestion from a not-parent: why not teach kids to clean up for themselves?
- makeitdouble 11mo agoYou can teach a 4~5 yo kid to clean up. Below that it probably comes down to personality/level of awareness, and it's probably a lost cause for 2 year olds and below. Then you'll want an adult to deal with the body fluids and other nasty stuffs. PS; what I mean by "teach a 4-5 yo kid" is really spending a lot of time with them rehearsing cleaning and drilling it down. It pays dividends, but you'll be spending months and months, if not years, doing the cleaning with them at a slower pace than if you did it just yourself.
- cosmicgadget 11mo agoLow cleanup time is even more important for kids doing it than grownups.
- Waterluvian 11mo ago> The worst toy is one with many pieces that my kids dump on the ground and then play with for only 2 minutes. One of my favourite toys was Mouse Trap. I never once actually played the game. Building it and setting it off once or twice was plenty. I agree with some of the sentiment of this blog but I also think it’s discarding a perfectly valid side to toys and play.
- stouset 11mo agoI think so many 90s kids had this same experience. The Rube Goldberg trap was so much fun to build and play with, nobody bothered to even try and learn the game itself!
- Doxin 10mo agoIt doesn't help that the game is objectively terrible. Worse than snakes and ladders by a mile. Especially the end-game is just... throwing dice and walking in a circle until some player gets unlucky.
- vunderba 11mo agoTrivial Pursuit was like this too. Our family would chill in the den just randomly asking each other questions from the cards. I'm not sure we ever actually played it using the board game part.
- vharuck 11mo agoWhen my wife and I have a date night, one of our go-to spots is a bar with a stack of Trivial Pursuit cards next to the napkins.
- lanthade 11mo agoI actually played mouse trap but my kid and their cousins do nothing with the game and love to just setup the trap. That game from the 80s has become a favorite toy of the gen alpha crowd when visiting the grandparents.
- mvid 11mo agoAs an uncle, is there an opposite version of this list?
- mft_ 11mo agoIf in doubt, buy a musical instrument. Or paint. Or glitter.
- paulryanrogers 11mo agoWarning: once glitter enters your home it will never leave. You may have to move.
- doubled112 11mo agoSome glitter comes anyway. My wife figure skated. It's been years, more than a decade, and several moves. Still find it from time to time.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- bhaak 11mo agoKinectic sand is the modern subtle version of glitter.
- cruffle_duffle 11mo agoKinetic sand does get a lot of playtime though. It is banned from our house though.
- burnt-resistor 11mo agoGlitter is crafting with herpes.
- vunderba 11mo agoYes. It's starts and ends with Perfection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfection_(board_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfection_(board_game)
- zamadatix 11mo agoAm I not loading all of this article? It basically stops for me after saying "magnet toys top the list" with 3 examples of such (well, really 2) for me, with no real investigation into other toys or exploration of why the variants like the Minecraft magnet toy scored much worse in cleanup (I assume it's due to the piece size?). Anything about toys other than magnet blocks? Another type of toy I've seen fit this bill has been wooden/plastic train tracks (the solid larger pieces type, not flimsy model type, and simple sturdy trains to go on them). It still has the element of customization and playing with what you build but cleanup is "scoop the large pieces into a bucket" (and stepping on them usually isn't painful!)
- honeycrispy 11mo agoThey're a parent. They probably don't have enough time to write a comprehensive article if this article isn't paying the bills.
- crowbahr 11mo agoMinecraft: weak magnets
- geerlingguy 11mo agoFor a younger kid, a ball is often a good option. This Christmas, after putting aside the push car, some books, and a few other little toys from the grandparents, my 1 year old has spent the past 30 minutes chasing a large beach ball one of his siblings brought up from the basement. I can second the recommendation for magnet tiles, though; everyone in the family seems to enjoy the satisfaction of them clicking together, and finding new ways to build random stuff. The toddler just makes stacks of magnet tiles, which is fine for his development. The 8-12 year olds enjoy building relatively complex structures. Then watching the 1 year old act like Godzilla an destroy it.
- thechao 11mo agoBlocks is the top comment (for me); and yours is number two. Timeless classic. Another one could be plasticine clay. These toys afford play, they don't direct, restrict, or guide play. Other good toys like this: box, stick, the woods, paper (especially a big roll of butcher paper), and things to draw with (I find a black, red, blue, yellow and green sufficient).
- 7402 11mo agoI recently needed to make a mockup of something, so I got some plasticine from Amazon, since I remembered playing with the stuff when I was a kid. However what I received was quite stiff and left an unpleasant oily smell on my hands that I had to scrub off with a lot of effort. Is there a particular brand of plasticine that you have had a good experience with?
- sallveburrpi 11mo agoAs a former child my favourites were Playmobile, Lego, Duplo, wooden blocks and those little matchbox cars. For cleaning we just dumped everything into a big box. Repeatability is endless
- tirant 11mo agoI also loved Playmobil. But they were so much better in the 80s, early 90s, when all the figures were exactly the same, except by the colors, so it meant they were all flexible to be dressed up as anything you wanted. Nowadays each playmobil doll is extremely personalized which removes the flexibility to dress them as anything and limits the imagination and originality. Such a pity. No wonder Playmobil almost went bankrupt recently.
- jnwatson 11mo agoThe best toy my sister and I got is a now long-discontinued product called Omagles. They were brightly colored tubes and panels you connected with plastic clips. They were strong enough to stand and climb on. They even had wheels we could make vehicles out of. They were so good I bought a used one for my own kid who had a great time with them. After some Googling, I see that the rights to Omagles were bought and are now sold under the brand Tubelox.
- evmar 11mo agoExact same for me! Just ten minutes ago my son opened his Xmas present, his first box of TubeLox. My expectations and hopes are high but he is currently distracted by the flashier presents.
- sejje 11mo agoHe'll probably find it himself, but if he doesn't, just build something cool in front of him. He may not have unlocked all the possibilities in his brain yet.
- Cerium 11mo agoThere is also Quadro Toys. I have a couple of the large sets and have built a series of houses, climbing toys, and now a "castle" with a slide for my daughter.
- sersi 11mo agoGreat recommendation. I'm definitely getting that for my son next birthday
- jdalgetty 11mo agoMagna tiles are easy to clean up in the they stick to each other sense, but I still find them all over the house.
- Tade0 11mo ago> Maybe I feel the satisfaction of clicking them together as I clean them up. Cleaning becomes a little like playing. My preschooler daughter got Magna Tiles for Christmas and she's cleaning them up herself, which is a first for her. I'm surprised the Minecraft blocks feel less strong - Magna Tiles seem to be using standard AlNiCo magnets and I expected, given the price, that the Minecraft ones would be using neodymium magnets, but apparently they're not and this weakness comes from magnets being only at the corners.
- bombcar 11mo agoThe Minecraft blocks have some strength but not much so you can easily take them apart. But they are very sharp. Way worse than Lego to step on.
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo agoThis should be a graded metric.
- CapitalistCartr 11mo agoWe found the Minecraft magnet tiles the same as the author did. Looked good, not much play, not much fun, basically a dud. Generic blocks seem better.
- efnx 11mo agoHot take - Along these lines video games score incredibly well. Arguably not a “toy”, but it’s interesting to think about.
- breve 11mo agoI tell my kids to imagine they have the toys they want. It's good for their development and the clean-up-time can't be beat.
- aqme28 11mo agoThat's what the magnatiles are for. The toy they really want is a rocket ship, so instead we give them a cheap little tool to imagine it with.
- jerkstate 11mo agoWe have some magnet tiles that have tubes and ramps for building marble mazes with - they are probably the most popular toy in the house. The thing about magnet tiles is there are several brands but they’re incompatible so it’s best to buy multiple sets from a single brand.
- sersi 11mo agoConnetix and magnatiles are pretty much fully compatible. Connetix is the only knock off I found that is higher quality than the original (and has great marble run)
- cnees 11mo agoI can't recommend enough ordering a $10 collapsible ball pen. My son understood even at age 2 that some toys needed to be played with in his play pen, and it means I can let him play with toys with hundreds of pieces and then scoop them all up at once.
- bobse 11mo ago[dead]
- NiloCK 11mo agoAnother overlooked characteristic of a toy, especially a toy that takes up space, is "doneness". Lots of free-play toys that my own kids use (4 and 7) can unconditionally be defended as still in use. They haven't been touched in an hour, but an ask to put it away is met with "I'm still playing with that". So: nothing gets put away until a parent pulls authority and overrules the kid's declaration that the game is still going. Understandably, the kids find this unfair and sort of demeaning. A board game is different in so far as it has an ending. The kids never try to weasel out of putting Hungy Hungry Hippo or chess pieces or whatever back into a box.
- fwipsy 11mo agoThere were only two toys I never got tired of -- legos, and computers. Both encourage open-ended creativity. (I had older lego house sets which were quite flexible. Modern lego pieces seem more specialized.) Unfortunately, so many pieces took several minutes to clean up, so I would just leave them spread out across my bedroom floor for months at a time. These days when I want to play with legos I put a bedsheet down first. Also, I read another article from the author and subscribed just based on how concisely she expresses her ideas. She just gets her point across, then quits. I love it.
- mkesper 11mo agoLego "classic" sets still exist luckily.
- mettamage 11mo agoTo me, game consoles were toys. Maybe they are a lot more now but the SNES and N64 felt like toys. The pc felt like a toy too. I am very likely to be a father in the future. I am happy I have all my old consoles because it helps a bit with introducing kids to technology without them having access to all of it. Soccer outside was fun too, there was a field nearby our house.
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo agoAh. So they are federated with minimal compatibility issues. There may be a lesson here.
- fidrelity 11mo agoWhen I read the title the first thing that came to my mind were Magna Tiles. Glad they made it on the list. It's the only toy in the house that lasted the test of time from she 4-8 (and counting). Also I love tidying up Magna tiles, even that is fun! My oldest kid got a small sample of Clixco and was surprisingly entertained even with a limited set of possibilities they offered. They're great fidget toys as well.
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo agoI annoy my wife by sorting magnet tiles away color type AND color. I do it as fast as possible with mock sorting algorithms. She shoves them back into the box.
- metaketa 11mo agoTiptoi
- galkk 11mo agoYour mileage may vary… As soon as I got first Minecraft block to my 5yo, the magnatiles were almost forgotten. And she never played Minecraft in her life, but saw the movie and some YouTube vids. The fact that the tiles have an image and purpose is a huge benefit, because she creates better stories with them. But I got it only after i got kiddo to cleanup her toys from the floor regularly.
- gervwyk 11mo agoI’m surprised no one mentions Knex. By far my childhood favorite, and for me, far more creative opportunity when comparing to something like lego.
- stevenjgarner 11mo agoYes! K’NEX [1] is based on spatial geometry. You connect plastic rods of different lengths into star-shaped connectors. This creates a "skeleton" or wireframe structure. It is much better than LEGO for building large-scale, open-air structures like roller coasters, Ferris wheels, and bridges. It is superior for kinetic builds. Interestingly, K’NEX has released "K’NEX Bricks" in the past that are compatible with LEGO studs, and some modern K’NEX sets include brick-compatible parts. [1] https://www.basicfun.com/knex/ https://www.basicfun.com/knex/
- leobg 11mo agoNow we finally know where the LLMs learned this style: > K’NEX isn’t just a building toy—it’s a gateway to limitless creativity!
- stevenjgarner 11mo agoHaha! Great catch. That specific structure ... "It’s not just a [Product], it’s a [Experience/Metaphor]!" ... is a classic trope of mid-to-late 20th-century American advertising. This style exploded during the "Creative Revolution" of advertising (1960s–1980s). Agencies like Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) began moving away from "reason-why" copy (which listed technical specs) toward emotional copy. So it is kind of a time capsule, like a website from the 90's. In professional copywriting, this is called Feature-to-Benefit Transformation. In classical rhetoric, this is a form of Correctio - when a speaker replaces a word or a description with a more powerful one to emphasize a point.
- jauntywundrkind 11mo agoI still think of Capsela a lot. That's my weird pick. Weird spheres that had gears and motors and things. It wasn't fancy, I didn't do that many incredible things with it (vs my LEGOs) but wow, still hits as a very special kind of toy, just because it was the only one that actually did things.
- chhxdjsj 11mo agoHas anyone had experienced with the giant magnet tiles? This article seems like suspicious affiliate marketing which places are beloved product that everybody has beside one that looks kind of similar.
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo agoFirst I’m seeing them, but that means very little. Every preschool we used had the normal magnet tiles though so I’m familiar with the concept. Fair to question this. Most things are fake and… lame.
- joannabregan 11mo agoAuthor here, I don't think I did affiliate market links.
- kleinishere 11mo agojust encountered these in a local public library a week ago. toddlers loved them.
- somat 11mo agoI vote the cardboard box, especially if it is a large appliance box, Unfortunately you can't really give someone a large cardboard box, but oh boy are they fun.
- rolisz 11mo agoI can't convince my wife to let my kids keep the big cardboard box, even though they love it!
- joannabregan 11mo agoCardboard box is a good one.
- relaxing 11mo agoThank you for writing about parenting. Today was a tough day with the kids, and reading your blog after they’ve gone to sleep helped things feel a little better.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- stevenjgarner 11mo agoCardboard box demolition ideas for kids [1] I like where this video is going, letting kids explore the structural capabilities of different geometries. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABHhzIJ18gQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABHhzIJ18gQ
- konart 11mo ago> I score my toys across 3 dimensions What about kid’s development? The whole point (okay, not while but the biggest) of a game is learning something.
- analog31 11mo agoFirst time parent? Just kidding. My experience as a parent, and the conventional wisdom of parents I've known, including my own, is that there's no predicting the influence of a given toy on a kid's development[0]. My hunch is that toys are better if they give the kid more agency to make up their own play and games without supervision, and many of the toys mentioned in the article are of that ilk. That could be because I still like toys, to this day, with that kind of built-in agency. Also, growing up in a emotionally stable family culture that values curiosity and learning is probably a huge deal. [0] Excluding cellphones and the Internet, which are their own discussion of course.
- pverheggen 11mo agoThe toy with the most longevity from my childhood were those cardboard bricks. Could be used for anything from forts, towers, hamster mazes, throwable weapons... Not the quickest toy to clean up, but still fun since it's a building activity of its own, stacking them against a wall or something.
- lanthade 11mo agoI had the same experience, loved my cardboard bricks. My kid never connected with them the same though even though my kid is big on building toys. Now they mostly just take up space, should probably give them away.
- xg15 11mo agoA phone would get perfect score in all of OP's metrics, so I feel there is some stuff missing to identify really good toys.
- mttch 11mo agoAfter my daughter turned 4, the ‘toy’ with the most play time and lowest clean up time was a good pad of blank paper and colouring pencils. The bonus is that it takes up little room and is therefore highly portable. Furthermore, if you forget it, you can replace it easily and cheaply!
- rolisz 11mo agoEhrm, I beg to differ. My 4 year old daughter has recently also started loving to draw. But, she pretty much refuses to let go of her masterpieces, at least we conviced her to store them in a shoebox, so they're not spread all over the house. And the pencils... Well, I've been picking up an awful lot of pencils from all over the house. So I'm not sure I agree with the "lowest clean up time", even though I'm really glad she's picked this up as a "hobby".
- furyofantares 11mo agoBy my measure, ever since we started taking in art supplies 5+ years ago we have yet to finish cleaning up.
- mttch 11mo agoWe have a specific area for drawing so the ‘mess’ is confined to a small area. Our daughter is happy to likes to give the drawings away and isn’t overly attached to them after they’ve been displayed for a short while - I don’t personally see this as mess as I am also quite proud of her pictures. If I judge magnetic tiles by the same measure I should also include the storage space taken up by a large plastic box of magnetic tiles, the resistance to tidy away their tile creations and the frustration when younger siblings get involved!
- stocksinsmocks 11mo agoI feel like this list says a lot more about what the author wants her kids to be interested in than a real survey of the whole toy market. There are a few stuffed animals that get tons of love, and the magnet blocks were a hit for a couple months but then they got old. This is going to trigger a deluge of unsolicited admonition, but the television and the Nintendo switch have by far the highest entertainment value per dollar spent.
- Sammi 11mo agoDolls, cars, and balls weren't even mentioned...
- droopyEyelids 11mo agoParents who are analyzing the problem like you would do well going straight to the iPad with unlimited access to YouTube. You can get an old iPad cheap and your kid will spend every waking second on it till they're old enough to drive. Or even longer!
- joannabregan 11mo agoI'm the author, and my husband immediately had the same feedback: iPad should be at the top of the list. I responded that iPad wasn't a toy, and he strongly disagreed.
- droopyEyelids 11mo agoImo, there would be no value in writing something where an iPad would satisfy the requirements, and I appreciated the list, and we're thinking about the large magnatile things now. Do you have an easel whiteboard paper roll thing? I think it fits this list.
- joannabregan 11mo agoI tried the easel and whiteboard paper roll when my kids were younger and it was not a great experience. But I think those things change with time. Cool to hear it fits the list for you.
- threethirtytwo 11mo agosmartphone. but everyone here is psychologically against this even though it's true.
- M95D 11mo agoI was expecting to see a tablet/phone in the top place: repeatability = 5, length of play = 5, clean up ease = 5. I know it's bad to give a kid a tablet, but the scoring used in the article is that bad it didn't award any points for how good it is for a child...
- joannabregan 11mo agoYeah, my husband told me after I published that I missed the iPad as as the clear #1.
- oh_fiddlesticks 11mo agoYeah but I'm glad you don't consider the ipad a toy. It's not a toy, i predict that we're going to look back at this time of 'ipad + headphone kids' and roll our eyes as much as we roll our eyes at bloodletting.
- lanthade 11mo agoScreen devices can be a toy but it takes very intentional use of them. My child has had an old iPhone se since 4yo. It has no network connection. I load music on it. It only has music, camera, and voice recorder apps. Like most toys it gets intense periods of play and then goes back in the toy box with a dead battery for weeks. It's my assertion that the problem with tablets/phones as toys for kids is the endless stream of new content. It's addictive and never gets old. If you find a way to cut off the firehouse of new (and keep the addictive apps off) then they eventually become just another boring toy. Us adults could learn from this too.
- didgeoridoo 11mo agocan confirm. we just got the kids those giant magna-tiles. they’ve played with nothing else today.
- analog31 11mo agoSomething I'm wondering. My kids are grown now. When they were little, we got a toy with connecting magnetic pieces, don't remember the name. The magnets broke out of the brittle plastic easily and it was actually a pretty low quality toy although the concept was cool. There was also some kind of recall or warning about the possibility of kids ingesting the magnets. That's about all I remember. Of course you never know as a parent whether the latest safety threat is serious or over-hyped. The claimed threat was that the magnets would click together in your intestines and wreak havoc. I wonder what the present conventional wisdom is on those magnets.
- The_President 11mo agoThe way it used to be, is if they come back with fasteners and nails attached after playing in the grass it's worth mentioning to the pediatrician on the next visit.
- saagarjha 11mo agoMagnetix?
- analog31 11mo agoThat might be it, and a quick search suggests that there were some recalls associated with it. Also, my kids didn't really gravitate to it. Their "construction" toys were a hodgepodge of blocks, some cheap "thomas train" knock-offs, stuffed animals, you name it, all combined into one giant mess. ;-)
- dandano 11mo agoMy parents literally just gave my daughter the alphabet puzzle for Christmas that was linked in the article as a terrible clean up vs play-time. I might send them this link!
- 1970-01-01 11mo agoThe best toys are the ones that your children love to play with. There isn't a formal method for finding it. The rule of thumb is don't buy noisy toys nor toys that have parts small enough to get lost under the car seats on first play.
- lanthade 11mo agoThese are all good toys, my middle elementary kid really likes magnatiles. That said, I still think Lego runs the board. My 40yo Lego is still in use, I still get pleasure out of it and my kid gets even more. My kid and I just finished team building the UCS millennium falcon and now we're having a blast playing with it. Soon it'll start being scavenged for other projects. I've never seen another toy equal Lego in replayability or in the vast array of ways it can be used. As a crusty old coot I complain about the seemingly single use pieces in new Lego sets and then watch as my kid uses them in new and creative ways in MOCs. No other toy we have has the same staying power and much to my wife's chagrin it's the yardstick by which I measure every other toy.
- salomonk_mur 11mo agoThey are just too expensive nowadays.
- lanthade 11mo agoThat's a common refrain that frankly just isn't backed up by analysis of the inflation adjusted price of Lego over time. https://www.pricing-evolution.com/p/surprising-trends-in-lego-pricing https://www.pricing-evolution.com/p/surprising-trends-in-leg... The data in the graph from this next post shows an inflation adjusted per brick price of .40 USD in 1980 vs a little above $.10 now. Perhaps more interesting is the cost per gram analysis which also shows a large drop. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15flwte/is_lego_getting_more_expensive_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15flwte/is... I think people tend to romanticize the past and underestimate the effect of inflation across decades. One thing that may contribute to the idea that Lego is now too expensive is that the average sets seem to be larger and more complex now. Even if the bricks are cheaper the sheer quantity of them will inherently raise the set price. That may explain why the data in the Reddit post shows average median set cost having risen even while per brick cost has decreased.
- elboru 11mo agoTip: Look for someone selling their grownup children’s Lego collection. I recently found a couple selling their children’s old Lego collection in Facebook Marketplace. I got an enormous bag of them for just a few bucks. It was a headache to filter out the garbage in them (small non-LEGO toys, unique pieces that were not really useful, a few mixed mega blocks, broken pieces, etc) but it was worth it, my children love them!
- gcanyon 11mo agoWhen our kids were little we got them a wire bead rollercoaster, something like: https://www.ebay.com/itm/304637213979 https://www.ebay.com/itm/304637213979 It's one piece. Cleanup is picking it up and putting it where you want it. For playability, that thing kept each of our kids occupied for an unreasonable portion of their toddler-hood. We then passed it on to friends, and it did the same for their kids. They kept it, and gave it back to our kids when they had kids, and it's still delivering joy.
- Jach 11mo agoI never liked these sorts of construction toys, or legos. I'd rank any of my old action figures higher on the 3 dimensions. Sometimes some stuffed animals joined in the play. And of course as I got older, video games.
- moi2388 11mo ago[flagged]
- eleventen 11mo agoDuplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315583
- thordenmark 11mo agoCan confirm that Magna-tiles score high on replayability and are way easier to clean up than Legos. My kids are teens now, but were the right age when these came out. Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys for a greener more affordable option.
- m463 11mo agoCouldn't help but think: #1 is probably an ipad, and lego is probably last place because of that one time a parent stepped on one barefoot. but the toys in the article actually seem nice.
- ipsum2 11mo ago14 points but 211 comments and hasn't been auto flagged for flame war detection is a first, in the almost 15 years I've been on HN.
- elboru 11mo agoFor some reason comments were moved from the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315583
- tomhow 11mo agoSorry for the confusion on this. There's a weird thing that happens when a post is put in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) then get lobbed onto the front page nearly 7 days after it was submitted. It can be getting lots of upvotes and a good discussion, then suddenly it "expires" and loses its ranking and disappears, which means the discussion ends prematurely and people who may have found it interesting may not see it. So I've tried to rescue it by creating a fresh copy of the post, and moving the comments to it. I've now restored the karma score to it too to make it less confusing. There's no way to do this that avoids some form of confusion to some people but at least this way the post gets its deserved amount of time on the front page and full opportunity for the discussion to play out.
- Nevermark 11mo agoSomething I like about Lego is that there are some small changes to available pieces, that result in large changes to play style. Large flat bases to build on, or not. Wheels, or not. Little characters, or not. Train tracks, or not. Etc. If you don't make all basic context-defining options available all the time, it keeps lego play fresh and fun.
- wkat4242 11mo agoWith that title, I was expecting a different type of toy lol.
- chromanoid 11mo agoLego Duplo is the best. It is a great creative toy at least from 2 to 10. Especially when you have it from early on and it is just "part of the furniture". It's much easier to collect from the ground than Lego. Newer Lego stuff also has so many tiny parts.
- rognjen 11mo agoWhat a strange world we're in when the top comment on a post about toys is about how LLMs are good...
- UltraSane 11mo agoLLMs are perfect for smart and curious kids who ask so many questions they annoy adults like I did. Smart kids can teach themselves many things using them
- kusokurae 11mo agoIf you want to produce children that endear themselves to oleaginousness and have no concept of source verification, yes.
- UltraSane 11mo agoHow would kids know if what they are taught by adults is correct? The same way they would verify what LLMs say. By repeated questions to different models and checking for consistency. My parents sent me to young earth creationist schools so don't act like people are any more reliable than Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3
- rognjen 10mo agoIt seems to me that you may not have read the comment in question - it wasn't that LLMs are a good toy, it was just that LLMs are good at a particular aspect of the authors writing.
- techsystems 11mo agoUseful! It would be amazing if the catalogue was much bigger
- nopakos 11mo agoMousetrap the board game is the opposite: Hard to setup, almost zero playtime, very hard to put back in the box. Repeat twice a day because the kids love the idea of the game!
- raffael_de 11mo agoI gifted my 6 year old nephew a cheap hand held analog radio (and a few other things to be fair). He loved it. I guess, it must be fascinating for a child to turn a wheel and then different music and voices are coming out of it. Also it has a frequency scale that's controlled by the wheel which I assume is good for training a technical perspective on controlled action and reaction. The antenna has to be pointed in the right direction. Maybe this gets him interested in why that is. Certainly no clean-up-time at all and play-time probably also decent.
- bartimus 11mo agoIf you can classify Minecraft as a toy, it has zero clean-up time
- pennomi 11mo agoFilling in creeper holes and cutting down floating trees left by my children is a never ending job though.
- slumberlust 11mo agoTwo things come to mind. There's a relatively cheap bumblebee rider with casters at target. Our boy has grown with this thing from the moment he could sit upright and push. Now that he's older he rips around the house on it and drifts. Second is something to climb on. We have a product called the nugget with nevernudes (accident protection) and he's tumbled and built shops/forts out of it for years now.
- MagicMoonlight 11mo agoI like the look of those massive tiles that you can use to build structures. That would have been very fun to have.
- etruong42 11mo agoI got one of these: https://chompshop.com/collections/chompsaws/products/chompsaw https://chompshop.com/collections/chompsaws/products/chompsa... So long as you have a steady stream of cardboard (whether from packages shipped to your home or it ends up in your friendly neighbors' recycling), I anticipate that you could always make things, solo or with friends. I've heard that one can use wheat paste as cardboard glue. My hope is to have the combination of a cardboard "saw" and cardboard glue is to result in something like (nail-free) carpentry that kids can perform nearly entirely unsupervised. Even making simple shapes that can go into dioramas and be props for roleplaying would already be great, I hope!
- aeonik 11mo agoI bought some transparent polycarbonate tubes for a ventilation system I built, and I had a few leftover tubes. These tubes have been one of the most consistently used toys for the last 2 years. They are about 5 bucks a piece depending on length.
- brcmthrowaway 11mo agosaved
- m0d0nne11 10mo agoOur spendthrift overpaid sociopath SIL supplies our grandchildren with all the latest crap (inevitably purchased at maximum-buttfu*k boutique retail prices!) only for every item to end up ignored after a cursory inspection and then abandoned in drifts on the floor - they literally have to rent a dumpster at least once a year to throw it all away! It's truly vile. So I treasure the memory of the look on SIL's face from a couple years back when I presented a gift to our grandson that he played with indoors until spring and then out in the yard until SIL... threw it away! It was 20ft of rope from Home Depot.
- kumarsw 10mo agoGiven that this is hacker news, the answers here are unsurprisingly biased towards building toys. Blocks/Duplo are great, but who is going to explore the newly built environment? Enter the die-cast toy cars/trucks/construction equipment/farm equipment. I've had good luck with the Ertl 1/50th scale stuff, which can be purchased in lots on Ebay.