Just consider the Toy Association’s “unifying characteristics” for a great STEM toy. They toys that foster those qualities are usually simple and not electronic.īut importantly, that does not place the most recommended toys for children’s play at odds with the STEM fields. Pediatricians are stalwart in their recommendation that play should be active, open-ended, imaginative, and cooperative.

They noted that preschool children (particularly low-income children) who were given blocks to play with at home under minimal adult supervision, showed improved language acquisition at a 6-month check-up. In a recent report from the American Association of Pediatrics, researchers noted that play incorporating physical activity, pretending, and traditional toys like block and shape sorters, helped improve children’s skills. Again, this wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t represent a distraction from more productive - and frankly cheaper - forms of play. So expensive toys marketed as STEM-focused are more for parents than they are for kids (the Toy Association found that 55 percent of parents said that labeling the toy as STEM made it a more attractive prospect). She describes trying to place a 5-year-old on any kind of career path as, in a word, “silly.” Kidd notes that there are far too many foundational, conceptional building blocks children need to possess before they become anywhere near thinking of a specialty in life. “It is neither necessary or possible to divine a toy that will prepare a toddler for a job they will have as an adult.” Celeste Kidd of the University of Berkley Kidd Lab. “It’s not necessary to have toys to prepare a toddler for their future jobs,” explains child development researcher Dr. Though those toys aren’t harmful, per se, the consumer logic underlying their popularity may be. Lots of people buy complicated STEM toys made for toddlers. Another 85 percent of parents planned on encouraging their child to learn to code. Moreover, 75 percent of parents wanted their child to end up in a career related to STEM. The parents surveyed felt, on average, a child should be on a career path by around 5 years old.

In May of this year, the central toy trade group the Toy Association issued a report that included a survey of 2,000 parents who were queried about their feelings on STEM fields and STEM toys. In other words, the doctors, engineers, and architects of the future may just need to go outside and screw around. And that matters, because STEM toys have a tendency to be expensive and a parent’s reliance on them could crowd out play we know to beneficial for child development, namely open-ended, imaginative, and cooperative play in natural environments. Unfortunately, though this goal is accepted as virtuous by parents anxious about their children’s economic future, there remains no real proof that STEM toys are effective and (perhaps ironically) there’s little data-backed support for the STEM premise. There are after-school STEM programs, STEM summer camps, and a steadily growing market of STEM toys, all of which seem to share a common goal: promote the skills necessary for academic success and subsequent access to better-paid jobs. The term, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, has birthed a technical subgenre of children’s activities and products. STEM education is a relatively new phenomenon for American kids.

Stem toys for kids