What separates the toys that get played with from the toys that get put away.
4 min read
Tell many children it's time to go for a run and the enthusiasm can disappear surprisingly quickly. Hand one of them a kite in that same park and they'll run until they're out of breath, without once being asked to. Same distance, same afternoon, completely different response. The only thing that changed is that nobody framed it as exercise. That gap is worth paying attention to. It tells you something useful about choosing toys: movement isn't something children resist. It's something they do constantly when the reason to move is interesting enough. The toys worth keeping are the ones that supply the reason.
There are four ways toys keep children moving, and they build outwards: around the toy, around another child, around the room and out of the door.
The toy pulls them around it
Watch a child with a garage set or a track and you'll notice they rarely stay in one place. They circle round to watch the car come through the loop from the other side. They drop flat to floor level to see the ramp head on. They shuffle backwards to take in the whole layout, then move in close again when something is about to happen. None of this is fetching a dropped piece. It's repositioning, driven by wanting a better view, and it's the quietest form of movement a toy produces. The test is simple enough to apply in a shop: is there anything here worth walking round to see?
Another child pulls them into it
Add a second child and the movement changes character. Two lanes rather than one, two cars rather than one, and suddenly they're following each other's cars as closely as their own, leaning in at the crossover, standing up to see who takes the bend first. Nobody stays sitting down for a race they might lose. It's the same reason a game in the park runs for an hour while a lap of the park alone loses its appeal in ten minutes. Competition takes care of the effort, and the effort stops being the thing anyone is thinking about. Toys built for two do this without needing an adult to organise it. With two remote control cars in particular, one specification decides whether they can run side by side at all, which we cover in the RC toy buying guide.
The play moves house
A track built across the floor on Saturday becomes a track running up a window on Sunday, then along a door frame, then down the side of a wardrobe. Most retailers sell this as longevity, and it is that. The more interesting part is what each rebuild asks of the body. Floor level means kneeling and crawling. A window build means standing, reaching overhead and stretching onto tiptoe. A door frame means working at head height with both arms up. The layout changes and the child's posture changes with it, which is a very different proposition from a toy that only ever works on a rug.
And sometimes it goes outside
Then there's the version with no track at all. A plane or a kite in an open space, and a child running flat out for as long as it stays up, changing direction, looking up, sprinting to get underneath it again. There's no layout to build and no lanes to race in. There's just something in the air worth chasing, and running is what happens while they're chasing it. This is the clearest example of the whole idea, and it's where this article started: the running was never the instruction, which is exactly why it happened.
None of this makes any one toy essential. It's a way of looking at what's already in the toy box, and a way of choosing the next thing that goes in it. Many of the RC toys in our range work on the first two, track sets and racing sets in particular. The scooters collection skips straight to the fourth, where the movement is the entire point. You can see how the rest of the range fits together on the Go Play page.
FAQs
What should I look for when choosing an active play toy?
Ask what the toy makes a child do with their body. Is there something worth walking round to see, can two children play at once, does it rebuild somewhere new and does it ever end up outdoors? A toy doesn't need all four, but the ones that manage two or three are the ones that keep getting picked up.
Does this mean quiet toys are bad?
Not at all. Books, puzzles and drawing do work that active toys don't, and a toy box needs both. This is about one particular property, not a ranking.
How much activity should a child get in a day?
The NHS publishes physical activity guidance by age group, with separate advice for children under 5 and for children and young people aged 5 to 18. We'd rather point you there than paraphrase it.
