Bought some books today. Paper ones, because there were too many unread ones in my Kindle to see them and my bookshelf of similarly unread books had a little more room. And, as a father sometimes does, at checkout I thought maybe I’d throw in something for the kids.
So I go over to Amazon’s toy section. Which has a lot of toys. But hey, categories! And one of them is “Learning & Education” which is secret code for “I brought more crap into the house post-Xmas but OMG DO YOU WANT THEM TO GO OT HARVARD OR NOT?”
However.
Here’s the list of top toys for 2-4 year olds, sorted by popularity:
That’s right, the most important lesson for young children to learn, as voted by most purchases, which would imply as believed by most parents, is how to mow the lawn.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing, I just don’t have a lawn.
On a side note, the number 6 option was a stacking game that you could probably modify into a Towers of Hanoi puzzle, which every 2-4 year old should be able to master easily. Because I’ve been trained to recognize possible Hanoi games at every opportunity. Fun side note to the side note, while I was in shopping mode this season I found a Hanoi game as a puzzle gift, “based on an ancient mathematical puzzle,” though this was for adults who like to feel like they still have the skills and passion for learning that they remember from grade 3.