What Are The Best Toys
Your Children Ever Had?

Lego is the Best Toy Ever according to over 800 parents surveyed by gogoblin.co.uk with eParenting. 41% of you named Lego as one of the 5 best toys your children ever had. Behind Lego come Monopoly, Barbie, toy cars, bicycles and footballs. Your criteria for selecting these particular toys were “most played with” and “most loved”

1. Lego - 41% of respondents
2. Monopoly - 16% of respondents
3. Barbie - 15% of respondents
4. Toy Cars - 14% of respondents
5. Bicycle - 10% of respondents
6. Football - 9% of respondents

You chose a wide range of toys and games – from soft toys (3.8% of all the toys and games mentioned) to toys which stimulate the imagination (34%). Interestingly (surprisingly?) the modern favourites, games consoles, seem not as popular with the parents as they are with certain age groups of children. Only 9% of all the toys mentioned were games consoles of any kind compared with outdoor toys (balls, swings, slides, trampolines) at over 11% and board games at a massive 16% of all the Best Toys named in the survey. Toy cars, train sets and soft toys all scored very high too.

So what, if anything, do the most popular toys have in common? I think it must be the versatility: with Lego, a child is limited only by his or her imagination. What began as a Starfighter will end up in pieces in the Lego box, only to be resurrected as a robot, a building or an elaborate racing car. Barbie is a little girl’s everywoman – a vet, a mermaid, a catwalk model a mother or just Ken’s girlfriend. And, like Lego, you can play with her on your own as well as with friends.

Likewise, the toy cars: a 2 year old will play with cars in a very different way from a 6 or 8 year old. The toys grow up with the child’s expanding world. With footballs, bicycles and Monopoly perhaps the attraction for parents is that these are activities for the whole family. I think this survey shows how much we value the importance of imaginative play as well as toys and games that we share as families. I hope that our children would have made the same choices.

So how does this help us with our Christmas shopping? Well you could do a lot worse than put Lego on your children’s gogoblin wish lists this Christmas. Board games make great family presents and, for boys of 5 or 6 all the way up to teens footballs, are a good bet (as the more they are “loved” the more often they need to be replaced). That doesn’t mean that they won’t spend all of Christmas day with the latest Nintendo game though…

For the full results of the survey visit http://www.gogoblin.co.uk/public/Best-Ever-Toys.asp

The winner of the £50 John Lewis voucher was TB, of Co. Durham, who said "Thanks for such wonderful news - it has made my day, especially as my wonderfully helpful hubby this morning put my brand new, once worn, handwash only cardigan into the washing machine, and it now fits my 9 year old daughter! The vouchers will be fantastic as I can now replace the cardigan."

Jane Manson is CEO of www.gogoblin.co.uk, the UK’s first and only wish list website for children and teens.

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