Research has revealed how quickly kids get bored with new toys
If you’ve ever thought that buying toys for your kids seems like a cycle of desperate pestering followed by boredom, you’d be 100 percent spot on.
Waste not, want not?
Turns out that at best, kids are pretty much over a new toy in around a month. But most kids get sick of new things much, much sooner than that and parents are ditching perfectly good toys at an amazing rate.
The British Heart Foundation has just revealed that 28 percent of UK parents “admit to discarding toys that are in perfect working order.”
“A new survey of parents discovered that, on average, a child loses interest in a toy within just 36 days. A fifth of parents said their child lost interest after 11 hours of play, while 8 percent said their children became bored in less than an hour.”
This trend is a brilliant reminder to choose toys very carefully and perhaps at least try to avoid impulse buys that might end up on the scrap heap.
Don’t bin it! Don’t buy it!
Obviously, this is a UK survey, but chances are this is the story for most kids in the Western world.
Their survey found that kids “have an average of four toys they’ve never even played with – which could add up to as many as 162 million unused toys in the UK” alone.
A careful Kondo
Now that everyone’s Kondo-ing their homes like mad, the British Heart Foundation is urging parents to be part of a ‘Toy Amnesty’ by donating unwanted toys to their charity shops.
And generally, the foundation is hoping that parents think more carefully about where their gently-used or unused toys end up.
This is a great prompt to rethink giving in to that desperate pestering. Maybe parents would rather avoid places that sell toys and put those hard-earned pennies towards something that will benefit everyone in the long-term instead?
That’s a big call when you’re in line at Kmart and a very small but very loud someone is screaming at you, we know.
Maybe just something to think about.
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