As parents we want the best for our kids. We want them to have fun, but we also want them to learn - to set them up for future life as much as possible. Which is why so many of us worry about what children are playing with, whether it helps them to develop.

We know that children enjoy toys, some of us may even remember enjoying them ourselves. But are such diversions good for children, or should we be pushing them towards something more educational that will help them later in life?

Why Toys are Important for a Child's Development

Many of us learn important skills as a child by playing - and it is often through interacting with toys that these skills first come about. For example we can learn such things as hand/eye co-ordination by playing with building blocks like Duplo and Lego, we can learn how to work as teams, important social skills, by playing games with others and we can learn how to bounce back from failure by losing at board games.

This is how children learn - they extrapolate the skills that they are using by playing and learn them and adapt them to other scenarios. And these are skills that matter in every day life, from driving a car to working on a project.

It also helps them to develop skills for more basic needs - playing with a ball as a youngster can encourage movement, which in turn encourages them to learn to walk, and then run, properly. This is what gets missed by many parents, the importance of the simple skills above developing too much too soon.

Children's toy are an essential part of their childhood, allowing them to develop at a faster pace than if they didn't have them. They learn imagination, rules and cause and effect all by playing games with their toys. As time moves on they will start to develop the concept of planning ahead, of coming up with strategies to win games.

But all this comes form letting children be children, letting them play games with their toys, letting their imagination and sense of joy teach them new things. It is important that we, as parents, nurture these skills by providing them with the right tools... and that doesn't always mean the right educational toy. In many instances the child will learn just as much, if not more, from a toy that they want to be playing with.