Real Play vs. Video Game Play. What's Better For Your Child?

As parents, we see it all too often: a child sitting alone in front of a glowing screen playing some kind of video game. Whether they’re deep into an a multiplayer online game with friends, or shooting the bad guys all by themselves, it can be a concerning thing for a parent to see. Why aren’t they out playing in the yard with their friends? How come they don’t go for a bike ride or play Hide and Seek anymore?

Most kids like to build things, and there are lots of toys on the market (mostly made in China).  So often, toys claim to allow kids to “use their imagination” but do the exact opposite.  Parents buy a kit for a child to build a product —but there’s no imagination in the process at all: the kids simply follow visual instructions, assemble the kit exactly as shown, and there is the finished product.  Not a lot of creativity involved in that.

Instead, how about giving your kids a toy that:

1.     Entices them away from sitting around watching a device?

2.     Combines their imagine with actual physical play?

3.     Promotes teamwork and collaboration and how to play together?

Kidz Forts toy sets do all these things—and more. A famous study of playgrounds conducted in England years ago found that the best playgrounds often consist of no more than a few used pallets, some boards, a pile of sand, and a hammer and some nails. Kids love these simple designs because it allows them to do an activity they enjoy more than anything else: building their own structures.

It’s asking a lot for the average parents to create playgrounds like this. But what parents can do is give their children tools that will enable them to build whatever they can imagine, whether that’s a fort, a castle, a home, an airplane, or a boat. The finished structure doesn’t need to actually look like any of those things—as long as the child can imagine it to be one of these things.

Toys like Kidz Forts enable open-ended play. They provide the basic material so your kids can add that one special ingredient: their own imagination. And Kidz Fort’s connectors have a patented “turn-key” design, which makes it easier for your little engineers and architects to put the pieces together and make their fantasy fort come true!