A Zoo Full of Wooden Animal Toys Might be The Perfect Toy for Young Children

If you got a kid or are still keen on revisiting your childhood memories every once in a while, one thing would stand out: the amount of plastic you played around with. Not surprising since such material appears to be everywhere we look, the big chain toy retailer is especially fond of it. But did you know that as of late, a recent trend among many new parents is that they are completely sick of plastic? Yes, it’s true. A lot of parents raising babies these days want nothing to do with the substance whatsoever despite likely having played (and still playing) with it during their childhoods.

While that might seem odd, a quick glance into the negative effects of plastic and the extensive research to back it up to its enough to make us reconsider the relationship we got with the material, even for those of us that are not yet parents.

The fact that it is not biodegradable at all and each plastic part of a product could be around forever is concerning enough for the environment. Worse yet its that it might also have a profound effect on children and their development.

Chemicals that can easily latch on to plastic products and even chemicals that are specifically added to plastic to make it more durable might interfere with the still-developing hormonal system of young children.

Thus, parents have every reason to be wary of the substance and toys that employ it as its central material. Luckily, many are taking notice of this these days and are changing too, or rather returning to, a more wholesome (and traditional) option: wooden toys like MUKAYIMO wooden toys.

Why So Many Parents Are Choosing Wooden Animal Toys All of The Sudden

Let’s get one thing staring: parents choosing wooden animal toys or wooden toys of any other kind is not a new thing; it’s been the ruler for a long part of the history of mankind!

Archeological digs sites on almost every single one of the places around the world where ancient civilization stood always stumble upon them. The Mayans had wooden toys, so did the Incas, likewise for ancient Japan, China, India, and Egypt.

Whichever ancient civilization you can think of online researching right now, it’s likely to have provided wooden toys and toys fashioned of other more ‘natural’ materials (like hair!) to their children.

While we today might simply think that this is because they lacked our industrial capacity, crafty wooden animal toys have some not-so-surprising perks.

What Is Good About Wooden Animal Toys Anyways?

When people started making toys fashioned out of wood, they made sure to give them the shape of something familiar to them. Some toys had a shape resembling humans; some were more akin to the animals that no doubt surrounded them in their day-to-day life.

Some other toys may have had an even more abstract yet, surprisingly functional and entertaining shape, like the ball and cup toy. Yet, both those kinds of toys and the human-shaped kind of wooden toys were a bit predictive to play with.

See, with toys like MUKAYIMOTOYS’ ball and cup wooden toy, the whole game is about putting the ball inside the cup. When playing with human-shaped toys, children were more likely than not to try to make them imitate what they saw the adults around them doing.

Walking, speaking to one another, fighting, partying, picking up crops, etc., with varying degrees of success for each activity they tried to simulate. With wooden animal toys, that is another story since children are likely to have only limited contact with animals and, hopefully, mostly with domesticated ones.

Thus, they had to really think about what, say, wooden animal toys shaped like a lion would do in order to imitate that during playtime. This leads us to one of the main reasons wooden animal toys are so good for children…

Wooden Animal Toys Encourage Imaginative Play

When we are talking about imaginative play, we refer exactly to the kind of playtime in which children are going to need to think. Rest assured, this is not a scenario in which they are under pressure as they would be during a school evaluation.

On the contrary, imaginative play it’s a fun time in which children can figure out and come up with many different ways to play with their wooden toys. Wooden toys, by the way, are specifically great for this since there is not a predetermined way in which to play with them

For example, wooden animal toys it’s likely just a representation of the animal it is supposedly elaborated after. Yet, since the toy likely has no joints around its body and certainly no button that makes it perform an action, children have to figure out how to play with it.

If they ever got their hands on lion-shaped wooden animal toys, for example, they would have to figure out what do lions do. How to move, behave, sound like, how do they interact with other wooden animal toys of different species they might have.

While they might certainly catch a glimpse of a lion on TV, children are still naturally curious. They are going to come up with thousands upon thousands of different questions regarding the animal’s behavior while playing with the toy.

While they might also come up with unheard-of notions like, say, playing like their wooden lion toy, it’s capable of living underwater; they are still thinking. Simply the act of thinking is enough to engage in imaginative play and stimulate their critical thought abilities from early on. Another good thing about wooden toys is that, with a little care, they might last you a long time.

Even Your Children’s Grandchildren Might Play With the same Wooden Animal Toys

Greatly carved, high-quality wooden animal toys can last a lifetime or even several with little care. The good kind of these toys are smooth and rounded around the edges as to best accommodate the children’s hands.

This also has the added advantages of making it unlikely they break and leave splinters due to also being thick enough to endure rough handling.

In fact, as long as you are able to avoid molding in wooden toys by cleaning them well, the most deterioration you could see in them is their painting, if they have any, fading over time. That last one is easily remediable with a fresh coat of it, however.

If you still have any doubt of just how much wooden animal toys can last, remember that archeologist routinely find wooden toys at dig sites that are thousands of years old. Several hundred lifetimes over the actual animals they represent and more than enough to entertain the children of your family for many years to come. If high-quality wooden animal toys are what you look for, look no further than MUKAYIMO’s zoo-worthy variety of them.