If you have a toddler, chances are that you also have stuffed animals, magnetic tiles, cars and building blocks scattered throughout your home. But as it turns out, kids need fewer toys than you may think.
Occupational therapist Dr. Alexia Metz led a widely cited research study at the University of Toledo in 2017 for toddlers between 18 and 30 months old. She brought them into a room with age-appropriate “sit and play” items like dump trucks and stacking toys.
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WATCH HEREWhat was the magic number of toys for the kids she studied? Just four.
“We keep bringing home more and more toys, thinking this is the toy that will get my kid into Harvard,” Metz tells TODAY.com. “But then we don’t see the value in their playing because they can’t organize themselves enough to play.”
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SIGN UP Kids in her research groups took an inventory of the 16 toys placed in the room. They picked them up and put them down in rapid succession during a standardized amount of time, almost as if they had shiny object syndrome.
“That exploration is so fast-paced that they don’t have time to sit and explore all the things a toy can do before they need to move on to the next one,” Metz says.
But when toddlers entered a room with just four toys present, “they went and they looked at them all, but then they had time to go back to each toy. They sat down and they played with it for twice as long, and they did many more things with it,” explains Metz, mentioning that kids would press all the buttons, stack the pieces or start playing pretend.
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Not only did the kids play longer with fewer toys, but their quality of play improved.
“There wasn’t that enticement of something else to go check out. Kids knew they wouldn’t miss anything if they sat there for another minute to play with the toy and see what it can do,” she says.
If you initially scoff at the idea of just four toys entertaining a child, think about the way your toddler plays with the handful of toys at the doctor's office. Notice what happens if you add a toy they haven't touched for months to the donation pile. Or pay attention to how intensely your child will play after you spent all afternoon cleaning their room. Seeing fewer toys encourages more in-depth play.
As a mom who raised her twins in a 1,000-square-foot Chicago apartment, Metz approaches her research from both an academic and pragmatic point of view.
“There was just no space,” she recalls of her kids’ toddler years. “My kids had everything they could want or need — and lots of these are really great therapist-approved toys — but it’s just too much. They can’t settle down and play.”
Metz cautions that her research doesn't perfectly translate to the average home (which likely has a wider variety of trending toys rather than the classic items used in the study), but there are certainly lessons parents can learn.
She says that the number of toys a toddler has is irrelevant, but what is important is the number of toys that are available to them at any given time.
“You can have your hundreds of toys if you have a place to store them, so that when a kid has time to play there’s just a smaller number available at the moment,” she says. Rotating toys within your own home can help, as well as swapping toys with other families.
Tyler Moore, author of “” and creator of the social media platform @TidyDad, lives in Queens, New York, in a railroad apartment with his wife and three daughters. He has embraced a specific method of toy rotation.
Moore limited the amount of toys his daughters had access to into what he calls “yes spaces,” which contain things like baby dolls and building blocks. Then he rotates in art supplies, games or other items that would require adult assistance. That mix of common child-led toys and less familiar play kits helped his kids’ imagination “run wild.”
Though toys have changed since Metz's 2017 study, parents have not.
Metz says we can collect kid items without even thinking about it: trinkets from , crayons from restaurants, stickers from the dentist. And there are often gifts from generous friends and family.
But just because we collect things doesn't mean we have to keep them.
“Recognize toys for their short-term value and then pass them on,” she says.
This story first appeared on . More from TODAY:
