The toys a five-year-old plays with today quietly shape the communicator, collaborator and friend they become tomorrow.
The single most effective category of toy for building social skills in five-year-olds is the turn-based game: board games, card games, skittles and outdoor sets that place two or more children in genuine conversation with one another, bound by shared rules and a common goal. These formats require listening, waiting, negotiating and managing disappointment in real time, which is precisely the practice children at this age need most. If you buy only one kind of toy this year for a five-year-old in your life, make it something that insists on other people being present to use it properly.
Age five sits at a remarkable juncture. Most children have left the parallel-play patterns of toddlerhood and are hungry for genuine co-operative experience, yet their impulse control is still developing and their capacity for perspective-taking is only just coming online. The right toy does not remove those tensions; it gives children a safe, structured arena in which to work through them, again and again, until the habits become second nature.
Developmental psychologists have long observed that the years between four and six mark a significant shift in children's social cognition. Jean Piaget described this period as the transition away from egocentric thinking, when children begin to understand that another person's viewpoint genuinely differs from their own. Lev Vygotsky placed equal emphasis on the social scaffold: children learn fastest not in isolation but in the company of a more capable peer or a guiding adult, within what he called the zone of proximal development. Both observations point in the same direction. Five is the age at which the right social experiences leave the deepest marks.
What the research says
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff, whose decades of work on playful learning are among the most cited in early childhood research, argue that guided play, structured enough to have a goal but free enough to allow exploration, produces stronger gains in language, self-regulation and social competence than either direct instruction or unstructured free play alone. A turn-based game with a caring adult present is almost a textbook example of that model.
Every game that requires a child to wait their turn is, in effect, a lesson in executive function. Adele Diamond's research on executive function development shows that the capacity to inhibit an impulsive response and hold a rule in mind while another person takes their turn is one of the strongest predictors of later academic and social success. A simple game of skittles teaches this lesson without a single word of instruction: you bowl, you step back, you watch, you wait, you celebrate someone else's go.
Language, too, grows in the gaps between moves. Hart and Risley's landmark research on early language environments demonstrated that conversational back-and-forth, what they called conversational turns, matters more for vocabulary development than sheer exposure to words. A board game creates dozens of such turns in a single sitting. Children negotiate rules, describe what they see, question outcomes and express feelings, all within a context that makes the conversation feel purposeful rather than performed.
There is a growing body of evidence that open-ended, low-tech toys produce richer social play than their electronic counterparts. Dauch and colleagues found that toddlers playing with fewer, simpler toys engaged in longer and more focused play episodes. Jenny Radesky's research on caregiver-child interaction found that device-based play frequently interrupts the conversational flow that is so central to social learning. Wooden and traditional toys, by contrast, demand imagination to complete them. They invite narration, collaboration and invention.
Durability matters too, though not only in the financial sense. A well-made wooden game carries a kind of seriousness that children sense and respond to. It communicates that the activity is worth care, worth returning to, worth mastering. That is a quietly powerful message at an age when persistence is still fragile.
A note on Jaques of London
Established in 1795 and the world's oldest games company, Jaques of London has been making toys and games that families return to across generations. The company invented croquet in 1851 and created the Staunton chess set in 1849, the design that remains the global standard today. That heritage is not merely historical: it is evidence that some toys genuinely stand the test of time, socially as well as physically.
At five, children are ready for games with clear rules, a definite end point and enough chance involved that skill alone does not always determine the winner. That balance matters enormously: it keeps the playing field level enough for a child to win genuinely, which builds confidence, while ensuring that losing is also a real possibility, which builds resilience. Look for games that involve colour recognition, simple counting or memory, as these add a layer of cognitive engagement without tipping into frustration.
Lotto, dominoes, snap and simple race games all fit this profile well. They are quick enough to complete before attention drifts, rich enough in social interaction to feel genuinely satisfying, and simple enough to play without adult facilitation once the rules are established. Browse the Jaques traditional games collection for beautifully made versions of these classics that will outlast any plastic alternative.
Not all social learning happens around a table. Outdoor games introduce an additional layer of physical co-ordination and spatial negotiation that indoor formats cannot replicate. Skittles, in particular, is a masterclass in shared anticipation: the collective intake of breath as the ball rolls, the communal groan or cheer at the result, the natural rotation of roles between bowler and setter. These moments of shared emotion are, in their quiet way, the building blocks of empathy.
Croquet, even in its simplified garden forms, teaches children to plan ahead, to observe an opponent's position and to accept that the game's geography changes with every turn. Stuart Brown's research on the biology of play highlights that games involving physical movement and social rules together produce particularly strong effects on emotional regulation and peer bonding. Outdoor play also addresses what Richard Louv identified as a growing disconnection between children and the natural world, a disconnection with measurable effects on wellbeing and attention.
Competitive games are valuable, but cooperative formats deserve a place alongside them. In a cooperative game, all players work together against the game itself, which removes the sting of personal defeat and replaces it with collective problem-solving. For children who find losing genuinely distressing, the cooperative format offers a gentler entry point into rule-based play, one that still demands turn-taking, communication and strategic thinking without the social risk of being singled out as the loser.
Kenneth Ginsburg, writing on the importance of play for healthy child development, emphasises that play must feel safe enough for children to take risks. A cooperative game creates exactly that safety: the stakes are shared, the glory is shared, and the conversation about what to try next is genuinely collaborative. Explore the full range of educational toys at Jaques of London for options that blend cooperative mechanics with classic craftsmanship.
The most practical question a parent can ask before buying is not "will my child enjoy this today?" but "will this still be worth playing in two years?" Games with adjustable rules, variable difficulty or broad age ranges offer the best return. A set of dominoes can be played as a simple matching game at four, as a counting exercise at five, and as a strategic tile-placement game at seven. The toy has not changed; the child's relationship with it has deepened.
Look also for games that a parent or grandparent can join without condescending. The social benefit of a game is multiplied when different generations sit around it together. Trawick-Smith's research on play quality consistently finds that adult involvement, when it follows the child's lead rather than directing it, significantly enhances the social and cognitive value of play episodes. A good game makes that kind of natural, reciprocal involvement easy.
Board games are one of the most effective tools available for exactly this challenge, provided the introduction is handled gently. The key is repetition in a low-stakes atmosphere: play often, keep sessions short, and resist the urge to let your child win artificially, since children generally know when an adult is managing the result and it undermines the lesson. Over time, the repeated experience of losing within a loving context, followed by the chance to play again immediately, is precisely how emotional resilience around disappointment is built. Adele Diamond's work on self-regulation confirms that practice in inhibiting an emotional impulse, which is what managing a loss requires, genuinely strengthens the underlying capacity.
For most five-year-olds, fifteen to twenty minutes is the sweet spot for a single game session. Games that can be completed within that window, or easily paused without losing their shape, work best. If a child is deeply engaged, there is no need to stop at the twenty-minute mark; but a game that routinely outlasts a child's attention will become associated with frustration rather than pleasure. Short, frequent sessions across many weeks produce far better social learning outcomes than occasional marathon play sessions, and they keep the anticipation of the next game alive.
Quality matters more than material, but the two are correlated. A well-made wooden game is heavier, more satisfying to handle, and significantly more durable than most budget plastic equivalents. Over a five-year play lifespan, the cost per hour of use often favours the more expensive option considerably. There is also the question of what the object communicates to the child: something crafted with care invites careful, attentive play in return. That said, the most important variable is not material but design quality. Look for games with clear rules, age-appropriate challenge and genuine replay value, in whatever material those qualities are delivered.
Many of the best traditional games scale naturally across a wide age range, which is one of the strongest arguments for buying classics rather than toys marketed tightly to a single age band. Skittles can be played competitively by a seven-year-old and enjoyed as pure physical play by a three-year-old at the same time. Dominoes can be played for colour matching at three and for numerical strategy at seven. Where the age gap creates a significant skill imbalance, a simple rule adjustment, such as giving the younger child an extra turn or a shorter distance to bowl from, can level the field without undermining the older child's experience. Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development is useful here: the older sibling often becomes the natural scaffold for the younger one, a role that benefits both children's social development simultaneously.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.