The right toy at five does not just entertain: it quietly teaches a child how to listen, wait, negotiate and belong.
The single most useful thing you can give a five-year-old for their social development is a toy that genuinely requires another person to work. At five, children move from playing beside others to playing with them in a purposeful, rule-governed way. That shift, which developmental psychologists have documented for the better part of a century, is not a small thing: it is the foundation on which friendships, classroom cooperation and eventually adult collaboration are built. If you are looking for a starting point, board games, skittles, cooperative card games and outdoor group play sets are among the most evidence-backed choices you can make.
Five is also the age at which a child's capacity for what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development becomes especially vivid in social contexts. They can now hold a rule in mind, apply it to someone else's turn and wait for their own, all at the same time. That is genuinely new, and it is precisely the cognitive load that well-designed toys for this age exploit. The result, when play goes well, is not just fun: it is measurable growth in empathy, self-regulation and language.
What the research tells us
Developmental psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff have shown across multiple studies that playful learning, particularly play involving peers, produces stronger gains in social competence and executive function than instructed learning alone. At five, the peer relationship is the classroom.
The evidence base for social play is now substantial. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI study found that the highest-quality play experiences for young children were almost always those involving other children and open-ended materials, rather than solitary or screen-based activity. Jaak Panksepp's work on the neuroscience of play identified what he called the PLAY system, a dedicated neural circuit activated specifically by social, physical play with peers, which drives the development of emotional regulation and prosocial behaviour.
Adele Diamond's research into executive function adds another layer: the cognitive skills that underpin academic success, working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, are exercised during structured social play with rules. Every time a child resists the urge to grab a game piece before their turn, they are doing the mental equivalent of a press-up. The toy, in this reading, is the equipment in the gymnasium.
Not every toy creates genuine social opportunity. A toy that a child plays with alone, however beautifully made, does not ask anything of another person. The toys that build social skills at five are those with an inherent social grammar: someone else must take a turn; someone else must agree to the rules; someone's outcome depends on your decision. Board games and skittles create this grammar almost automatically. So do building sets used collaboratively, puzzle challenges set for pairs and traditional outdoor group games.
Negotiation, the quietly underrated social skill, emerges naturally when children must agree on how to play. Who goes first? What happens if a piece falls off the board? Can we change the rules? These micro-negotiations, trivial-seeming to adults, are the training ground for the compromise and conflict resolution that children will need throughout life. Peter Gray, in his extensive writing on self-directed play, has argued that children deprived of rule-governed social play with peers lose precisely these negotiation skills, because adults tend to solve disputes for them rather than letting the game itself provide the structure.
For five-year-olds, the most socially productive toy categories combine clear rules with enough chance or skill variation to keep all players genuinely engaged. Specifically:
Jaques of London, established in 1795 and the world's oldest games company, has long specialised in exactly these categories. Their educational toys collection and wooden toys range are particularly well suited to five-year-olds: the materials are honest, the rules are elegant and the designs have been refined across generations of family play.
A note on quality of materials
Alison Gopnik's research into how young children learn from objects suggests that children treat the physical properties of a toy as information about how it should be used. A well-made wooden game signals seriousness and care: children tend to play more attentively with objects that feel substantial and real.
Richard Louv, whose work on children and nature has influenced a generation of parents and educators, argues that outdoor play with other children in less structured environments produces social and emotional benefits that indoor play alone cannot replicate. The unpredictability of the outdoors, the variable terrain, the weather, the need to adapt, mirrors the unpredictability of social life in a way that a fixed board game cannot.
Traditional outdoor group games, ring toss, skittles on a lawn, croquet played in teams, have the additional advantage of crossing age groups. A five-year-old playing croquet in the garden with a parent or older sibling is not just developing social skills with peers: they are learning how to read an adult's mood, calibrate their own competitiveness and hold their place in a mixed-ability group. Jaques of London invented croquet in 1851, and the game remains, at its heart, a profoundly social one, requiring patience, spatial thinking and an ability to celebrate another player's good shot.
Jenny Radesky's research, and subsequent work by Sheri Madigan, has linked heavy screen use in early childhood to reduced quality of social interaction and delayed social-emotional development. The mechanism is not mysterious: screens tend to direct a child's attention inward, towards a solo experience, whereas the toys that build social skills require the child to attend to another person's face, voice, intentions and feelings.
When choosing a toy for social development, the question to ask is simple: does this toy make my child look up? A board game makes a child look up at their opponent. Skittles make a child look up at the person bowling. A wooden puzzle done in pairs makes a child look up to ask for help or offer a piece. Screen-based toys, even ostensibly educational ones, rarely pass this test as consistently.
When assessing a toy's social value at five, consider these practical criteria:
On the value of traditional games
Kenneth Ginsburg, writing on play for the American Academy of Pediatrics, notes that traditional games passed between generations carry social and cultural meaning beyond their mechanics. When a grandparent teaches a child a game they themselves played, the social learning is doubled: the child learns both the game and something about belonging to a longer human story.
Absolutely, and this concern is more common than parents often realise. The key for only children is to create regular play contexts where another person is genuinely required: playdates built around a board game, family game evenings where a parent plays as a proper participant rather than a facilitator, and group outdoor games with neighbours or cousins. The toy itself sets the social structure. An only child sitting down to a game of skittles with a parent is having a qualitatively different experience from solo play, because the rules require them to wait, to watch and to respond to someone else's success. Over time, these structured experiences with adults and older siblings transfer remarkably well to peer play. The toy teaches the grammar; the friendships later supply the conversation.
Piaget's work on the development of rule understanding in children remains instructive here. From around four, children begin to grasp that rules are binding and shared, rather than arbitrary impositions. By five, most children can hold a short sequence of rules in mind, apply them fairly to others and feel genuine indignation when a rule is broken. This is, in developmental terms, a significant achievement. It means that five is a genuinely good age to introduce simple board games with two- or three-step rules, provided the game moves quickly enough to hold attention and the outcome is reached in under twenty minutes. Starting with games that use dice, since chance removes the anxiety of pure skill, tends to work well. Confidence with rules then builds naturally towards more complex games by six or seven.
The honest answer is that both have genuine value, and the research does not firmly favour one over the other at this age. Cooperative games, where players work together towards a shared goal, are particularly useful for children who find losing distressing, or who are still developing the emotional regulation needed to manage disappointment. They also produce rich negotiation and communication, because players must agree on strategy. Competitive games, played in a warm and low-stakes family context, teach something equally important: that you can lose, feel briefly sad and then want to play again. Both experiences are part of social competence. The most balanced approach is to have both types available and to follow the child's lead, moving towards more competitive formats gradually as emotional resilience grows.
You do not need to choose between them: they develop overlapping but distinct social capacities. Indoor wooden games, board games, stacking sets, card games, tend to build patient, attentive social skills: listening, waiting, reading another person's face across a small table. Outdoor group games develop more dynamic social skills: reading a group's energy, adapting quickly to changing situations and managing the mild physical risk and excitement that Sandseter and Brussoni have shown to be genuinely beneficial for children's confidence and risk calibration. If you can only choose one for a particular occasion, consider the child's current social challenge. A child who struggles to wait and listen may benefit most from a calm indoor game; a child who finds large group dynamics difficult may grow most from a structured outdoor game with clear turns and a shared focus. In an ideal week, there is room for both.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.