What the research actually says about wooden versus plastic toys, why the material matters less than you might think, and what to look for instead.
Wooden toys are not magically better than plastic toys, but the kinds of toys that tend to be made from wood, simple, open-ended, quiet, and free of electronic features, are consistently better for young children's play and language development than toys that flash, sing, and talk. The most reliable research on toy quality, including the long-running TIMPANI toy study and a well-designed 2016 study of electronic versus traditional toys published in JAMA Pediatrics, points the same way: the simpler the toy, the richer the play and the richer the conversation around it.
So if the question is "should I buy wooden toys instead of plastic ones?", the honest answer is this: choose toys that leave the most work for the child to do. Wood is an excellent shorthand for that quality, because woodworkers cannot build in batteries, screens, and sound chips the way injection moulding invites. But a plain plastic stacking cup beats a flashing wooden robot. The material is a useful proxy. The principle underneath it is open-endedness.
Since 2010, researchers at Eastern Connecticut State University, led by Professor Jeffrey Trawick-Smith, have run the TIMPANI study (Toys that Inspire Mindful Play and Nurture Imagination). Each year they film preschool children playing naturally with a range of toys in real classrooms, then score the quality of play each toy produces: how long children think, how creatively they use it, how much they cooperate and talk with other children.
The results have been strikingly consistent across years. The toys that score highest are almost always the simplest: hardwood unit blocks, construction sets, simple vehicles, basic dolls and animal figures. Toys that are highly realistic, highly themed, or that perform by themselves tend to score lowest, because they leave the child nothing to invent. A toy that does one thing gets played with one way, briefly. A toy that does nothing by itself can become anything, and gets played with longest.
Key citation
Trawick-Smith, J. et al. TIMPANI Toy Study, Eastern Connecticut State University (annual, 2010 onwards) · Simple, open-ended toys consistently produced the highest-quality play; single-function and electronic toys the lowest
One of the study's most quoted findings is that the basic wooden block set outperformed nearly everything else tested, year after year, for both boys and girls. Not because it was wooden, but because it was open. The wood simply happens to be how good blocks are made: heavy enough to stack truly, durable enough to be thrown into a basket a thousand times, and silent.
The clearest single study on this question was published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2016 by Anna Sosa of Northern Arizona University. Sosa recorded parents and babies aged 10 to 16 months playing at home with three kinds of toys: electronic toys (a talking farm, a baby laptop, a baby mobile phone), traditional toys (wooden puzzles, a shape sorter, rubber blocks), and books.
The differences were not subtle. When the electronic toys were out, everything that matters for language learning fell: parents said fewer words, babies vocalised less, there were fewer conversational turns, fewer parental responses, and less content-specific talk. The electronic toy was doing the talking, so the humans stopped. Traditional toys produced far more conversation than electronic ones, and books produced the most of all.
Key citation
Sosa, A. V. (2016). Association of the Type of Toy Used During Play With the Quantity and Quality of Parent-Infant Communication. JAMA Pediatrics · Electronic toys produced fewer adult words, fewer conversational turns and fewer infant vocalisations than traditional toys or books
This matters because conversational turns, the back-and-forth between adult and child, are one of the best-established drivers of early language development. Researchers such as Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff have spent decades showing that children learn language from responsive human exchange, not from audio output. A toy that fills the room with its own noise crowds out precisely the thing the child needed most: your voice, answering theirs.
None of this means the material is irrelevant. Wood has real, practical advantages that parents notice within a week of owning a good wooden toy.
These are honest advantages, and they compound over a childhood. A toy that lasts fifteen years and three children is also, simply, better value than four toys that each lasted one Christmas.
See the Jaques wooden toy collection, made to be handed down →Here is the part most "wooden toys are better" articles leave out. The research above is not really about material at all. TIMPANI scores open-endedness. Sosa's study compared electronic toys with traditional ones; her traditional set included rubber blocks alongside wooden puzzles. No serious study has shown that an identical toy performs better in wood than in plastic.
The real variable is what the toy demands of the child. A plain plastic tea set, a bucket of plastic animals, or simple plastic stacking cups are excellent open-ended toys, and they will serve a child far better than a wooden toy fitted with buttons, lights, and a speaker. Wooden toys with electronic features exist, and they carry all the problems Sosa documented, in a more tasteful casing. Equally, the cheapest plastic toy can be a superb one if it leaves the story to the child.
Wood remains a useful rule of thumb precisely because the toy industry rarely puts batteries in it. If you stand in a toy shop and pick the wooden option, you will, nine times out of ten, be picking the simpler, quieter, more open toy. But you are choosing the design philosophy, not the timber. Keep the philosophy and the material becomes negotiable.
A short test that works in any toy aisle:
This is, not coincidentally, how toys were designed for most of toymaking history. Jaques of London has been making games and wooden toys since 1795, long before anything beeped, and the design brief has not changed: a simple, beautiful object, the child's imagination, and another person across the table.
Browse simple, open-ended educational toys →Usually, yes, if you judge them per year rather than per purchase. A well-made wooden toy commonly outlasts several plastic equivalents and survives to a second or third child, which makes the real cost per child lower than it looks at the till. The exception is paying a premium for wood on a toy that is electronic or single-purpose anyway: there you are paying for the material without getting the benefit.
Both are safe when they meet UK and EU toy safety standards, so the standard matters more than the material. Wood avoids the worries some parents have about plasticisers in older or uncertified plastic toys, and solid wooden toys rarely shatter into sharp pieces. Whatever the material, buy from makers who test to EN 71, check for loose small parts on toys for under-3s, and retire anything with splinters or broken edges.
Babies reliably orient to lights and sounds, so in the first minutes an electronic toy often wins the glance. But attention grabbed is not attention held: observational research, including the TIMPANI findings, shows children play longer and more inventively with simple toys once the novelty of a performing toy fades. Babies also explore with their mouths and hands, and many parents find the weight and texture of wood holds that kind of exploration well.
Every age, because "wooden toys" spans everything from teethers and stacking rings for babies, through blocks, puzzles and shape sorters for toddlers, to marble runs, skittles and chess for older children. Match the toy to the stage, not the material: grasping and mouthing in the first year, stacking and posting in the second, pretending and building from two or three, rules and games from four or five. Always follow the age guidance on the box, especially the 36-month small-parts warning.
No. The research does not say plastic harms children; it says toys that perform displace conversation and invention. A toy box full of plastic animals, bricks and tea cups is a perfectly good toy box. If you want one easy improvement, it is not replacing plastic with wood: it is quietly retiring the toys that talk, and sitting down to play with whatever is left.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.