The Importance Of Playing With Lego

How playing with LEGO can make your kid smarter

It’s a fact across the world, and increasingly in the developed world, that with all the pressure on young ones to perform and excel, they don’t get to play nearly as much as their parents and grandparents used to.

Free play is essential for a child’s emotional development and studies have shown that, without it, children become prone to develop anxiety, depression and other mental health disorders.

Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and author of Free to Learn, wrote a column about the decline of play and simultaneous rise of children’s mental disorders for Psychology Today.

He maintains that free play and exploration are, historically, the means by which children learn

And authors Jirout and Newcombe found in 2015 that the more time kids spend playing with spatial toys such as blocks and puzzles, the better they perform on IQ tests of spatial ability which can be defined as the ability to generate, retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual images. I.e., to imagine or visualise an invention, and then build it.

Playing with LEGO can also influence a child’s career choice later in life. Tiffany Tseng, an engineer at MIT Media Lab explained the link between Lego and engineering: “Legos are a good introduction to communicating ideas with physical objects. Putting things together and taking them apart got me interested in how things work, and by the time I was an undergraduate, I knew I wanted to be an engineer."

In this image a child learns to build a truck using Lego bricks and following an instruction manual. Where to from here?

A lot has been written about the benefits of playing with bricks, such as developing fine motor skills, problem solving abilities and fostering creativity, but parents are not generally aware of how it affects children’s mental development and develops the skills they’ll need as