A recent study of childrens' toys showed some interesting results. As most parents know, forking over a handful of cash for a kid's toy is usually a bittersweet event. The child is thrilled, but you know that toy has a life span of about an hour.
A recent study monitored childrens' toys and exactly how often the kids played with them, on which days, for how long, and more. One interesting result is that the majority of toys enjoyed a sum total of 4.7 hours of play time -- that was the median score. If you divide that into money spent, you get a hard and fast number of how much that entertainment cost you per hour. The study also investigated pleasure as a measure of how much enjoyment a child actually got out of playing with a toy. Rather than ask during play-time, the children were surveyed at consistent intervals about their most valued toys which proved consistent with the ones they had the most fun with. The question was asked monthly for 24 months. The most surprising answer were childrens Christmas ornaments that ended up being the least amount of "play with" time, and yet consistently had "pleasure" and "value" scores in the top fifth percentile.
As it turns out, Christmas ornaments were deemed to be something of lasting value rather than having a mere temporal score. Similar scores are seen amongst women for fine jewelry.
As a result, we strongly recommend, after buying a few temporarily interesting toys for your kids, add even a single favorite Christmas ornament. It's destined to become a cherished and much loved heirloom from childhood.