As a parent I very much agree. And for grown-up children too.

On my desk I have a small tin containing small wooden blocks and planks, arches, etc. I get lots of play value from them - when my thinking is blocked, or if I just want to fool around and not think at all. I'm in my mid fifties.

And over at my climbing club's off-grid climbing hut we have a big box of over-sized, home made jenga blocks. Pretty-much everyone plays with them: not only jenga, but also just building structures or giant domino runs or whatever.

We all need to play sometimes.

Then we’d take a large marble and use two long triangular blocks as flippers to “play” on it.

Tilting was NOT advised.

Bonus: You can roll a lot more down those long rubber racetracks than just cars.

Bonus 2: Why did these go away? https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/chubs-baby-wipes-stac...

At one point way back then, my dad made something in the workshop that improved them tremendously: Wooden boards.

These were small, thin, very flat boards of oak -- about 3/16" thick and 3/4" wide. Their lengths varied in 2" increments, and the length of each board was written on it.

With boards added in, the blocks got a lot more interesting. Fastening was still limited to gravity, but things like cantilevers started happening.

I’ve seen some sets that are blocks with random flat surfaces but still balanced.

However, I notice that many antique block sets seem far superior to newer sets.

(I’m sure someone must make an amazing new set, I see some suggestions in the comments).

Having made some wooden block sets from scratch, what I am always amazed about with a good set is balance / size of pieces, coupled with variety and quantity. The balance being a vitally important part that seems to be overlooked in “bad” sets.

That being said ...

We got a lot of mileage - many good years of use from male and female children - out of "Snap Circuits":

https://elenco.com/

A very, very cool building ecosystem with easy to build and understand recipes - we built a working FM radio, for instance. Not at all fussy or fragile.

My children are not particularly "STEMy" but they all enjoyed breaking out the "circuit kit".

I can vouch for the quality of modern magnatiles

The problem now is that there are a zillion knock-offs sold everywhere, both retail shops and online. We don’t buy them, but the kids get them as gifts. They all have something different, from the magnet positioning to the outer dimensions, presumably to try to dodge some patents. These become the weak point in bigger builds or throw off the dimensions in ways that add up and cause early collapse.

I’ve been quietly removing the gifted knock offs and replacing them with real ones because it makes the experience less frustrating.

We’re starting to have the same problem with LEGO now

We got some fabric bins to store them in, which made cleanup a 2 minute affair if adults helped or 5 minutes if the kids did it alone.

Highly recommend.

The most fun my kid had was playing make believe games with me. Like I'd say "you're lost in a forest and you see a cabin up ahead and a trail that goes past it. What do you do"? And we'd go from there. Zero dollar cost and unlimited hours of fun until they grow up enough and don't want to play anymore.

For bonus points, get pics of your kids' faces lit by only that light.

Boom: next year's card.

Usually cake baking of some kind. The kids will get bored after the initial mess making part, but will be expecting a yummy treat at the end, so the parent has to see the whole thing through, _and_ clean up the mess.

For an added bonus, the kid then eats the sugary treat, and they have that to deal with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfection_(board_game)

Even kids who can't read yet will somewhat play with them outside of the rules. Except they're fragile, easy to lose, will bring fights and other troubles as they grow up, and cost a ton more money if they really get hooked.

Or paint. Or glitter.

So I'm not sure I agree with the "lowest clean up time", even though I'm really glad she's picked this up as a "hobby".

My experience as a parent, and the conventional wisdom of parents I've known, including my own, is that there's no predicting the influence of a given toy on a kid's development[0]. My hunch is that toys are better if they give the kid more agency to make up their own play and games without supervision, and many of the toys mentioned in the article are of that ilk. That could be because I still like toys, to this day, with that kind of built-in agency.

Also, growing up in a emotionally stable family culture that values curiosity and learning is probably a huge deal.

[0] Excluding cellphones and the Internet, which are their own discussion of course.

Nowadays each playmobil doll is extremely personalized which removes the flexibility to dress them as anything and limits the imagination and originality. Such a pity. No wonder Playmobil almost went bankrupt recently.

Fair to question this. Most things are fake and… lame.

Larger (like tall 6x2) bricks are uncommon outside buckets, and a lot of larger pieces like dedicated wall-sections or big vehicle nose-bits or car undercarriages are now rare.

The result is that my old sets are a mix of everything from large contoured structural plates down to tiny pieces, but my kids’ bins of legos are like 98% tiny pieces. They use them less than I did, I think because it’s hard to sort through the loose pieces when they’re mostly very small, and with less variety there aren’t as many large pieces to use as jumping-off points to start a build, and making, say, a house-height wall or the front of a space ship is slower than when we had more bricks that could kinda short-hand those pieces and let you skip the middle, if you will, to focus on both the big-picture and fine details. I doubt I’d have liked Lego so much if mine had looked like theirs.

The 11yo wants few new sets now because he doesn’t know where he would put them, and declines to swap out his assembled sets.

Duplo blocs come close, but they are pricey (hard to gift second hand toys) and you can only stack them when the other toys interlock in more interesting ways. For small kids, building an articulating shape the size of their arm with 4 or 5 blocs is really magical.

https://www.amazon.com/HABA-Musical-Eggs-Acoustic-Germany/dp...

He's also enjoying the Mega Bloks someone got him though he's mostly just sticking them together and throwing them.

Or take them to a library that has toys, see what they play with, and then go buy that.

Then you'll want an adult to deal with the body fluids and other nasty stuffs.

PS; what I mean by "teach a 4-5 yo kid" is really spending a lot of time with them rehearsing cleaning and drilling it down. It pays dividends, but you'll be spending months and months, if not years, doing the cleaning with them at a slower pace than if you did it just yourself.