Welcome to WhatToy.com

Whattoy was set up in May 2006 by a group of parents in Nottinghamshire. Our children range from 2 months old to 12 years old.

The idea for this emerged one evening when we were discussing how hard it was to buy good toys for our children, and in particular how much they were influenced by TV adverts, films, and massive displays in shops. We felt that 'pester power was causing poor toys to take over our houses, and that our kids were not getting the best type of play as many toys, such as computer games (PS2's etc), were causing them to want to play on there own. Two of the group are teachers, and believe strongly that the best types of play are:

a) Open ended (the child can decide how to play with it).
b) Are games played with other children or adults.

With this simple thought in mind we thought that information and reviews that helped cut through this relentless hype would help parents like us choose better toys. We decided the best approach was to start trying and testing toys and then to publish the results, so that's what we did. We started with some of the toys and games that we owned and then moved on to buying toys we thought looked promising and reviewed them. We soom realised that to get good information we woud need some help in testing, so we enlisted our local school and two local nurseries to help evaluate the toys, and this gave us lots of better information. In fact we are still working through everything we got back to get the best products on the site in time for the Christmas ordering peak.

We realised that all of us really disliked many of the simple and garish electronics that cause lots of toys to shout 'ABC' or '123' in a brash accent with plinky plonky music applied, and then for the manufacturer to claim that these were 'educational'. It seems very few manufacturers have any idea what is developmental at all, so we have been going about finding more out by reading recent publications and talking to teachers and other eductional experts.