Why We Believe in Screen-Free Play: A Statement from Jaques of London

Jaques of London was founded in 1795. For 230 years, we have made wooden toys, outdoor games, and strategy games. We have never made a toy that required a screen. We have never made a toy that required a battery. We have never made a toy whose primary value was in the stimulation it provided rather than the engagement it demanded.

For most of our history, this was simply what making toys meant. Wood, craft, play. The screen-free toy was not a position. It was a description. It was only when screens arrived in children's lives, and began displacing the play that our toys supported, that the description became a conviction. And it was only when the research began to document what that displacement was costing children that the conviction became something we feel obligated to say clearly: we believe in screen-free play, and here is why.

What We Have Always Believed About Play

The philosophy behind every toy Jaques of London has ever made is simple, and it predates the screen-free movement by two centuries. Play is how children learn. Not structured learning. Not educational content delivered through an engaging interface. Play, in the original sense: a child, an object, and the freedom to do whatever they can think of with it. The block is not a teaching tool. The pull-along toy is not a developmental programme. They are props for a child's own imagination, physical effort, and discovery. The learning happens in the child, not in the toy.

This belief has always had practical expression in what we make. We make things from solid wood because wood has weight, texture, and warmth that a child's developing senses can actually work with. We make things that do nothing on their own, that wait silently for a child to decide what they are, because the deciding is the development. We make things to last through more than one child, because a toy worth making is worth making to endure. And we make things that are screen-free, not as a marketing claim, but because a toy that does not require a screen does not require a screen.

What the Research Has Confirmed

For most of Jaques's existence, the case for physical, screen-free play was intuitive rather than documented. Parents and grandparents knew it worked because they had lived it. Children who played outside, who built things and knocked them over, who lost games and chose to play again, who were bored on Tuesday afternoons and discovered something interesting before Wednesday morning, these children were fine. Better than fine. They grew up with the resilience, the attention capacity, the social skills, and the boredom tolerance that the research now identifies as the most important protective factors against the mental health crisis that is the defining feature of the current generation of young people.

The research did not change what was true. It explained what was always true. The Harvard Center on the Developing Child documents the serve-and-return interaction that physical play with real objects produces. The Play England research documents the relationship between unstructured outdoor play and emotional regulation. Jonathan Haidt's synthesis documents what the displacement of that play by screens has cost. And the NHS mental health data documents the outcome: a generation with worse mental health outcomes than any cohort measured before them, at exactly the age and in exactly the proportion that the displacement of play predicts.

Why This Matters Now More Than Ever

Jaques of London has existed through every technological disruption of the past two centuries. The railway. The telephone. The radio. The television. The video game. The internet. The smartphone. Each of these shifted how people spent their time and, in the case of the last few, how children spent theirs. We adapted to none of them by making a different kind of toy. We kept making the same things because the same things were still what children needed.

The screen-free movement of 2026 is different from previous disruptions in one important respect: it is the first time that the displaced activity, physical, outdoor, screen-free play, has been specifically identified by medical and developmental researchers as the cause of a measurable public health problem. The connection between screen displacement of play and the mental health outcomes now recorded in children is not speculative. It is documented. The WHO, the CMO, the RCPCH, the Anna Freud Centre, and the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign have all arrived, from different starting points, at the same conclusion: children need to play more and screen less, and the toys and games that support this are not luxuries. They are necessities.

This is why we believe what we believe. Not because we are a toy company trying to sell toys. Because 230 years of making things for children has produced the same conviction that two decades of developmental research has reached: that physical, open-ended, screen-free play is the most important thing a child's daily life can contain, and that everything else, including screens, is valuable only to the degree that it does not displace it.

• 🧱
  We believe in open-ended toysA toy with no correct use, no prescribed outcome, and no built-in stimulation requires the child to supply all of these. That requirement is the developmental value. The toy that does nothing on its own is the toy that asks the most of the child playing with it.
• 🌿
  We believe in outdoor playOutdoor physical play is the most protective single activity available for children's developmental and mental health outcomes. Daily, routine outdoor time, not special occasions, not organised sport, just being outside, is the most important play habit a child can have.
• ⏳
  We believe in boredomThe child who is allowed to be bored and to find their own way through it is developing intrinsic motivation, creative capacity, and boredom tolerance, qualities that the research identifies as directly protective against the anxiety and screen dependence that characterise the anxious generation.
• ♟️
  We believe in losingGames with rules, where losing is real and recovery is required, build the emotional resilience that the research identifies as one of the most critical missing skills in the current generation of children. The game where someone loses is the game where someone learns something.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Jaques of London believe in screen-free play?

Because 230 years of making toys has produced the same conviction that developmental research has reached: that physical, open-ended, screen-free play is the most important activity in a child's daily life, and that the displacement of this play by screens is the most significant developmental risk children face today. This is not a marketing position. It is the conclusion that experience and evidence both point to.

What makes a toy genuinely screen-free?

A genuinely screen-free toy requires no digital interface, no battery, no connectivity, and no external stimulation to produce engagement. It waits silently for a child to decide what it is and what it does. All Jaques of London toys are screen-free in this sense: open-ended, physical, and dependent entirely on the child's own imagination, effort, and discovery for their value.

Is screen-free play backed by research?

Yes. The research base supporting physical, screen-free play as a developmental priority is now extensive and consistent. The Harvard Center on the Developing Child, Play England, the WHO, the UK CMO, the RCPCH, the Anna Freud Centre, and numerous independent research programmes all identify physical play as foundational to healthy development and document the harms of its displacement by screen time. The evidence is not preliminary or contested. It is the basis of official public health guidance in the UK and internationally.