Toy libraries: borrow the fun, keep the learning
A toy library lends board games and toys the way a book library lends novels. Here is how it works, what a simple game teaches, and how to find one nearby.
Picture a shelf that holds no books at all: puzzles in worn boxes, a stack of board games with the corners taped, a bin of building blocks missing exactly one piece. Someone scans a card, signs a slip, and walks out with a game for three weeks instead of buying it. That is a toy library, and if the name sounds like a contradiction, the idea behind it is older and more practical than it first appears.
An idea born from not being able to afford one more toy
The first American toy library opened in Los Angeles in 1935, during the Great Depression, when a toy shop owner noticed local children pocketing toys they had no way to pay for and set up a lending programme instead of calling the police. The model then travelled: Sweden in 1963, the United Kingdom soon after, France by 1967. By 1992, an estimated 4,500 toy libraries were operating around the world, a number that suggests the need it answers has never really gone away.
In practice, a toy library works almost exactly like the book kind. You pay a small membership fee, or none at all if it is attached to a public library. You borrow one or two items for two to three weeks. You bring them back, ideally in one piece, and take home something new. Some are run by volunteers out of a community centre, others sit inside an existing public library building, and a few began specifically to support children with disabilities before widening to serve any family in the area.
What a simple board game is quietly teaching
It is tempting to file board games under ’just for fun,’ but a 2025 review by the HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice at the University of Oregon looked specifically at linear number board games, the kind where a player moves a piece step by step along a numbered path, and found that a few short sessions of about ten minutes each were associated with real gains in early numeracy: counting steadily, recognising numerals, comparing quantities. Nothing elaborate was required. Rolling a die, moving a token, saying the numbers out loud as you go turned out to carry more mathematical practice than it looks like from the outside.
The learning does not stop at numbers. Sit through a family game night and you can watch a child absorb a small pile of skills that rarely get named: reading a rule sheet and following it, waiting through someone else’s turn, negotiating a disagreement about whether a move was allowed, losing a round and starting the next one anyway. None of that is printed on the box. All of it is happening under the box.
A board game teaches its rules out loud and its patience in silence.
Playing as a family, without the cupboard filling up
There is also a plain, unglamorous reason toy libraries make sense: children outgrow toys fast, and a cupboard full of games nobody has opened in a year is a familiar sight in a lot of homes. Borrowing turns that around. You try a strategy game before deciding whether it is worth owning. You rotate what is available for a rainy Sunday without a new purchase every time. A membership that costs little or nothing does the same job as a shelf that costs a great deal, and it keeps circulating instead of gathering dust in one house.
- Reading and following rules
- Counting, comparing, sequencing numbers
- Waiting for a turn
- Handling a loss and staying at the table
- Talking through a disagreement about the rules
- Planning a few moves ahead
Finding the one near you
Toy libraries do not always announce themselves. Some sit inside your existing public library under a name like ’library of things’ or ’family resource room.’ Others are stand alone associations run out of a community centre, a church hall or a school. The simplest way in is usually the simplest question: ask at your local public library’s front desk whether a toy or game lending service exists nearby, or check the community noticeboard for a family resource programme. Many will let you visit once before joining, so there is very little to lose by walking in and looking at the shelves.
What you are borrowing, in the end, is not really the box. It is an evening at the table that would otherwise not have happened, over a game neither of you had to buy to find out whether you liked it.
Sources
- Linear number board games support numeracy skills for young children (HEDCO Institute, University of Oregon) (hedcoinstitute.uoregon.edu)
- Toy library (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org)