toys, playrooms, cleaners, games, kids toys

It is just a fact of life as a parent that you are going to have to figure out how to care for plastic toys from time to time. The fact of the matter is that when someone is asking “how to take care of plastic toys,” what they are really asking is “how do we keep plastic toys clean and in good condition?”

Depending on the age of your child or children, the answer to this question is going to have a varying degrees of detail. If you have a young child, there are going to be some steps to take in caring for toys that you don’t need to worry about when you have an older child.

There are some things you should do in order to keep the plastic toys looking fresh and new no matter what the age of the toys. There are ways to wash the toys no matter how old your kids might be. Basically, you want to make sure you are getting the toys as clean as possible, as safely as possible for both the toys and the kids who are using them.

There are a couple of different ways to clean the toys and keep them looking like they are brand new. You want to make sure that the cleaning is being done with products that will keep the toys from being worn down. This often means that the best way to clean the toy is with warm water and regular dish soap. High quality plastic toys will withstand this type of care without negative effects, and will stay safe for your children. This might seem like a rather basic way to wash the toys, but it actually has a couple of different benefits. 

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The first benefit of just going with warm water and soap is that there aren’t any really harmful chemicals in the cleaning solution. Your first priority is to make sure that your kids are not coming into contact with any harmful chemicals in their play equipment.

Most kids are going to find a way to get a toy into their mouths one way or another. No matter how many times you tell your kids they shouldn’t suck or chew on their toys, they will get chewed on and sucked on from time to time. Younger children are certainly going to do this more, but older children can absent mindedly put a toy to their mouth from time to time. Soap may not taste all that good, but there are few average soaps that are going to cause any real harm if they are ingested. As long as you use the same kind of soap that you use on your body, you can be rest assured that no one is going to get really sick if they happen to suck on a small toy.

The other benefit of using soap and warm water is that the soap is not going to be harmful to the paint or coloring that is on the plastic toys. If you are trying to care for the toys in a way that will make them look new you don’t want the paint on the toys to get worn down or washed off. Using hard chemicals can do both.

At times, you might run across a larger plastic toy that has lots of nooks and crannies such as a play house or play set that is made to look like part of a house. These are not toys that are going to be able to be run under the kitchen sink. In the case of these larger toys, you can simply get a bucket of warm water, some soap and some clothes. If you want to make sure that every little inch of the toys stay nice and clean, you can also get an old toothbrush and detail the hard to reach spots.

You just want to make sure that you rinse well after scrubbing the toy down, so that you don’t develop any sort of soap scum. Plastic is actually rather porous and you need to make sure that you are thorough or the toys will start to look old and dirty rather quickly.