Children love all kinds of colours and give an immediate response to them. However children's responses differ from adults'. In order to communicate with children, colour should become your friend. Children use a limited palette, which becomes wider as they grow up.
Colour is the first characteristic which children can discriminate. Young parents often paint nurseries black-and-white and buy black-and-white toys. To start, children start to distinguish red colour. Later they start to discriminate other bright colours, such as yellow.
Small children are attracted to bright colours. Numerous scientific studies show that children's preferences change over age. But over the age of ten they start preferring blue. We believe that this change is part of the process of developing and appearance of the ability to perceive different hues.
Colour preferences are closely related to gender. Numerous researchers show that most young girls prefer pink, lavender or violet. Young males like black and other dark colours more than girls. The query has been mooted if these preferences are genetic or environmental. It's hard to answer this question precisly but we are inclined to consider colour preferences to be innate. It's a difficult connundrum to be solved in future.
Colour words and children
First let's analyse how children learn about colours. They learn to discriminate them long before they know the words for colours. Children learn colours' labels at the age of 2-5. Red - stop sign, tomatoes
Blue - police, sea
Grey - clouds
Do toys makers know about it? Walk about any toy department - you'll see that they are quite well aware of children's' colour biases and use the colour to get children's attention and sell their toys. Companies selling to adults use the same tactics by picking colours and colour schemes that will get attention and sell products.