Child Development & Educational Toys – Make the Right Choice

The Six Essential Elements of Child Development

As a caring and involved parent, you want to assist your child’s development in any way you can. Why not acquire educational toys geared toward encouraging growth in all of the developmental areas? Authorities differ slightly on how to organize these domains. However, a good standard to follow is that set by Drs. Dorothy and Jerome Singer of Yale University, who identify six essential elements of developmental play that can be cultivated through the use of age-appropriate educational toys:

• Motor development: the development of gross motor skills that use large muscle groups for activities such as running, kicking, balancing, jumping, hopping, lifting, climbing, and swinging, and the development of more delicate fine motor skills, such as the pincer grip of thumb and forefinger.
• Eye-hand development and vision: the development of keen powers of perception and of the ability to use the eyes and hands together in coordination to perform a task.
• Cognitive learning: the development of the ability to learn new knowledge and to process, understand, and apply this knowledge to different ends. Developing this area helps a child improve his or her capacity for mental activities such as reasoning, interpreting, comparing and contrasting, evaluating, judging, inferring, predicting, sequencing, and visualizing. It also helps children master specific content knowledge relating to vocabulary, mathematics, science, and so forth. 
• Hearing, Listening, and Voice: the development of skills relating to the senses and communication. Developing this area allows a child to discriminate between different types of sensory input, processing those that are important and screening out ones that are not.
• Social/Emotional: the development of skills relating to how one interacts with other people and how one behaves oneself.
• Creative/Imaginative: the development of skills relating to pretending about the world and using the imagination to explore new ideas and possible solutions to problems.

Which Educational Toys to Get

To develop gross motor skills, look for toys that require large, yet controlled movements from your child. As they begin to stand and walk, provide younger children with wooden push and pull toys. As they gain more control over their muscles, get them wagons, play strollers and shopping carts, tricycles, and kid-powered ride-on cars such as the Plasma Car. Look for toys that develop more specific gross motor skills, such as hopscotch sets (hopping), jump ropes or the Spin Master Stomp Rocket (jumping), or hula hoops (rotating body). Sports equipment also promotes the development of more varied gross motor skills.

To develop fine motor skills, look for toys that require your child to perform precise, controlled hand movements. For example, get lacing cards or activity books or boards that have the child perform life skills such as buttoning, tying laces, zipping, snapping, cutting, and locking and unlocking.

To promote eye-hand development and vision, seek out toys that require children to use keen perception in concert with hand dexterity. For example, get nesting and stacking toys such as the Melissa and Doug Geometric Stacker; blocks and other building sets; peg boards; puzzles; and art activities such as drawing, cutting, painting, sculpting, or lacing beads. Also look for toys that increase your child’s sense of perception, such as I Spy books or puzzles that require children to differentiate between different sizes or colors of the same object.

To develop cognitive skills, look for toys that require the use of logic, identifying patterns, finding solutions, and solving puzzles. For example, get games that require children to use clues and deductions to solve problems, such as the classic board game Clue or FoxMind Games’s Logix I. Or get science and nature kits that develop children’s powers of observation and investigation, such as Battat’s Bug Catcher Set. Or get toys and games that teach content skills and problem-solving skills, such as Melissa and Doug’s See and Spell. Or get building sets or model sets by makers such as Meccano that require children to think about how pieces can and should fit together.

To develop hearing, listening, and voice, look for toys that appeal to the senses. Get musical instruments such as shakers, drums, whistles, triangle, tambourines, and xylophones to encourage children to play with and compare different sounds. You can also get toys that help children discriminate between different sounds, such as sound puzzles.

To develop social and emotional skills, look for toys that require your child to interact with other people. For example, games such as FoxMind Games’ Babylon teach skills like taking turns and good sportsmanship. Building toys such as wooden unit block sets or Legos encourage skills such as cooperation and sharing as children work together to construct something.

To develop creativity and imagination, look for toys that encourage your child to create things or to pretend or role-play scenarios. For example, Uberstix construction systems can be used to build an infinite variety of structures. Art and craft supplies give children practice with making things. Dolls, dollhouses, Battat toy vehicles, and toy dinosaurs can all be used as props to make up stories and recreate real-life scenarios. Costumes, props, and copies of real-life objects can all also be used in imaginative play.

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Educational Toys Versus Edutainment Toys

The Rise of Technology and Edutainment

Today’s parents feel pressured to use technology to begin their child’s education in utero. For example, the BabyPlus Prenatal Education System promises to “give your baby a headstart” by playing rhythmic patterns to help stimulate early learning. It is time, therefore, to step back and evaluate the true value of toys that incorporate technology to teach.

Toys that are formed from high-tech electronics embedded with semiconductor chips are generally called edutainment toys. The quality and substance of their play may be limited by the number of buttons a child can push. Some promise to challenge a child by allowing him or her to interact with the educational content to learn it. For example, V.Smile offers a Baby Infant Development System aimed at introducing interactive learning to kids 9 months to 3 years. They can watch educational videos with this system or push buttons on a tray to influence what is happening on a television screen.

Some older toys are also adding electronic bells and whistles to appeal to the current technologically sophisticated generation of children. Dolls now interact with the Internet. Wooden Brio trains make electronic sounds and can be controlled by infrared remotes. The classic Fisher-Price Rock-A-Stack now also comes in a Dance Baby Dance version whose center rod lights up and plays songs when the rings are stacked on it.

Open vs. Closed-ended Toys

An open-ended toy encourages free play with an unlimited number of outcomes. For example, a building set can be used to construct a variety of different structures. A closed-ended toy, on the other hand, has a limited and often soon exhausted number of outcomes.

Not all closed-ended toys are bad. After all, a stacker is a classic closed-ended educational toy: it can only be put together correctly in one way. However, to solve a stacker, a child must develop and use logic and fine motor skills. The child benefits from the repetition of playing with the pieces of a stacker, manipulating them with his or her fingers over and over and thinking about how they fit together until the solution is mastered and then repeated for pleasure.

A closed-ended edutainment toy, on the other hand, may only require a child to press a few buttons. Eventually, it leads to a dead end and the child grows bored and tosses the toy aside. As Martha B. Bronson notes in The Right Stuff for Children Birth to Eight, although a child can have a rich play experience with any toy, basic, open-ended toys encourage this type of experience more than rigidly programmed toys with only one or two functions do. This sort of edutainment toy is not timeless. It is meant to be replaced sooner rather than later by the next big product in edutainment that uses the latest in technological innovations.

Often people assume that toys that use new technology are more innovative and educational than non-technological educational toys. In fact, childhood specialists such as Jane Roberts (president of Young Media Australia, a consumer advocacy group), question how educational and interactive high-tech edutainment toys really are, noting that “[p]ressing buttons and having items do things for you is fairly limiting in terms of how children learn.” Furthermore, many traditional toys are themselves becoming more innovative about stimulating a child’s imagination and creativity without having electronics in them. For example, the blocks in FoxMind’s Cliko game can be used for a variety of games that are challenging to children and adults alike.

Negative Impacts of Edutainment Toys

Overall, parents might not want to encourage children, especially younger ones, to use too often edutainment toys that involve televisions and computer screens. The authors of “Effects of Preschool Television Watching on First-Grade Children,” found that preschoolers who watched more television than their peers did worse in school and were not as well socialized when they entered first grade. Researchers Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis found that babies watching Baby Einstein DVDs and videos scored lower on language skills than babies who had never watched them at all.

In addition, Allison Sloan notes in Shopper’s Guide to Healthier, Greener Toys that computers and television sets emit EMFs, “invisible forcefields whose possible health effects, from headaches to sleep disruption to cancer, are the subject of heated debate.” Children’s developing brains are in the greatest danger from such outside influences.

A final caution about edutainment toys is that they can foster in children an acceptance of a disposable consumer culture. A timeless toy such as a set of wooden unit blocks will hold up under heavy use for generations and can be played with at the same time by children (and adults!) of a variety of ages. Edutainment toys, on the other hand, are usually played with by only one child at a time, and they generally have a shorter playtime and life span. Children quickly master and get bored of them, or their high-tech components break, rendering the toy useless, and then they are discarded, releasing toxic chemicals and metals into the environment.

What Parents Can Do

As technology and the Internet permeate society and people’s lives more and more, it does make sense to introduce children to computers and other inventions that they will need to use as they grow older. A toy is not necessarily bad or useless because it incorporates technology. That said, smart parents should examine the stated purpose of an edutainment toy, evaluate how and what it teaches, and determine if their children could receive equal or greater value from a simpler, classic toy. Roberts warns against the dangers of a parent using high-tech toys as babysitters, substituting interaction with a machine such as a single-player computer game for what should be “the best learning for young children—real-life experience when they model, create, explore, and develop their own initiatives through play.”

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Educational Toys Help Kids Develop Life Skills

Educational toys not only promote developmental skills in children. They also help children acquire and improve essential life skills. Creativity, self-confidence, independence, responsibility, and integrity can all be cultivated through the use of carefully selected educational toys.

Creativity

One hallmark of educational toys is how well they support creative, open-ended play. A tray of wooden food can inspire a child to spend a whole afternoon running a pretend restaurant or planting and harvesting crops on a pretend farm. A set of blocks can be turned into a tower, a road system, a fort, a car, or even different animals. And the possibilities for a pound of modeling clay are endless! The more time a child spends exploring all the different things a toy can become, the more developed the child’s powers of imagination will be. This fosters an open-mindedness to new possibilities that will help the child think of creative and innovative solutions to any challenges he or she ends up facing as an adult.

Self-Confidence

One way to build self-confidence is through play that encourages a child to assert him or herself. Singing, performing, and acting in front of an audience all help children assert themselves both in the planning stage and during an actual performance. Children also learn to assert themselves by acting out scenarios or performing informally with peers. Open-ended toys such as musical instruments and dress-up clothes and props encourage this type of play.

Taking risks that pay off will also develop a child’s self-confidence. Susan G. Solomon, author of American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, notes that “Children need a chance to take acceptable risks, learn cause and effect, make choices and see consequences. If they don’t learn to take risks, we’ll lose a generation of entrepreneurs and scientists.”

To take such risks, children must develop powers of risk assessment and decision making so that they can be sure that the risks they plan to take are, in fact, acceptable. The act of riding and controlling large toys such as bicycles requires children to calculate physical risks. The logic needed to play certain strategy-based board games like Monopoly, chess, and checkers involves risk assessment such as whether or not to invest in a property or risk one piece for a future, greater gain.

To improve their ability to calculate risk, children should also develop their decision-making skills. Science and engineering kits can help by requiring children to use observations and directions to make decisions about how to run an experiment or build a working machine. Puzzles and building construction sets can also hone this skill.

Independence

In general, allowing children to direct their own play and be in charge of what to do during their free time helps them become more self-sufficient and resilient. In particular, certain educational toys foster skills such as problem solving, taking charge of a situation, and leadership.

One aspect of being independent is being able to solve a problem on your own. Working with a construction toy system allows a child to explore different solutions to the challenge of building various items. Logical challenges faced on your own, such as figuring out how to use a set of pattern blocks to replicate certain complicated patterns, also build problem-solving skills.

Another aspect of being independent is taking charge of a situation. This can be as simple as providing your baby with two toy choices and allowing the baby the autonomy to make his or her own decision about which to play with. Beyond that, you can also encourage the development of independence by allowing your child to direct what roles you will take on when playing with your child or letting your child be in charge of how a toy will be played with. Providing your child with open-ended play sets such as farms, fire and police stations, pirate ships, tree houses, and train stations creates a situation where your child can control what scenarios he or she will act out that day.

A third aspect of being independent is taking a leadership role. While unit blocks and communal building sets of oversized hollow wood blocks, huge foam blocks, or sturdy cardboard blocks can foster cooperation skills, they can also offer opportunities for one child to lead others in a positive way to build a specific construction that that child has in mind. Educational toys can also help children become self-motivated and self-directed so that they can lead themselves to accomplishments without always relying on outside support and affirmation.

Responsibility

To become good citizens, all children should develop a sense of personal, societal, and environmental responsibility. In general, trusting children to take good care of their toys, to play nicely with them and put them back where they belong when play is done, can begin to foster a sense of responsibility. At the most basic level, a chart such as Melissa and Doug’s Magnetic Responsibility Chart can help a child keep track of his or her personal obligations. Beyond that, specific toys can develop other kinds of responsibility.

When a child is provided with an open-ended toy such as a construction set that must be assembled by the child, he or she will take on the personal responsibility of following the directions and making sure the toy is put together correctly. This will train the child to take a sense of pride and personal responsibility in any future jobs he or she is expected to do. And, when a child takes care of a doll or pretend pet, he or she also develops a sense of personal responsibility for fulfilling his or her obligations to someone else.

Role-playing of obligations can extend to creating a sense of responsibility to society. When a child pretends that he or she is a construction worker or a doctor, that child is practicing taking on adult responsibilities that must be fulfilled if people are to live together in communities. Such role-playing socializes the child and allows him or her to get used to the idea of becoming a contributing member to such a community once he or she is grown.

Finally, science kits that encourage children to study the earth can educate children about why people must take care of animals, land, resources, and so forth. Plus, toys that are crafted from sustainable materials (such as Plan Toys) or bioplastics (such as Green Toys), or designed to use recycled materials (such as the Uberstix Scavenger sets), encourage a respect for the conservation of natural resources. This in turn leads to a developed sense of responsibility for caring for the environment.

Integrity

Educational toys can also help children develop integrity. Using costumes and props to role-play situations such as customer and server can help children practice politeness and manners. Acting out scenarios such as taking care of an injured doll or animal can foster compassion and empathy. And playing competitive games fairly by taking turns and following the rules develops a child’s appreciation for right and wrong.

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Adults Can Play Too!

The Importance of Adult Participation in Child Play

The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights states that every child has a right to play, just as he or she has a right to life, education, and health. Theorists such as Lev Vygotsky claim play helps children increase their ability to interact with others, practice taking on different roles, and develop creativity. Above all, through play, children master new skills and learn new information about the world.

Parents and Guilt

Too often, parents misunderstand studies about the benefits of play. They end up feeling guilty that they are not doing enough to guide their children’s development. They worry that if they do not supply their children with the right play experiences at the right ages, their children will fall behind other children, fail at school, and ultimately fail at life!

Soon learning becomes a competition. By controlling the way their children play, parents attempt to attain a specific result—quantifiable success. Afraid that skipping any one activity will put their child behind other children, parents sign their child up for everything and fill any free time left with rote flashcard drills.

Activities such as ballet lessons, music lessons, karate lessons, foreign language classes, and participation in sports teams are all wonderful taken one or two at a time. However, if you pile too many on at once, you neglect one of the most important developmental opportunities that you can offer your child—open-ended, child-driven play that is shared at certain times with you.

The Benefits of Play

Children learn essential life skills by copying adult role models. From the moment your child is born, you are their first and best toy and playmate. As they grow older, connecting with them through shared play experiences strengthens the bond between parent and child and keeps lines of communication open even when daily schedules become more hectic and time together harder to arrange.

However, children also need time and space to explore the world and their imaginations by themselves. Adults must never take over playtime and direct a child’s every action. As Kenneth R. Ginsburg (associate professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine) and two committees for the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote in a recent clinical report, “When play is controlled by adults, children acquiesce to adult rules and concerns and lose some benefits of play, particularly in developing creativity, leadership and group skills.”

Choosing and using appropriate toys can help you understand when to engage actively in play with your child and when to let your child take charge…

Active Interaction

For many toys, both you and your child must take an active role because the toy requires at least two players. For younger children, you can both take an active role in rolling or throwing balls back and forth. For older children, sports equipment such as bats, mitts, soccer balls, basketballs, and footballs can lead to hours of fun, physical activity, and unobtrusive lessons in taking turns, following the rules, good sportsmanship, and (if you play together against another opponent) cooperation and communication. Multi-player games (such as chess, checkers, Monopoly, or Jenga) can also reinforce these lessons.

Active Modeling and Passive Following

Childhood should be a journey, not a race, with plenty of time allowed along the way for investigations and discoveries. Get for your child what the American Academy of Pediatrics calls “true toys,” ones that lead to open-ended play instead of one or two closed-ended outcomes that a child is rushed to master. Such toys include blocks, building sets such as Legos, costumes and props for dress-up and role-playing, dolls and puppets, people and animal figurines, toy playsets, play food, and toy vehicles.

With these sorts of open-ended toys, sit back at first and let your child examine them before you jump in with directions, instructions, or suggestions. Never assume there is only one right way to play with a toy. It is fine if your child serves building blocks for tea in teacups or tucks trucks into doll beds for naps. Providing your child with the physical and mental space needed to play around with the idea that these objects can be anything is exactly what your child needs.

Unless your child’s play turns destructive, allow your child to take the lead when playing together with these toys. You can play alongside your child, but do not upstage or correct him or her. For role-playing, let your child assign the roles. Often, children want to be in power and order adults around in ways not allowed in real-life.

Pay attention to your child’s interests and abilities and select toys accordingly. If your child does ask you for help, then you can model how to act out a certain scenario or demonstrate a useful strategy for connecting parts of a puzzle or a building set (for example, solving a puzzle by assembling its border first). If you notice your child is growing frustrated with a toy, evaluate whether the task at hand is too difficult. Perhaps the toy will be more appropriate a few months or even a year later.

One of the best things you can do during imaginative play is to help your child develop language skills. Comment on what your child is doing to introduce new vocabulary, saying things such as, “I see you parked the red tractor by the green block.” Or you can gently encourage your child to talk about what he or she is pretending, asking questions such as, “What are you dressed as? What do you think a fairy/doctor/astronaut does?”

Solo Play

Some toys are great for a child to play with alone—those with what Montessori theorists call “control of error,” where a child can tell by himself or herself if he or she is completing it correctly or incorrectly. It is good for a child to play imaginatively with the pieces of such a toy in ways different from the stated purpose of the toy, but it is also beneficial for him or her to figure out how to stack, order, or assemble it the right way. Toys of this sort include stackers, sorters, and puzzles. Parents can offer help if requested, but otherwise allow your child to master the toy alone and in his or her own time.

Many arts and crafts activities such as drawing, painting, beading, and clay play are also best pursued almost entirely alone by a child. As Susan Striker, author of Young at Art and the Anti-Coloring Book series, says, when children see an adult draw or create something, often they focus on copying that over and over to please the adult instead of developing their own, individual creativity.

Striker champions letting children make their own discoveries about each medium, regardless of the mess. That said, tidier parents can safely allow themselves to at least explain to a child how to use the materials, and then they can step back and let the child create whatever he or she wishes. An adult should never step in and correct a child when a child is creating art. It does not matter if lines are not drawn straight or if a clay person is missing feet. The process of creating, not the final product, is the important part at this stage.

What You Can Do

As a parent, you can help children develop in so many ways. Play expert B. Caldwell notes that parents can support play by providing “time, space, materials, or social partners [such as siblings].” Just always keep in mind that, as Ginsburg says, the best way to ensure that your child develops into a wonderful adult is to “[share] pleasurable time together.”

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“This is My First Child” - Help in Choosing Educational Toys

The Plight of New Parents

First-time parents are faced with the important but often daunting task of selecting safe and appropriate toys for their new infant. As Ann Miles Gordon notes in Beginnings & Beyond, modern parents often live miles away from the support network of extended family upon which previous generations of parents relied. Traditional advice is not passed down as often and modern parents must rely on other sources of information.

At the same time, parents feel pressured to be very involved in their children’s lives to make sure that their children develop well. And many parents are having their first children later in life when they have more disposable income to spend, but it is hard for them to know just how much to spend and on what. For lack of more creditable information, they may end up being influenced by television commercials or print ads declaring the benefits of this toy and that. They might find it hard to locate quality information about how to figure out which toys really do constitute educational toys and activities that are best for their new babies. The good news is that with a little consideration of the developmental stages through which their child will pass, parents can stock their homes with toys that will stimulate their child safely during every month of his or her first year. 

Look for Toys That…

• are machine or surface washable.

• have high reusability.

• are tough enough not to break or wear out during normal usage.

• give good value for the price.

• do not have sharp edges that could poke or cut a child.

• do not have ribbons that could pose a suffocation hazard.

• are enjoyable for an adult to play with as well.

• have been singled out to receive honors such as the Parents’ Choice Award or the Oppenheim Platinum Toy Award.

• meet your child’s current stage of development.

The Developmental Stages of Your Child’s First Year

Any toy you get should be fun to catch your baby’s interest and educational to develop your baby’s skills. Provide toys that help your baby explore all five senses and learn about different sizes, shapes, textures, colors, smells, and so forth. Intersperse playtime with feedings and naps and cut playtime short if your baby ever seems over stimulated.

Birth: Babies are just beginning to respond to sights and sounds. They may reach for but are unable to grasp objects. By the first month, a baby can focus its eyes at 18 to 45 cm and enjoys looking at toys with high colorful contrasts or black-and-white patterns such as checkerboards, wavy lines, stripes, or circles. Hang visual toys such as mobiles, dangly playthings, or safety mirrors in that range, or hold the things you want your baby to see close to his or her eyes so that he or she can focus clearly. Looking at a mobile will encourage your baby’s ability to recognize patterns, and reaching for it will begin to develop both your baby’s motor skills and his or her eye-hand coordination.

Look for teethers for your child to gum and taste and soft blocks or other soft toys with different textures to touch. You can rub each texture softly against your baby’s skin. Shake rattles or squeeze squeaky toys to make noise for your baby to listen to and track as the toy is moved around. Play or sing songs such as nursery rhymes, and read books to begin introducing your baby to the sounds of language. Your baby can hear high-pitched noises and will recognize your voice and respond positively to soothing words and humming. To establish trust and a sense that he or she can rely on you, respond within one or two minutes when your baby is crying.

1 to 3 Months: During this stage, your baby will benefit the most from simple toys that appeal to the senses and whose color scheme is either a high contrast black-and-white or paired bright colors. Particularly, your baby will enjoy listening to or playing with noisemakers such as rattles and squeaky toys. He or she will also like play gyms with colorful and noisy toys to bat at and grab. You will need a play mat on which to place your baby during tummy time, along with a child-safe mirror to put on the floor so your baby will want to look up at him or herself and strengthen his or her ability to hold up his or her head and neck. Continue to play or sing songs and read simple board books. Your baby will begin to coo in response to sounds you make, so develop his or her attention span by seeing how long you and your baby can talk back and forth until your baby loses interest. By three months, your baby can initiate as well as respond to play. He or she smiles for the first time during this time period and will enjoy bonding through skin-to-skin contact.

4 to 6 Months: Now your baby can control his or her hands well enough to grab and hold toys and other objects, most of which will be brought immediately to his or her mouth. Your baby’s awareness of his or her environment expands, and he or she will respond well to interactive games such as tickling or playing with his or her fingers and toes. Continue to provide your baby with rattles or other toys that have knobs to grab or rings to move around to develop fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination. Your baby will also like toys of different sizes and with different textures to feel and explore independently, like soft blocks or dolls and soft cloth books made from different kinds of fabric. Read even more to your baby, because now your baby can focus on the words and pictures found in simple board books. He or she will start to show preferences for different kinds of music in different kinds of situations and can be soothed to stop crying if he or she hears a familiar piece of music or song.

7 to 9 Months: Continue to introduce toys with more complex colors, shapes, and textures. Allow your child to play with safe household items such as plastic containers or wooden spoons. Once your baby can sit (typically anywhere from 6 to 9 months), he or she will enjoy blocks and other hard objects he or she can hold and bang together. When your baby is sitting in the bath, introduce toys that help your baby explore the water, such as cups, foam toys, or floating boats. When reading, allow your baby to hold the book sometimes and explore the pages on his or her own. Provide toys that encourage reasoning, such as cause-and-effect toys that have parts that pop-up or play music in response to your baby’s actions. Use balls and wheeled toys to get your baby moving and developing his or her gross motor skills. Your baby will also enjoy busy boxes, ring stackers, and other toys that hone fine-motor skills (especially the thumb-and-finger pincer grip) and eye-hand coordination.

10 to 11 Months: Read your baby books about simple concepts and have your baby identify and point to objects in them. To develop gross motor skills, provide him or her with balls to roll back and forth or chase once he or she can crawl. Soon your baby may be able to move objects in and out of a container, so get him or her a first sorter or a toy into which he or she can drop small balls. By now, your baby will love playing peek-a-boo and other more involved, interactive games. He or she will also like hearing rhymes that involve playing with his or her hands, such as Pat-a-Cake. In addition, he or she may start saying more sounds and enjoy playing with toys that make sounds he or she can imitate.

12 Months: As your baby begins to stand and try to walk, provide him or her with push-toys and then pull-toys. Help your baby hone his or her fine-motor skills further by letting him or her stack cups, pour water from one container to another, or fill and dump out a container with blocks or other small objects. Your baby may be able to say a few words, so continue to read more complex books and then allow your baby to “read” the books back to you. He or she may begin to start imitating your actions in more detail, so provide him or her with simple role-play toys such as telephones or toy kitchen props.

Conclusion

Although you should be educated about children’s toys and take care when selecting them, you should also not worry that your child’s childhood will be ruined if you do not purchase a bunch of expensive toys. As George Scarlett, Ph.D., (the assistant professor of child development at Tufts University and author of Children’s Play) points out, “Almost any play material can present opportunities for being creative, imaginative, and constructive.” Just be sure to keep your baby’s development in mind always.

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Play Value

• promotes quality and healthy play
• teaches a new concept or skill
• enhances creativity
• creates interest in the child for prolonged play
• suitable for open-ended and creative play

Design

• Innovative and original
• Made from environmentally healthy and sustainable materials
• Natural design for ease of use with adequate instructions
• Visually attractive and provokes interest 

Values

• Promotes social responsibility
• Creates community awareness
• Environmental awareness

Quality

• Durable
• Safe 

Suitability

• Age and gender appropriate
• Suitable to child’s ability & skill level

TOY SAFETY

Magnetic Toys

• Keep magnetic toys away from children under six. If a child swallows more than one magnet, seek immediate medical attention.

Toxic Chemicals

• Start by reading the labels. Avoid toys made of PVC plastic.
• Avoid products such as play cosmetics with xylene, toluence, or dibutyl phthalate

Lead

• Use home lead tester available at hardware stores to test content in jewelry or other toy products
• Go for wooden and cloth toys when possible
• Educate your child not to put jewelry and similar toys to mouth
• Keep away such toys from children under 3 years old as they normally put things to their mouth to explore things

Excessive Noise

• Protect child from toys with excessive noise
• Reduce volume to desired level and apply tape as a limit. Or cover speaker with tape to reduce noise

Chocking Hazards

• Never give toys with small parts to children under 3 as chocking is the most common cause of toy-related deaths
• Always read labels and chocking hazard warnings if any
• Mylar balloons are a better alternative to latex balloons for children under 8 years of age
• Make sure balls and balloons for ages 6 and under are at least 1.75 inches in diameter