The vital importance of playing and toys came to prominence in the psychological community thanks largely to the book Homo Ludens, or Man the Player, written by Johan Huizinga, a Dutch cultural theorist. Huizinga argued that playing is not merely for children, or “just for fun”, but the basic starting point for all personal development.

Huizinga’s book succinctly sums this whole approach to playing with a single sentence: “Let my playing be my learning, and my learning be my playing.” In other words, play serves as a form of practice and training, a way to exercise our body and mind without the actual stakes involved in “real life”.

An obvious example of play used in training would be flight school. A virtual flight simulator used to prepare pilots is, by definition, a video game, but it serves an important function in a pilot’s learning process in that the trainee is free to experiment and test the boundaries of his aircraft without actually putting his own safety at risk. When he’s finally put into the cockpit of the real airplane, he knows exactly what it can do the first time he takes the captain’s seat.

For young children, playing often works on a broader level in that they are still developing motor skills. A toddler plays with a bouncing rubber ball not because bouncing a rubber ball is a specific skill they’ll need later in life, but in order to develop body strength and reflexes.

Children begin with basic physical and sensory learning. If you observe an infant, you’ll see that one of the first skills they attain through play is the ability to grab. At this point, learning toys are simple; a soft blanket, a stuffed animal, anything that the child is able to interact with in a physical capacity. In regards to sensory learning, an infant simply needs sounds and images to stimulate them.

Beyond your child’s physical and sensory development, the brain, likewise, needs to be stimulated and kept in shape. Studies have shown time and again that people who are read to as children tend to do better in school and in their careers. Children’s books and regular reading sessions can make the difference between a child who enjoys the challenge of schoolwork and a child who finds schoolwork to be a chore.

In any context and for any individual, taking time to play is important and should never be neglected. There is perhaps no greater tool in learning. This is true in adulthood and much truer in early childhood.

Another reason for the age range is, of course, safety. Safety has more to do with physical development than mental or emotional development. The Haynes Internal Combustion engine is great for a kid who has grown strong enough to handle simple tools and carry slightly heavy parts. It’s recommended for kids aged eight to sixteen for reasons of both physical and mental development. A six year old would probably find it a bit cumbersome to put together when the engine block itself ways almost as much as they do.

If your six year old is the size of an eight year old, though, then you don’t have that to worry about. Safety issues are different from child to child just as mental development is different from child to child.

Under six years or so, though, you should probably be willing to treat these safety concerns as the gospel. Choking hazards are a very real threat, as are pointy, heavy, and delicate objects.

To break safety concerns down into age groups…

Infants

For baby toys, you really do want to regard the safety precautions with a lot of respect. Every toy you give a kid aged zero to twelve months needs to be a number of things in order to be safe. It has to be soft, it has to be devoid of anything like buttons that can easily snap off, and it has to be comfortable to cuddle with.

Toddlers

With toddlers, you want to avoid getting too complex with the toys. They can now handle plenty of toys with moving parts, but nothing easily broken, nothing with a lot of pointy corners, nothing that’s too heavy for them to safely lift, and you still want to be aware of choking hazards.

Small Children

Now it starts to get a little trickier. Some kids shoot up a foot or two between the ages of four and five, while others stay around the same size until they’re nearly seven or eight years old. At this point, you have to look at the safety precautions on the package and then exercise your own knowledge of your child’s development levels, physical and mental. And be honest with yourself! We all want to believe our kids are geniuses, but most five year olds just aren’t ready for a Technics Lego toy just yet. So try to stick to the recommended age range for now.

Here’s kind of a silly rule, but it’s a good gauge of your child’s physical growth. Next time you go grocery shopping, if your kid can easily carry a gallon of milk into the house and put it in the fridge without dropping it, he or she may be ready for toys recommended for eight year olds, but still, make sure to practice common sense and don’t give them anything that would make you nervous!

More than simply a colourful little show to keep kids distracted in front of the TV for a little while, The Wiggles are doing a great job at inspiring a whole generation of young people to take a real interest in music. This is accomplished with songs that are easy to memorize, easy to sing along with, and if your kid picks up a guitar, not all that tough to play.

With either a simple guitar, a drum kit, or a keyboard, you can help to encourage what may wind up becoming a true passion for your child throughout their life. There are a lot of great educational toys for aspiring musicians out there.

Now, we have a little bit of advice on this front… Guitar lessons can be helpful, but the trick about the guitar is that it’s really not all that difficult to come up with something enjoyable by just fiddling around with the strings until you figure something out. Before you spend any money on lessons, watch how your kid plays around with his new instrument. Look up some instructions online for playing simple songs on the guitar. If your kid can get the hang of that, then they may be ready for lessons.

When you’re a kid, musical toys make a great trial process before splurging on a pricy guitar or something down at the music shop. The first time a kid watches The Wiggles, it’s a lot like the first time any of us heard a great Rock and Roll song. The first thing we wanted to do was grab a guitar and start to jam. But of those of us who went to the pawn shop and picked one up for cheap, or begged and begged our parents to get us one, how many of us actually learned to play? One in five would probably be a bit generous. Although, those of us that did learn to actually play our guitar discovered a whole new form of expression, a way to communicate beyond words (and for a lucky few, a way to make a whole truckload of money!).

If your kid cannot stop pounding on his plastic drums, wait until he or she is old enough and get them lessons and a real set. Lessons can teach a kid how to play well, but they won’t teach a kid how to enjoy playing in the first place. That sense of fun, of joy in music, has to be taught at home before you hand the training over to a professional.

One more piece of advice; as soon as your kid starts expressing real interest in music, go ahead and introduce them to some of your favourites, especially any classic Rock and Roll you have laying around. You’re never too young to fully appreciate the sheer joy and catchy melodies of The Beatles, Elvis Presley or Chubby Checkers.

Using our Gift Finder, you can find a great toy by narrowing your search by a child’s gender or age, a price range, a specific category or brand. Plus, you can choose as many or as few selects as you wish in order to narrow down the toy results, and then sort them with our different sort options, in order to find the perfect toy!

If you were already reading Doctor Seuss before you ever started first grade, you were probably ready for a little something more by that point. Some of us got lucky and were maybe skipped ahead a grade or two, while others simply had to settle for being the bored smart kid in the class.

When you’re young, you tend to latch on to certain things, and it’s important that your parents nurture that interest (even if it does result in boredom at school). For example, when a kid who’s always been playing around with legos toys, K’nex and other mechanical toys starts learning about simple and complex machines in school, he or she is going to wind up saying “Haven’t I already been over this?” The wise teacher will administer some slightly advanced curriculum to the child.

Being way ahead of the class, again, while it can make school a little dull, winds up being very important later in life. It’s always the kid who found grade school dull who winds up being accepted to an elite academy for future engineers.

If you want to facilitate your future-engineering-genius’s creativity and grasp of the material, the good news is that you have quite a lot of options. The better toymakers out there craft their products with an understanding of the way a child’s brain functions. Kids don’t think they’re training for a career in designing new ways to harvest and cultivate food, or that they’re going to engineer an ingenious solution to fossil fuels, they’re just having fun, putting different things together and seeing what they come up with.

Legos are a no brainer. Particularly any legos toy kit full of moving parts, gears, wheels and axles. Lego’s Technic line is particularly great. Each kit is built with a certain thing in mind. One might make a real working bulldozer, another might make a race car, but if you get a few kits, you can piece the different parts together and make pretty much anything you can come up with.

Meccano is another great line of developmental toys if you want to step up from the simplicity of Technics. Meccano actually comes with a few simple tools and requires kids to put together cars, airplanes and other machines with small pieces of colour coded sheet metal, as well as nuts and bolts.

But dig this, if you want something really cool, you can go for the Haynes internal combustion engine. It only costs about sixty five bucks, which isn’t much when you consider what it is: A simulation of a real, working internal combustion engine.

Now, it doesn’t actually require gasoline or anything, it’s not a real engine, but rather, an electronic simulation of one. It’s a small model of a real four cylinder engine. It comes with spark plugs, tools, nuts and bolts, and all the instructions you’ll need to put it together. It teaches how a real engine works, and it makes all the cool sounds you expect from a real engine. It’s as close as you can get to real engineering without filling your living room with carbon monoxide!

It’s one of those fascinations that, for many of us, begins in early childhood and carries right on into adulthood, and then right on into old age. While in real life, we may have to settle for a more affordable and modest vehicle, leaving the hot rods and custom machines to racers and movie stuntmen, the escapism of a good car chase flick, or just a walk through a classic car show leaves most adults with a smile on their face, thinking about what we could drive if only we didn’t have to hold down a job and maintain a respectable living!

If it’s your son or nephew who’s nuts about V8 engines and knows more about fuel injection than you do, here are a few words of advice: Encourage that. Whenever you go to work on the car, let the boy tag along, explain to him what you’re doing and allow him to help out. At the very least, you’re going to raise a kid who can take care of these things for himself when he reaches driving age. And secondly, keep encouraging his infatuation with cars with the right toys.

Some of the coolest cars toys actually come from Legos. Lego racers, for instance, are pretty cool. They let the kid put together a race car either based on the instructions, or they can build one of their own design.

And of course, you simply cannot go wrong with remote control cars. Back when we were kids, these were pretty much the cool toy, and they still are. Sure, you can play racing video games these days, but do racing games let you build your own race tracks in the backyard? Do you get the same viscera thrill racing in a video game that you do hearing the whirr and buzz of the electric motor of a remote control car? Can you set up a bunch of used soda cans and try to stage spectacular crashes into the stack? Remote control cars offer room for imagination that’s hard to attain with an Xbox controller.

And of course, if your kid is still a bit young for something as complex as a hundred piece lego set or a remote control car or something, there are plenty of things for the young, car loving child. Wooden toys, for example, They may not fulfil that need for speed, but they’re a safe, easy alternative when your kid is just obsessed with automotives and you know he’s not ready for something made for older children just yet.

Sometimes you can get lucky with a random guess, but there are only two ways to know for sure that you’re getting the girl something she can enjoy. The first approach is to make a call to your sister or brother and ask what your niece loves more than anything.

This method works, but we don’t really like this approach because it’s kind of admitting defeat. A gift should really be from the heart, and if you have to ask someone else what to get, that’s sort of like cheating.

What we like is, if you don’t already know what you want to get for your niece, spend a little time with her. Take your niece out for lunch, go to the playground together, do something to hang out with the kid for a little while, and you should know exactly what to get her before the afternoon is up.

You’re going to know right away. When the birthday season is approaching, kids generally find themselves incapable of talking about anything besides exactly what they’d love to open on their special day.

Besides spending an afternoon together being a perfect way to get some precious intel on that baby doll toy your niece really wants, it’s also a great way to get reacquainted with the kid. It’s important for children to have a full family’s worth of positive adult role models. Not just a mom and a dad, but uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even older siblings all play a key role in shaping a child’s idea of the value of family, and even their own sense of identity. Spending some time with the kid is going to wind up being more valuable than any toy you’re going to buy them.

Now, once you have some ideas for what to get the kid, you’re going to want to make a call to the parents. You want to make sure that you’re not going to wind up both getting her the same present, of course. It can be helpful, though, to get toys that complement each other. If your sister or brother is getting the kid a Wall-E DVD, you can go ahead and get your niece something like the Wall-E VTECH Learning Laptop.

A gift is an expression of a certain idea: I love you, I care about you, I want you to be happy, and I know what you want. Just asking the parents what to get the kid will wind up with a great toy to unwrap at their birthday party, but you’ll be missing out on the very most important part of what buying a gift is all about. The personal connection that a gift evokes can only be accomplished when it truly is from the heart.

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