Educational toys are vital to a child's development: in the early years, a child's learning centres around play and engaging your infant in a wide range of play activities will give them an excellent foundation for learning future life skills.
Toys should be tailored to suit different developmental stages. A newborn baby doesn't have a very developed sense of sight; it usually ranges to around ten inches until he or she's three months old and it starts to develop further. Therefore, it's better to stimulate the much more advanced sense of hearing until this time with toys which produce a range of sounds for your baby to interact with.
After three months, changes really start to happen and your baby starts to be able to follow moving objects with their eyes. At four or five months, they may develop an interest in brightly coloured objects and are often able to grasp and move things around for themselves (albeit in an uncoordinated manner!).
By six months, many babies develop an appreciation for and fascination with particular toys. A couple of months later, building blocks help to develop an understanding of big and small and the foundations for special awareness.
Once infants begin to toddle, many parents give them gender-specific educational toys; girls play with dolls and replica domestic appliances (irons, tea sets etc), while boys tend to be given gadgety toys, sporting equipment and spacial-temporal items such as shape-sorters.
It's important that children, whatever their sex, get the opportunity to play with toys which are stereotypically female and male. Traditional spacial-temporal toys are important for special awareness development in the brain, and one theory behind the fact that men tend have right-hemisphere dominated brains, and females left-hemisphere dominated, is that this is due to boys being traditionally given more shape-sorting and puzzle-type toys compared with girls.
Educational toys such as building blocks are important to the development of both sexes, and are vital for early development of number concepts, coordination and spacial awareness.
While it is important that your child can interact with a toy, don't think that the more money you plough into educational toys, the smarter your child will grow up to be. Children are problem-solvers, they're creative, and they like, and need, to discover things for themselves.
This means that toys should encourage the child to build its imagination around them. Clever marketing often leads parents to believe that the more money they spend on a toy, the better it will be for their child's development. An all-singing all-dancing expensive electrical toy may look good, but if it does all the work for the child, he or she will quickly loose interest and it won't do much for development. A toy shouldn't command the child; the child should command the toy.
Thomas Pretty is a child behavioural therapist with many years of experience consulting companies in the toy industry. Find out more about educational toys at http://www.toysandlearning.co.uk/
