Holding your newborn in your arms is the most amazing feeling in the world. Apart from buying essentials like clothes, diapers, and baby accessories for them, giving them the right toys plays a major role in their growth and learning development.
Toys help babies to have a fun and learning environment where they learn meticulous skills like cognitive, emotional, behavioural, social, fine motor, and gross skills. This shows that parenthood is indeed an awe-inspiring journey where providing innovative and creative toys to your babies is as important as their meals. Want to know more? This article will help you to guide how toys play their role in a baby's learning of wonderful things.
Benefits of Toys for Your Kids Development
Toys are an incredible source of learning for babies and toddlers. They play a vital role in shaping behaviours and benefiting amazing skills to babies and toddlers.
Interaction and Problem Solving
Toys help babies to learn interaction, it helps them to get familiar with new and different things. Later, it helps to boost their confidence and build social skills. While playing sometimes toys go under the bed, stuck in each other, and cracking the puzzle gives them a problem-solving mindset. They learn how to get their stuff back and solve their issues themselves.
Enhance Cognitive Skills
Babies are curious by nature. When they get toys, they explore it in unique ways. They play and make their games themselves. Like shapes, puzzles can turn into towers, blocks sets can help them to learn colours and try new things. This helps them to build hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills as well.
Incorporating Social Skills
Toys like board games, big puzzles and construction sets etc are amazing toys to build interaction and friendships. Babies learn to do sharing as well.
Boosting Physical Fitness
Having a play gym, play mat, sports equipment, home gym equipment builds physical strength of babies. They get control over their eyes, hands and feet. Muscles also get strong and such physical activities increase their appetite as well.
Foster Sensory Development
Toys are the best source to increase the sensory activity of the babies. When they touch something like clay, plastic, artificial grass, or any toy, they understand features, textures, and colors with their parent's help. Many sensory activities can be planned at home to make babies more intellectual and joyful.
Toys Guide
Here are the tips you should consider when purchasing toys for your little one:
Choose Age-Appropriate Toys:
It's not like you will go to some fancy toy shop and start randomly picking toys for your babies. First, you must keep their age in mind and then select the toys accordingly. Otherwise, the baby can be frustrated, and it might not be a safe play for your baby.
Newborn to 3 months
We usually think newborns can't play with toys. But that's the right time to start introducing them to different colours and make them familiar with different sounds to keep checking their auditory ability.
Soft toys are easy to hold and are not harmful to babies. Rattles produce different and funny sounds that grab their attention and help them to be mindful.
3 months to 6 months
Here starts the most joyful age of your baby, where he has started observing the world more keenly and taking an interest in things around him.
Musical toys and funny pop-up toys remain the centre of attraction for infants when they start recognizing colours and noises. "I will hold it" age where an overhead gym with few rattles plays a vital role in stretching their muscles. A play mat is another wonderful toy where babies can exercise, crawl, do tummy time, and much more.
6 to 12 months
At this age babies need teething devices; they want to put everything in their mouth as teething is a tough stage both for parents and babies. Soft, BPA-free, plastic toys help babies to get relaxed and calm during the teething stage.
6 to 12 months is the right age to introduce soft books and 2-piece puzzles to start a fun learning environment. A play mat will help you through at this age as well to let the baby crawl happily and easily.
Toys for Toddlers
Your mini-explore is ready to explore the world with her mini-toes. She will see something and just want to grab it or maybe put it in her mouth.
Construction toys, building blocks, stacking, and 4 to 5-piece puzzles are now new friends of your toddler. It's the age to develop sensory skills and let them feel the textures, colours, and noise. Avoid saying ‘no’ to your mini ones as this will steal the opportunity to conquer the world. Make your home baby-proof to avoid any accidents.
Quality and Safety
When parents buy toys make sure they are age friendly for babies. The plastic material must be refined and won't be harmful to babies and toddlers. If the toy is not suitable for age, it won't give them the desired fun.
Value for Money
Educational toys, building blocks, construction sets and puzzles are the kind of toys that are worth buying. So before deciding to buy a toy make sure the toys are value for money.
Toys At Home
Your home is full of interesting toys for your little ones. You can give them plastic plates and some spoons to create sounds, containers with lids so they can open and shut, and stacking with plastic or disposable glasses for hand and eye coordination.
A container with different lentils or pasta will also create different and interesting sounds.
Toddlers take an interest in home chores. They can easily pour water from the bottle into a glass, do folding, put things in their right place, etc. It makes them feel responsible and independent.
Final Words
Toys are a great source of pleasure, fun, and learning for babies. It becomes more interesting when parents or elders contribute their efforts as well. Toys are golden childhood memories. One of the most amazing outcomes of having toys is that babies don't get addicted to screens and stay focused on their free play.
Don't forget that with toys, physical and outdoor activities are also extremely important for body health, fitness and natural exposure. So, keeping a healthy balance is mandatory. Happy parenting!
