0-3 years old is the fastest growing stage of a baby. In this critical period, parents must provide an environment that can stimulate the learning ability of the baby, so as to exert his potential. Toys and playing are important driving forces affecting the growth of the baby. Parents can choose good toys for their babies with special wisdom, use your creativity and pick up your childishness and play with the baby to make the relationship between parents and children closer and sweeter.
Baby’s Month Age Development & Toys
Infants grow, change, and learn faster than in any other period. Infants aged 0 to 1 generally know their surroundings by sensory perception, such as hearing, seeing and touching, while infants and young children after 1 year of age begin to use physical activities to expand the scope of exploration. The development of babies in this period should be all-round and balanced.
- Physical growth: Practice detailed and holistic motor skills.
- Psychological growth: Build more self-identity.
- Emotional growth: Learn how to express emotions.
- Cognitive growth: Increase the ability to think and solve problems.
- Language growth: Learn to communicate and express in spoken language.
- Social growth: Learn to interact with others and building good interpersonal relationships.
Based on the love of children, parents hope to give their babies the best toys, but the first thing to do is to understand the key points of each stage of the development of babies. With sufficient knowledge base, we can select the most appropriate toys of the right age from a variety of toys, and truly achieve the function of toys to inspire baby’s potential.
Three Considerations in Choosing Toys
Toys can not only enrich children’s lives, but also stimulate their performance and even expand their abilities. But there are so many kinds of toys in the workshop. Department stores, roadside stalls and toy stores have launched fashionable, popular and beautiful toys from time to time, which make parents look dazzled and confused. There are three considerations for parents who are worrying about how to buy baby toys.
1. What is a “good” toy?
Good toys have the following characteristics:
- Cooperate and develop children’s basic motor abilities.
- Satisfy children’s desire to operate.
- Provide opportunities for children to solve problems.
- The learning process becomes more interesting and makes children happy.
- Foster children’s curiosity.
- Help children express their wishes and emotions in language.
2. Choosing Toys Correctly
- Suitable for children’s ability: Understand whether it is in line with the baby’s current stage, or the next stage of development from the applicable age and function marked on the toys.
- Consider the purpose of toys: What functions toys have and what abilities children can learn from them.
- Choose toys with multiple functions and many changes: Babies’ learning and development should be all-round. If toys can promote eye-hand coordination and train muscle development, they can be included in the list for consideration.
- Challenging and encouraging toys can bring children a sense of achievement: children can get satisfaction of “control” or “completion” from the operation, such as building blocks bridging.
- Colorful toys: Children are very sensitive to colors, bright colors can stimulate their imagination.
3. How to check the safety of the toys?
Whether toys make babies play safely or not is a matter of great concern to parents. The news often spreads the unexpected event that infants swallow pearls, which makes parents very distressed! Therefore, in order to avoid letting the baby play with toys and turn into a tragedy, parents should pay great attention when choosing toys. We should choose the toys with National Inspection Qualification Mark and read the instructions carefully and pay attention to whether there is a warning sign on the toys.
- Does it have sharp edges?
- Are the parts smaller than babies’ mouths?
- Is it easy to loosen?
- Does the joint or seam clip to the hand or hair?
- Are the surface coatings toxic?
- Are the sounds too loud or sharp?
- Is the material fragile?
- If it is an electrical product, does it have quality assurance?
Playing is always a child’s nature, but what to play and how to play is a complex problem. The incorrect way of guiding may make fun toys become harmful things to the baby. How to let the baby play happily and have a good level of play, please tell us!