My Top Toy Recommendations
I am often asked if I can recommend toys for different stages of childhood. I have to say however that I’m not much of a toy person and actually neither are my children. Nature and the everyday world often is a far better entertainer (cardboard boxes surely come top of the list!). Most toys inhibit imagination and have a very limited range of play, no wonder that so many parents say “he only plays for a minute or two”. A ‘good’ toy needs to involve an element of control in terms of how a child chooses to play with it, ie: there needs to be more than just one action/motion/use. Ideally it will be gender neutral too.
If you do want to buy your child a toy or two, here is my (very small per age group) list of items I recommend, from personal parenting experience. What I will add here is that every toy is infinitely better if you join in with the play too.
Babies
Older babies to 3 years
Messy Play Tray (fill with paint, foam, water, ice, rice etc)
3-7 Years
8-13 Years
Flibberty Adventure Den Building Kit
Note: I have linked to Amazon products so that you can read a description of each product, but most can be bought freely elsewhere on the internet and in local shops. The links are to the UK version of Amazon, so apologies to those of you reading who are outside of the UK, in many cases you can overwrite the .co.uk with your country’s domain (e.g .com) and it will show the the page from your country.
Lastly, some of these are affiliate links, the small amount of funds I receive from these go towards my costs for the upkeep of this blog and my newsletter.
Sarah Ockwell-Smith 
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