Around the end of the first year or shortly after the start of the second year (i.e. around the first birthday), most children begin walking. My son wasn't necessarily a prodigy for beginning to walk unassisted at 9 months, nor is any child necessarily deficient for delaying this ability until 15 months. As children grow and develop, their interests become apparent, and depending on the environments they have experienced and the activities that have captured their foci, different skillsets will appear at different times. Generally, girls will speak earlier and boys will walk sooner, but there is so much variation here (and over so few months of time is it relevant) that if the roles are reversed there is really nothing abnormal about it. I did notice in Jackson and many of his friends that a MAJOR mental growth spurt was readily apparent right around the first birthday. Coincidentally, it was also not until that same span of time until I was even remotely convinced that I might be willing to go through the effort of spawning another human.
So, now that the child is ambulatory and at the early stages of verbal development, as well as having some more neurons firing in her brain, it's time to find something suitable for new forms of play. After all, a cardboard box and a plastic bottle no longer seem to satisfy her, so to keep her from fishing around in your computer desk for paper clips to gag on, you need to get more creative. After all, it's far cheaper to buy toys than pay an ER bill.
There are many toys geared toward the 12 months+ crowd. Many of them are riding toys or musical toys. In fact, many of the toys I profiled for the first year are still rather relevant, only now instead of gumming them with teething mouths full of drool, your little darling can start to try some of the uses for which the toys were intended.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends the following toys for the Second Year:
- Board books with large pictures, simple stories
- Books and magazines with photographs of babies
- Blocks
- Nesting toys
- Simple shape sorters and pegboards
- Beginner's jigsaw puzzles
- Toys that encourage make-believe play (child lawn mower, kitchen sets, brooms)
- Digging toys (bucket, shovel, rake)
- Dolls of all sizes
- Cars, trucks, trains
- Unbreakable containers of all shapes and sizes
- Bath toys (boats, containers, floating squeak toys)
- Balls of all shapes and sizes
- Push and pull toys
- Outdoor toys (slides, swings, sandbox)
- Beginner's tricycle
- Connecting toys (links, large stringing beads, S-shapes)
- Stuffed animals
- Child keyboard and other musical instruments
- Large crayons
- Toy telephone
- Unbreakable mirrors of all sizes
- Dress-up clothes
- Wooden spoons, old magazines, baskets, cardboard boxes and tubes, other similar safe, unbreakable items she "finds" around the house (i.e. pots and pans)
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I agree with much of what is on this list and would also like to point at that there is NO MENTION at all that children should have toys that make electronic sounds or music or have any sort of graphical display. It's not that it's strictly a bad thing to have those kinds of toys or that your child will not enjoy them. The problem is that they often teach the wrong lesson: Children need to learn causal relationships. If you give a child an electronic keyboard that makes noises not correlated to the action, the child fails to learn how sounds are made. However if you give a child a piano that plays notes when he pushes the keys, then the connection can be made that the act of depressing the key causes a sound to be made. Remember: toys are the learning tools you give to your child to teach him about the world. This is his first education, and no matter how much YOU know, HE is still unaware of the fundamental laws of the universe.
Check out some toy suggestions next week! :)
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