First Year Toy Review, Part I

My husband Andrew has a great mindset that he has shared with me about making purchases: When you buy something, think about the day you will one day have to dispose of it. Children are not babies for very long, though it may seem like it at the time. Because I am keen on helping my family save money, I try to purchase toys with high standards of quality that will last a long while. Because my son is Herculean, I try to ensure that all of his toys are built to withstand something akin to a nuclear blast. And because I recognize that children are in a continual state of development, I try to find toys that will grow and develop with Jackson, rather than be discarded as "too young" before the purchase price of the toy has been validated.

The toys I am highlighting today are ones that I bought for my son when he was 5 or 6 months old. He is now 27 months old, but we still find time to play with some of them. What I like about each of these toys in particular is that they have many developmental stages of play for a child.

Fisher-Price Rock-A-Stack

Price: $10

Size: Small/Medium

Age: 5 months+

Durability: Medium-High

Pros: The simplicity of this toy is what makes it great for babies. They can actually hold the individual rings; they can chew on the support stand; it's "rockable" so it doesn't tip over too easily when an uncoordinated tot bumps it accidentally. They also have modified the top ring so that instead of being strictly a hollow, red donut, it functions as a semi-clear, semi-opaque red rattle.

Cons: The tower of the stack can fit into a child's mouth up to a point. If you have a child with a particular large mouth, she may be able to hit her gag reflex, though I haven't yet seen this become a problem. The tower and stack can be used as a hammer, so your little Bam-Bam may reek havoc on your toes as you walk past.

Educational Value: Standard colors make it easy to identify color names to your child. Helps teach order of operations for stacking, since the base is wider than the top and limits how the rings can be stacked. Helps develop fine motor skills for placing the rings on the stack.

_________________________

Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics, Baby's First Blocks

Price: $13

Size: Small/Medium

Age: 5 months+

Durability: High

Pros: There are numerous parts to this, but not so many that a parent can't keep track of them. The toy is a container and is designed to help children put the blocks through the right shape hole. Who doesn't love a toy that encourages kids to be neat? The blocks themselves are very durable and are well-designed to avoid injury: All edges are smooth; the pieces are VERY well structured so that babies can chew on them and slobber on them and not bust them, plus they can hit them on anything without making even a dent. While each shape is hollow, there is a vent hole in the center to prevent the child from accidentally gaining suction and getting the toy stuck on any body part. The pieces all fit easily within the container, which has a convenient carrying handle. The yellow lid is a great attractant (and may be the only part the child wants to play with for a long time), too!

Cons: This is really nit-picky, I know, but one of the shapes is really hard to name. When I play with my son, I like to be able to identify the shape, color, texture, etc. The triangle, star, circle, and square are fairly simple. But the fifth shape could be called a plus, an X, a cross, or whatever other name you might imagine for that shape. Ideally speaking, anyone who plays with this toy with your child will be in agreement as to what shape-name to associate to that piece.

Educational Value: This toy is great for helping a baby learn basic colors and shapes. Each shape will only fit into its own shape hole in one particular orientation, so there's no cheating there. Believe it or not, it's a tough concept for a baby to learn that convex and concave shapes can match one another. (Think about it: you wouldn't give a 4-month-old a puzzle.) Each shape comes with a matching piece that is the same shape and color, so you could help teach matching skills as well. The hole in the middle of each shape matches the exterior shape (e.g. the star shape has a star hole) to help parents and caregivers guide children to learn how to sort shapes.

_________________________

Fisher-Price Stack & Roll Cups

Price: $10

Size: Small

Age: 4 months+

Durability: Very high

Pros: This is the most cleverly constructed simple toy I have ever encountered. The Stack & Roll Cups have been a favorite not just with my son and his compatriots in babyhood but also with parents. They are that awesome. Like the old school stacking cups (which I also recommend but am not profiling today), these can stack on top of one another into a tower. They also nest well within one another. But what the normal stacking cups can't do, but these can is to join together to make balls. Each cup has a hole in the end that is about an inch in diameter, and the smaller ones have extra ventilation holes, "just in case". There are 10 cups in all, which can make 5 balls simultaneously, but each "cup" can form a ball with both the next cup larger and the next cup lower. AND you can stack any smaller cup on the back of any larger cup. As if that weren't enough, they included another little ball with a smiley face and a jingle bell inside. (For a while, it seemed like the jingle ball was enough for Jackson and friends while us parents and other adults played with the cups. They really are fun!) Kids can smack them around, fit them together, stack them, and roll them around as balls or even bring them in the bathtub. The favorite, of course, is to stick the jingle ball inside a ball made from the cups and set your child loose chasing it, fingering the ball inside, and shaking it around. WAIT! There's more! I've saved the best for last! Not only can your runt gnaw on these things (and get great little cup-shaped red marks on her face), but they store up really compactly. Because of the way the jingle ball fits into any of the cup-balls, and the way that any cup can form a ball with the next larger and next small size, you can make one big nested ball out of all the pieces. This whole set can be stored neatly together in an area the size of the two largest cups forming a ball.

Cons: The sophistication of the toy is lost on babies. Also, because there are 10 cups, the manufacturers had to use more than the standard set of readily name-able colors, so there can be some awkward moments as you try to encourage your baby to chase down the "ummm...yellow-green cup".

Educational Value: Each of the standard rainbow colors is represented in a cup, plus a couple of extras to show that not all color names are so clearcut. The colors are also ranked in size by rainbow order with the smallest cups being in the purple portion of the spectrum and the largest being red. The cups have numbers on them, as well, concatenating the order in which the cups will stack as a whole. (Of course you could also make a stack with all evens and another with all odds. Or you could nest the evens and nest the odds. Or....) When you make the cups into the 5 simultaneous balls, other patterns are apparent: each in the pair of cups forming it has the same shape (e.g. a star) engraved in a ring on it; each in the pair are of the same or nearest color name (though the red and orange ball gets a bit awkward to explain). There are soooo many educational opportunities with this toy that even through much of elementary school it can be a useful demonstrative tool.

_________________________

That's all for today, folks. I've got lots more to review, but I'm tired. I promise they are not all Fisher-Price toys! It just so happens that Fisher-Price has some high quality toys for children for the first year. Playskool and other brands dominated the ranks for many of our toys for the second year, which I'll get around to profiling when I finish up with first year toys. Stay tuned for more baby toy fun!

Parenting Philosophy Toolbox, Part 8

(This is part 8 of a series. To see the the first part, click here.)

8. Be creative. This is often a challenge for parents. We spend so much time becoming "grown-ups" and giving up on childish pleasures. We work hard to get organized and maintain regular schedules. We emphasize intellectualism and crave reason.

Then we have children--and we are totally at a loss for how to deal with them! We wonder why they do things that make no sense. We simply get to a point, somewhere along the line, in which we can no longer sympathize with the joy of riding a merry-go-round. Seriously, I used to love those things, but since my son started enjoying them, I have discovered that my adoration of the merry-go-round has been replaced by discomfort when I feel the loss of control and head-spinning craziness that whirling about in circles induces. Kids LOVE that stuff. Adults...not so much.

In order to get in tune with how children experience the world, we have to go back and try to remember what it was like being young. With more and more people waiting longer to have children, this only becomes more challenging. The boring adult rut is tough to bust out of, but to truly relate to a child, we have to walk a mile in shoes that are way too small for us now. Which just looks ridiculous--yet that's actually part of what we need to do. We need to embrace a level of silly that helps us connect with our children.

I didn't know I had lost my touch. I had retained it for a long time, even up until about halfway through my 20s. But by the time my son Jackson became a toddler, something was very different in me, and I felt I had to relearn old ways of relating to children. Thankfully he has developed some small level of patience and understanding that sometimes Mommy and Daddy are a little dense about certain "obvious" concepts.

For example, when Jackson was 12 months old, he began behaving very strangely in relation to food. He would be quite clearly hungry, but lacking verbal skills, he simply could not articulate to us why it was that he was refusing to eat food that he obviously wanted to ingest. Out of desperation, we began to try to discover what would appease him. Andrew and I learned a LOT about toddlers from this sort of behavior. Why didn't Jackson eat his food? He was learning about lids. He wanted to take the lid off his baby food and put it back on. Between EVERY bite. EVERY time. For MONTHS.

Sure, we could have argued. We could have tried to tell him he was being ridiculous. But truly, had we forced him to get upset over something so trivial and easily accommodated as covering and uncovering his food between bites, who is the more ridiculous? He was asserting power in his largely powerless life. He was developing fine motor skills. He was learning about his environment. And more than that, he was eating without a fight.

Being creative with your interactions with your child can help in numerous ways. Say your child is hungry. You're on your way home to get food but have run out of food with you in the car. She's upset because she wants food and keeps asking for it, but no matter how much sense you try to use to reassure her that you understand she is hungry and that you are making strides toward acquiring sustenance, all she can focus on is the sensation in her belly. Crack the window. Talk about the wind. Sing a silly song. Point out words that she's been learning: "Look! Trees! Bicycle! Running! Ambulance! School bus!" The important part of this, of course, is that you first acknowledge the desires expressed by your child and reassure her that you are actively working to resolve the sensations in her belly--then you can try a distractionary technique.

Kid won't eat something you call broccoli? Call it a little tree. Want your child to learn about road safety as a pedestrian? Teach him about the Road Fairy/Ferry who has to be with him to help make sure there aren't any cars coming. He asks for a banana and refuses to eat it? Get him into a silly place and call it the Banana Zone.

It's okay for kids to splash in puddles once in a while. It's okay for them to treat curbs as balance beams. It's okay for them to do silly things and for you to join them. But remember: if you do it once, they will expect you to do it again. And again. And again. Begging may be involved. Whining as well, if you do not bend sufficiently to allow the game to happen again. So whatever you allow, whatever silliness or creative game you decide to play, consider whether or not it's one you'd be willing to do with any sort of regularity. If it's any kind of success, your child will want to repeat the fun time with Mommy and/or Daddy.

Also if your child has some issues that need resolving, be they significant (traumatic event) or minor (afraid of monsters under the bed), you may want to consider flipping through a copy of Dr. Lawrence Cohen's book Playful Parenting. I acknowledge that his writing could be better organized than it is, but for those looking for some ideas on where to start, it's a place to go. Dr. Cohen is a child psychologist who uses play as a form of therapy to help children recover from incidents ranging from violent behaviors to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to a fear of riding on swings. He describes play as many researchers today do, which is the main form of learning for children, particularly through about age 7. Play is how they study the world around them, how they make sense of what they perceive, and therefore play is the most critical aspect of childhood as well as the most educational.

The main thing for you as a parent is that you connect with your child. So you have to get down on the child's level. Get on the floor and roll around. Pretend to be a train or an elephant. Make silly noises and encourage your child to copy them or make up his own for you to repeat. Discuss ridiculous hypothetical situations with your older child (e.g. What would happen if you launched a water balloon into space? Whose house would it land on?). Life can be fun if we allow it to be so. Be creative, and enjoy more of life as a parent.