Between the ages of 12 and 18 months, most children move up a gear in their developing relationship with the world. Already they have progressed from their first cursory encounters to more thorough examination. Now, as they move into their second year of life, curiosity and dexterity increase, and examination becomes experimentation. It is no longer enough to thoroughly experience something, and find out how it looks from all angles, how it feels, tastes and smells. Now, they have to find out what it does if they push it, squeeze it, bang it or drop it. They start to enjoy malleable things - dough, mud, water, sand - discovering that they can make these materials behave in amazing ways. Dough or clay will take on new shapes, water will spread out in a huge puddle when you spill a small bit, and dry sand will pour like water.
For the rising-twos, paint is usually appreciated mainly as a squidgy substance which has the added benefit of coming in a range of bright colours. However, this does not mean that children of this age are not interested in making their mark. By the age of two, most will have begun to understand what drawing implements are for. At first, they hold a crayon in their whole palm and scribble from side to side. Gradually they change to a rough approximation of the tripod grip, and the scribbles become circular.
Another sign of developing creativity is the growing tendency to use bricks for building up as well as for knocking down. And although they still enjoy putting things into containers and taking them out again, children in their second year also start to fit objects into corresponding holes, and to unite things, such as cups and saucers, that belong together. Thus many of the toys that are acquired during the child's first year take on new roles during the second. Canny carers will squirrel away some of the old things, so that they will seem fresh and new when they reappear a few months later.
Pretend play becomes increasingly important as children's minds develop. Their desire to imitate the adults close to them becomes stronger. They still like to follow you around, simultaneously doing the things you do, but they now have the mental capacity to imitate actions they saw you perform hours or even days earlier.
At this stage, the props have to be as realistic as possible. Children of this age have yet to make the imaginative leap that allows them to make one object stand for another. Using, say, an upturned hat as a doll's paddling pool, requires a level of symbolic thought which will take months more to develop. For young toddlers, the best props of all are the real objects themselves. An old disconnected telephone is a particular favourite.
Dolls, teddies, plastic farm animals and small-world figures also become popular at this age. Toddlers of both sexes enjoy playing with dolls, though to begin with, the imitation infants get lugged by the hair rather more often than they get fed. Small-world people get treated in a similarly cavalier fashion at first, but after a while, they cease to be mere objects and start to emerge in the toddler's mind as real characters in simple dramas where they are made to do the washing up or visit their friends.
Small figures, animals and vehicles are particularly useful in reinforcing children's growing understanding that objects belong to categories. This realisation is essential to an ordered perception of the world. It is helpful to know, for example, the difference between food and non-food. Most 18-month-olds understand this distinction and no longer take everything to their mouths. Once children begin to discriminate this way, sorting things into groups becomes a favourite game.
If it is important to provide playthings that will stimulate children's intellectual growth, it is equally important to provide equipment that will aid the development of their bodies. There are few natural obstacles to conquer in the immediate environment of the modern urban child, so climbing frames, balancing beams and softplay modules have to take the place of trees, walls and grassy knolls. And then there are the ride-on toys - toddlers don't know how good they are for developing gross motor control, they just know they love them.
Safety remains paramount when choosing toys for children this age, but the considerations are much the same as for toys for younger babies, discussed in our first article in this series (see Nursery World, 24 May 2001). NW