Infantplaza.com

Author: Chang Lim

One question some parents ask themselves; When should you start buying developmental toys for the baby?

The answer: Before they’re born.

Playing is the most important part of a human being’s development. We’re not just saying that to sell some toys, it’s true. In every sense of the word, playing is the most important part of personal development.

If wolf cubs don’t wrestle and fight in the litter, they’ll never be able to hunt as adults, and if children don’t play in their early developmental years, the entire learning process will never be anything but a chore to them.

In a way, every form of learning is a type of play. When you’re solving math problems on a worksheet, you’re not solving a real math problem, like "how many hours of overtime do I have to work to make the car payment?" you’re solving a pretend problem on a sheet of paper to practice for when you have to solve a real problem. That’s what playing is, and it starts in infancy.

For an infant, playing is how the basic functions of life are first learned. Playing for an infant is, of course, not quite the same as it is for a slightly older child. An infant isn’t able to piece together some Lincoln Logs and make a cabin, or drive a remote control car around the living room. What an infant does is much simpler, and much more critical. For an infant, playing amounts to things like watching the mobile go around in circles, feeling the textures of stuffed animals and blankets, and learning from a game of peekaboo that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.

One of the more recent and significant studies in the importance of play was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, or the AAP. "The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds". The basic gist of that 2006 report was that free, unstructured playtime is one of the most important elements in helping a child reach critical developmental milestones in socializing, cognitive development, emotional development, and even in teaching them to deal with stress, and become resilient against the emotional slings and arrows of life.

A lot of this can be explained further if you want to read a thick book on affective neuroscience, but in plain English, what it comes down to is that a baby needs to play if he or she hopes to develop their brain and their physical coordination. Squeezing a teddy bear is vitally important to hand-eye coordination and learning to interact with one’s environment. Heck, chewing on the corner of a blanket has a huge impact on a baby’s physical and mental growth.

At the very earliest stages, luckily, there’s not too much to worry about when it comes to picking out toys. You could hand a baby a comfy blanket and any <a href="http://www.yogee.com.au/">stuffed animal</a> without loose buttons, and they’ll figure out how to make the most of it. Perhaps more important is that they spend a lot of time playing with those toys with both of their parents.

About the author:

Yogee.com.au is a leading Australian online toy store. Visit yogee.com.au for a wide selection of Kids Toys at discounted prices. To save money on your next purchase, please visit <a href="http://www.yogee.com.au">Toys Online</a>.