Baby toys

Baby toys have to do a very practical job: keep infants busy, comforted, and learning with safe shapes, textures, sounds, and movement. By our assessment, the best ones are the ones that are easy to grasp, washable, and built for short attention spans, because that is how babies actually use them. The downside is that this category can become noisy, cluttered, and short-lived in usefulness very quickly, since what works for a six-month-old may be ignored a little later. In practice the good ones are simple, not fancy, and often more about teething, reaching, and repeated dropping than about entertainment in the adult sense. Compared with toys for older children, baby toys are much more about safety and sensory development than imagination or rules. Baby toys are worth choosing carefully when the child is very young, and less worth overbuying once the house is already full of plastic that sings and flashes on its own.