SupplyToy

Toddler gifts rarely fail in December. They fail in January, when the visitors have gone home and the room is crowded. Choosing against winter, floor space, and what the child can already do removes most of the shelf on its own.

A four-year-old counting to four and a five-year-old counting to ten are showing you two of the least interesting maths skills they have. Sorting, patterns and one-to-one matching are where the real groundwork sits.

Most board games are abandoned for one of three reasons: the shortest game is too long, the table never has the right number of people, or someone gets knocked out early. All three are checkable before you spend anything.

A room full of toys produces less play than a shelf with six. Here is the mechanism behind that, and a rotation system that takes ten minutes a month to run.

The tripod grip parents worry about does not appear until around four, and tracing worksheets will not hurry it. Hand strength and two-hand coordination are the real work, and they look a lot like play.

A first board game has one job, which is to survive being played four times in a row without tears. That means more luck than skill, a round measured in minutes, and no way to knock a player out of the game.

Most gifts for two-year-olds are abandoned within weeks, and it is rarely the toy's fault. It is a mismatch with what a two-year-old can actually do, and the fix is simpler than it sounds.

Three is the year pretending takes over, and a gift only earns its place if it can be written into the story. Here is how to choose toys that get cast instead of shelved, plus the small-parts problem nobody mentions.