Sleep
Why Sleep Matters for Brain Development in Young Children
Sleep is often thought of as the thing that happens when a child is not learning or developing. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. The slee...
4 min read
19 articles found
Safety
Why Toddlers Do Not Understand Stranger Danger
Parents often worry about teaching toddlers to be wary of strangers, yet developmental research shows that toddlers are cognitively incapable of under...
5 min read
Play
Puzzles and Shape Sorters for Young Children: Developmental Value and Age Guide
Shape sorters and puzzles are among the most pedagogically sound toys on the market, and one of the few categories where simple, inexpensive versions...
3 min read
Play
Sorting Games by Color and Shape
Sorting is one of the earliest and most fundamental mathematical activities — grouping objects by shared characteristics is the basis of classificatio...
2 min read
Play
Sorting and Categorizing Games for Toddlers
Sorting and categorizing activities may seem simple, but they develop crucial cognitive skills. When a child sorts buttons by color, organizes toys by...
6 min read
Play
Puzzles for Young Children: Benefits and Selection
Puzzle play develops crucial cognitive and motor skills—problem-solving, spatial reasoning, fine motor control, and persistence. Yet many parents feel...
7 min read
Play
Puzzles and Shape Sorters for Young Children
Shape sorters and puzzles are among the best-researched early childhood play materials. They develop spatial reasoning, problem-solving, fine motor co...
2 min read
Play
Pretend Play: First Imaginative Games
Pretend play is not a frivolous activity for children. When a toddler feeds a doll, when a preschooler becomes a dinosaur, when children create elabor...
5 min read
Play
Pretend Play and Its Role in Cognitive Development
When your child pretends a block is a phone or acts out being a dinosaur, they're engaging in one of the most cognitively powerful forms of play. Pret...
5 min read
Play
Matching Games for Toddlers
Matching is the cognitive act of identifying sameness. When a child pairs two pictures of dogs, they are not just recognising a visual similarity — th...
2 min read
Play
First Puzzles for Children Aged 1–2
A puzzle is, at its core, a matching problem: this shape goes in this hole. For children aged 1–2, the challenge of that matching — visually identifyi...
3 min read
Play
Drawing and Its Role in Early Development
Drawing is one of the most important activities for young children's development, yet many parents underestimate its significance. From the earliest s...
6 min read
Play
Classification Games for Early Learning
When a child puts all the small animals in one pile and all the large ones in another, they are doing early mathematics. Classification — sorting obje...
2 min read
Play
Cause-and-Effect Toys and Games
One of the most important concepts for young children to understand is cause and effect—the understanding that actions create results. This foundation...
6 min read
Play
How Building Toys Develop Spatial Reasoning
Spatial reasoning—the ability to understand how objects fit together in space—is a crucial cognitive skill that predicts later math and science succes...
6 min read
Emotions
How Fear Develops in Infancy
Fear is not present at birth as a genuine emotion, even though the startle reflex and general distress responses are. The development of fear — the di...
3 min read
Development
Why Toddlers Ask 'Why': Curiosity, Learning, and How to Respond
The phase when a child discovers "why?" as a word is simultaneously delightful and relentless. Why is the sky blue? Why is Grandpa old? Why do we have...
5 min read
Development
Imaginary Friends in Early Childhood: What They Reveal About Development
The preschooler who sets a place at the table for an invisible dragon, narrates long conversations with a companion only they can see, or insists a se...
5 min read
Development
Executive Function in Young Children: What It Is and Why It Matters
Executive function is the set of cognitive skills that sit behind a child's ability to plan a sequence of actions, hold information in mind while usin...
6 min read