Baby Keepsake #2: 👶🏼 Wooden Toys You’ll Both Treasure 👶🏼

Baby Keepsake #2: Wooden Toys You’ll Both Treasure

When our children are younger it’s much easier to guide them towards natural toys and ask that any gifts be the same. It’s when they are older and the lure of brightly colored and often electronic toys can get the better of you and them.

WWII saw an end to traditionally making toys from metal and wood and by the late 1940s Fisher Price, was the first toy manufacturer to make its entire toy line in plastic. In order to keep up with the mass production of toys, many other companies followed suit.

Today, the toy industry is a huge market to say the least, worth $20.36 billion in 2016 and growing each year. Not surprisingly plastic toys make up 90% of that revenue.

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As parents, not only should we be concerned with the environmental impact that these disposable toys have on the future of our planet, but also the health impact on our children.

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Every year we see more and more recalls on children’s toys. This can be due to chemicals found in the paint or plastics, small parts that pose a choking or swallowing hazard or toys that pose a fire hazard. These recalls are mostly on toys manufactured outside of the US.

Last year, there were over 174,100 toy-related ER-treated injuries and sadly 7 deaths in children under 15 years of age.

There are many reasons for these staggering and sad statistics, but perhaps one of the easily rectifiable one is the move away from purchasing mass produced, plastic toys made outside the US and a return to the more traditional, handmade variety. Lovingly crafted to not only be fun to play with but be passed down to the next generation.

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My husband for instance still has wooden toys from when he was a child that his mum recently gave to us when clearing out their basement. All they need is a coat of beeswax and they’re ready for Freyja to play with. They were bought for him by his grandmother, Freyja’s great-grandmother, from local craftsmen in the Chicago area and still look almost like new!

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You may have read in my article Red Wellies # 6: Teething Pain and How to Manage it, where I highlight some of the pros to wooden teething toys and also introduce one if my favorite sources for heirloom wooden toys, Bannor Toys

Apart from being durable and timeless, wooden toys encourage the imagination and grow with your child. For Valentine’s Day, we bought Freyja a wooden heart stacker. As she’s still so young, she can use the hearts as teethers, then as a stacker to sort by size and use the heart shapes for whatever else she can imagine… Perhaps heart shaped pancakes… yum!

And rather than relying on the toy for stimulation by way of lights or sounds, your child makes up their own play and uses their imagination which isn’t limited by the original purpose of the toy.

They’re also tactile and encourage fine motor skills as often a wooden toy is heavier and isn’t molded to the child’s hand. They must work to be able to manipulate and play with it.

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Here are some of the toys we have for Freyja. All toys are from Bannor Toys apart from the darling, wooden, pull-along dog which is from Papa Dons Toys.

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I hope that you consider some wooden toys for your children and turn them into keepsakes and a reminder of their childhood to pass down to the next generation.

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Original content by @redwellies

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