What developmental science actually says about play between 12 and 24 months, which toy categories earn their place, and why the flashing electronic ones can quietly work against the very skills they advertise.
The best toys for a 1 year old are simple, sturdy and open-ended: push and pull toys for new walkers, stacking cups, a simple shape sorter, balls of different sizes, board books, and ordinary household objects such as pots, boxes and wooden spoons. The research on toddler play is remarkably consistent on this point. Toys that do less invite the child to do more, and it is the child's own effort, repetition and experimentation that builds the brain at this age.
A 1 year old does not need many toys, and does not need expensive ones. What they need is a small set of objects that match the developmental work they are doing right now: learning to walk, discovering that hidden things still exist, working out cause and effect, saying first words, and putting things into containers and tipping them out again, roughly four hundred times a day. Choose toys that serve those jobs and you can ignore almost everything else on the shelf.
The second year of life is one of the steepest learning curves a human being ever climbs. Most children take their first independent steps somewhere between 9 and 18 months, and once walking begins, the world reorganises itself: a toddler can now carry objects, push things, climb, and choose where to go. Physical play in this window is not a break from learning. It is the learning.
Alongside walking, several quieter revolutions are under way. Object permanence, the understanding that things continue to exist when out of sight, consolidates across this period, which is why peekaboo and hiding games suddenly become hilarious rather than confusing. Cause and effect thinking takes off: drop the spoon, mum picks it up, drop it again. First words arrive, typically between 10 and 14 months, followed by a slow build to a vocabulary explosion late in the second year. And almost every child of this age becomes obsessed with what researchers politely call container play: filling, dumping, posting, nesting and carrying.
Jean Piaget described this stage as sensorimotor intelligence: the child literally thinks with their hands and body, running small physical experiments hundreds of times a day. A good toy for a 1 year old is simply good apparatus for those experiments.
Key citation
Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children · WHO (2019). Guidelines on Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Sleep for Children Under 5 Years of Age
For a new or nearly-new walker, a stable push-along toy is close to perfect: it offers support, rewards forward motion, and turns practice into a game. Once walking is secure, a pull-along toy on a string does something subtler, asking the child to coordinate their own movement with an object trailing behind them, which develops balance, spatial awareness and planning. This is one reason pull-along animals have survived two centuries of toy fashion essentially unchanged.
Possibly the highest value-per-pound toy ever made. Stacking cups serve seriation (ordering by size), fine motor control, cause and effect (towers fall down), container play, bath play and pretend play, and they keep earning their place well into the third year. If you buy one thing, buy these.
A wooden sorter with a handful of chunky shapes is a genuine problem-solving machine: it demands visual matching, rotation, persistence and the delicious payoff of the shape dropping through. Choose simple over clever. Three to six shapes is plenty at this age; twelve shapes and a singing lid is a toy for the parent, not the child.
Rolling, chasing, throwing and (eventually) catching a ball builds gross motor skill, tracking and turn-taking. A ball rolled between parent and child is also one of the earliest true back-and-forth games, and that serve-and-return rhythm is the same structure that underpins conversation.
Board books count as toys at this age, and they may be the single best-evidenced object in the house. Shared book reading is one of the most reliable predictors of early language, not because of the book itself but because of the talk it generates: naming, pointing, questioning, repeating.
Saucepans, wooden spoons, cardboard boxes, plastic bowls, a low kitchen drawer the child is allowed to empty. Toddlers consistently choose real objects over replicas because real objects are what the grown-ups use, and imitation is the engine of toddler learning. This is free, and it is not a lesser form of play.
Key citation
Trawick-Smith, J. et al., TIMPANI Toy Study, Eastern Connecticut State University: simple, open-ended toys consistently scored highest for sustained, complex child-directed play
If you want the wooden versions of these categories from a maker that has been producing them since 1795, our publisher's range covers most of the list.
Browse traditional wooden toys for ages 1 and up →Strip away the packaging claims and four questions do most of the work:
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff, two of the most cited researchers in early language and play, summarise decades of work in a phrase worth keeping: the best toy is 90 per cent child and 10 per cent toy.
This is where the evidence becomes unusually specific. In 2016, Anna Sosa of Northern Arizona University published a study in JAMA Pediatrics that recorded parents and 10 to 16 month olds playing at home with three kinds of toys: electronic toys (lights, songs, talking buttons), traditional toys (blocks, shape sorters, rubber blocks) and board books. The result was striking. During electronic toy play, parents said fewer words, responded less, and used fewer of the content-specific words the toys were nominally teaching. The children also vocalised less. The electronic toys did the talking, so the humans did not.
Key citation
Sosa, A. V. (2016). Association of the Type of Toy Used During Play With the Quantity and Quality of Parent-Infant Communication. JAMA Pediatrics, 170(2)
This matters because the quantity and quality of parent-child conversation is among the strongest known predictors of early language development, a finding running from Hart and Risley's landmark work onwards. A toy that suppresses conversation is therefore working against the headline on its own box, however many letters and numbers it recites. None of this requires a household ban or a guilt audit of the toy basket. One singing toy will not bend a childhood. But when you are choosing what to buy, the direction of the evidence is clear: the quieter the toy, the louder the conversation around it.
The same logic applies to screens. The WHO's 2019 guidance recommends no sedentary screen time at all for children under 2, not because screens are poison but because every screen hour displaces the floor play, handling and back-and-forth interaction that this age actually runs on.
If you are buying for someone else's child, the categories above are the safe list, and the gifts that last tend to be the ones slightly ahead of the child: a pull-along for a baby about to walk, a first puzzle for the months after, a wooden toy that will still be on the shelf, intact and loved, at age four. Maria Montessori's observation holds: children are drawn to real, beautiful, manageable materials. A well-made wooden toy also survives being a hand-me-down, which is its own kind of value.
See educational toys built to last beyond the first birthday →Far fewer than most homes contain. A working set is around 8 to 12 toys available at once, covering movement, stacking, posting, books and a ball, with the rest rotated out of sight. Research on toddler play suggests fewer available toys leads to longer, deeper engagement with each one, and a 1 year old genuinely cannot tell the difference between a £15 toy and a £50 one.
Bad is too strong; less good is accurate. The Sosa 2016 JAMA Pediatrics study found that electronic toys measurably reduced both parent talk and child vocalisation compared with traditional toys and books. Occasional use does no harm, but as the default toy diet they crowd out the conversation and child-led effort that drive development at this age.
Mostly: anything that can be carried, posted, emptied, banged or pushed, plus whatever you are holding. Expect filling and dumping containers, putting lids on and off, pushing things along the floor, and bringing you objects for naming. This looks repetitive to adults; it is systematic experimentation to the child, and it is exactly what this stage of play should look like.
A wooden pull-along toy, a set of stacking cups, or a well-made shape sorter are the classic answers, and the evidence backs the classics. They serve the child's current developmental work, stay relevant for two years or more, and survive the treatment a toddler hands out. A beautiful board book is the strongest small gift; the shared reading it triggers is worth more than the object.
Every toy on this page is educational in the only sense that matters at 12 to 24 months: it gives the child practice at moving, gripping, solving, talking and playing with another person. Toys marketed as educational because they recite the alphabet are answering a question 1 year olds are not yet asking. Trust the boring-looking classics; the evidence does.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.