Twenty-five tested, no-kit ways to keep your toddler calm, curious and screen-free while you wait to vote, plus the compact toys worth slipping into your bag.
The short answer, for any parent reading this in a hurry: singing two or three familiar nursery rhymes, playing a quiet pointing game ("find something red, find something round"), and narrating what you can both see will carry most toddlers through a polling-station queue of ten to twenty minutes without a screen in sight. These are not hacks or tricks. They are the ordinary ingredients of language-rich, attentive parenting that researchers have studied for decades, and they work precisely because they involve you.
If the queue is longer, or your two-year-old is in a particularly energetic mood, a single small wooden toy or a pocket-sized travel game tucked into a bag gives you one more reliable layer of calm. The sections below give you all twenty-five ideas in full, the science behind why waiting is actually good for young children, and a brief word on why bringing your toddler into a polling station at all is one of the loveliest small civics lessons available to a British family.
There is a widespread and entirely understandable belief that toddlers and queues are incompatible. The belief is wrong, or at least greatly overstated. A polling-station queue is, by historical standards, a short one. It moves. It offers a changing cast of faces, sounds and textures. And it places a parent in exactly the right position: close, unhurried, without a desk or a phone competing for attention. That is the optimal condition for the kind of warm, back-and-forth conversation that researchers Hart and Risley identified as the single most powerful driver of early vocabulary growth. A ten-minute wait, handled well, is a ten-minute gift.
Self-regulation, the ability to manage impulse and tolerate frustration, is one of the most reliable predictors of later academic and social success. It is also a skill that must be practised, not simply downloaded. Adele Diamond at the University of British Columbia has shown that the executive-function networks underpinning self-regulation are built incrementally through repeated, low-stakes experiences of waiting, redirecting attention and persisting with a task. A polling queue, with its gentle social pressure to stay reasonably quiet, is precisely such an experience.
What the research tells us
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff have demonstrated across multiple studies that playful, contingent interaction between a caregiver and a young child produces deeper learning than passive entertainment. A parent who names, wonders aloud and responds to a toddler's observations is providing richer cognitive input than any screen could offer in the same window of time.
Jaak Panksepp's foundational work on the SEEKING system in the mammalian brain is also relevant here: toddlers are neurologically primed to find novelty and meaning in ordinary environments. A polling station, with its unusual furniture, hushed atmosphere and unfamiliar adults, is genuinely interesting to a child who is invited to notice it.
Every activity below requires nothing but your presence and your voice.
Polling stations are housed in village halls, school gymnasiums, community centres and church rooms, spaces that are rarely visited and therefore genuinely novel to a toddler. The booths themselves, with their little shelves and stubby pencils, are curious objects. The ballot paper is large and crinkly. The ballot box has a satisfying slot. You are not obliged to explain voting in constitutional detail, but pointing to the pencil and saying "we are going to write something very important on a piece of paper" is enough to make a child feel included in something meaningful.
Language matters more than you think
Dana Suskind's Thirty Million Words project, drawing on the foundational Hart and Risley corpus, shows that narrating your environment to a young child, simply describing what you see and do, builds vocabulary and early literacy at a rate that no passive activity can match. Waiting in a queue is, in this sense, a narration opportunity.
There is no shame in packing a small toy. The best ones for a polling queue are silent, self-contained, open-ended and robust enough to survive being dropped on a community-centre floor without drama. A compact wooden puzzle, a set of small stacking pieces, or a pocket travel game satisfies all of those criteria. Jaques London, established in 1795 and the world's oldest games company, has a long tradition of making beautifully crafted, portable objects that reward attention rather than replace it.
Browse Jaques educational toys suited to early years and on-the-go playFor slightly older toddlers approaching three or four, a simple travel game introduced at home before election day becomes a reliable anchor in any unfamiliar environment. The familiarity of the object is itself calming, something researchers in the Vygotskian tradition would recognise as a transitional scaffold: a known thing in an unknown place.
Explore Jaques travel games, compact enough for a coat pocket or changing bagPatricia Kuhl's research at the University of Washington has shown that live, social musical interaction activates infant neural networks in ways that recorded music does not. Singing together, even quietly and even slightly off-key, is neurologically rich. For the queue, favour songs with repetition and physical action: Row, Row, Row Your Boat in a two-person sway; If You're Happy and You Know It with the volume dialled to a considerate murmur; or Old MacDonald where your child chooses the next animal. Call-and-response structures are particularly useful because they give the toddler an active role and a clear moment to wait for, which is itself a gentle rehearsal of the patience the queue is asking of them.
Children absorb the values of their families not through lectures but through observation of what adults treat as important. A parent who brings a child to vote, who waits patiently in a queue, who marks a paper carefully and pops it through a slot, is demonstrating participation, patience and civic duty in a single unspoken lesson. Friedrich Froebel, whose philosophy underpins so much of modern early-years thinking, believed that children learn the shape of the world by being present in it alongside adults who take that world seriously. A polling station is, in its modest way, a very serious and very hopeful place. Your toddler does not need to understand it fully to feel that.
A note on presence
Dimitri Christakis at Seattle Children's Research Institute has consistently found that the quality of caregiver attention during shared activities matters more than the activity itself. Being genuinely present with your toddler in the queue, curious and calm, is the most powerful thing you can offer them.
Probably not as much as you fear. Most voters are quietly sympathetic to small children in public spaces, and polling clerks are experienced with families. The activities above, particularly whispering games, slow breathing and texture exploration, are specifically calibrated to redirect vocal energy without suppressing it entirely. If your child does produce a sudden shout, a calm and unbothered parental response, "ooh, that was a big voice, let's try a tiny voice now," rather than a sharp shush, is both more effective and less likely to escalate.
Most polling-station queues in the UK resolve within ten to twenty minutes even on busy election days. For a two-year-old, twenty minutes of engaged, interactive waiting is entirely reasonable and well within what developmental research suggests for this age group, provided the wait is active rather than passive. If you arrive and the queue appears very long, going for a short walk with a pram and returning in fifteen minutes is a perfectly sensible strategy. There is no rule requiring you to stand still from the moment you arrive.
Under UK electoral law, you are entitled to bring your child with you to vote, and returning officers are required to ensure that polling stations are accessible. In practice, most are held in buildings with level or ramped access, and buggy space is generally available near the entrance or in a lobby area. It is worth folding a buggy if the space is tight, but you will not be turned away on account of it. If you have specific access concerns, your local council's electoral services team can confirm the layout of your assigned station in advance.
Step outside with your child first, allow them to regulate, and then return if you can. You do not have to abandon your vote. Most polling stations remain open from 7am to 10pm, giving you a wide window to try again later in the day when your toddler is better rested or fed. A meltdown in a queue is not a parenting failure. It is a two-year-old being two years old in an unfamiliar environment, and the adults around you almost certainly understand that better than you might expect in the moment.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.