Five gentle, evidence-backed days of play to help your toddler thrive in the quiet week between Christmas and New Year, no tablet required.
The five days between Christmas and New Year, fondly known as Twixmas, do not need a schedule packed with organised activities, nor do they need a screen propped on the kitchen counter to keep the peace. The honest answer to surviving this week with toddlers is simpler than most parenting articles suggest: slow down, offer open-ended toys, go outside once a day, and trust that a bored child is a child on the verge of something imaginative. A screen-free Twixmas is not a feat of parental endurance. With a little preparation it becomes, genuinely, one of the loveliest stretches of the year.
If you have a two-to-four-year-old who keeps reaching for the tablet the moment they are not entertained, that is entirely normal, and it is not a sign you have failed. Research led by Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff consistently shows that toddlers learn language, spatial reasoning and social understanding most efficiently through hands-on, face-to-face play, not through passive screen consumption. The week between Christmas and New Year is, in practical terms, a gift: you have new toys in the house, you have time, and the usual pressures of routine are suspended. Use it.
What the evidence says about screens and under-5s
The World Health Organization recommends no screen time at all for children under two, and no more than one hour of sedentary screen time per day for three-to-four-year-olds, with a strong preference for interactive, co-viewed content over passive consumption. Independently, work by Christakis found that background television alone disrupts the quality and quantity of parent-child verbal interaction, reducing the very conversations that build vocabulary and cognition in the toddler years.
Twixmas, the colloquial name for the days from 27 to 31 December, occupies an unusual psychological space. Routines are dissolved, grandparents may still be visiting, sugar consumption has been higher than usual and sleep is almost certainly disrupted. For toddlers, whose entire sense of security rests on predictable rhythms, this can produce a potent mixture of overstimulation and boredom. Understanding that is half the battle. The goal of a Twixmas plan is not to replicate nursery school at home. It is to offer just enough structure to prevent dysregulation, while leaving generous room for child-led exploration.
Before 27 December arrives, do one quiet, ten-minute task: put roughly half the new Christmas toys away. This sounds counterintuitive, but Dauch and colleagues demonstrated that toddlers engage in higher-quality, more sustained play when offered fewer objects at a time. A room overflowing with new gifts is cognitively overwhelming. A small, curated selection placed at child height, with space around each item, invites genuine exploration. Rotate toys every day or two across the week and the novelty is replenished without a single new purchase.
Designate one corner of a room as the play zone for the week: a low table, a basket, perhaps a wooden tray. Keep screens physically out of that space. The absence does not need to be enforced through argument if the environment simply does not invite the habit.
After the intensity of Christmas Day and Boxing Day, toddlers need decompression more than stimulation. Let your child help you sort and arrange their new toys. Naming, categorising and placing objects on shelves is deeply satisfying for this age group, draws on early mathematical thinking and requires no adult performance whatsoever.
Choose one simple game and play it repeatedly. Repetition, far from being tedious for toddlers, is precisely how learning consolidates. Skittles, stacking rings or a simple wooden puzzle all reward multiple attempts. Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI research identified open-ended, manipulative toys as those producing the deepest learning value, and classic wooden sets score consistently at the top of that measure. Bring one out and let your child take the lead on the rules.
Browse Jaques traditional games, played and loved since 1795Wrap up and go outside, even if the weather is grey and damp. Sandseter and Brussoni's research on outdoor risky play demonstrates that physical freedom in natural environments reduces anxiety, improves executive function and restores attention in young children. Even a thirty-minute walk with puddles, sticks and the occasional muddy detour will recalibrate a fractious toddler more effectively than any indoor activity.
This is the day to introduce a toy that invites narrative, building or role-play. Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development reminds us that children stretch furthest when a more capable partner, a parent or an older sibling, joins the play and gently extends it. Sit on the floor. Follow your toddler's lead. Ask questions rather than directing. A simple set of wooden figures, a set of building blocks or a board game adapted for small hands can sustain an entire morning this way.
Explore Jaques wooden toys, crafted for open-ended, lasting playNew Year's Eve with a toddler is best celebrated early and gently. A family game played at the kitchen table, with a hot drink for the adults and a small treat for small people, is genuinely festive. Froebel, whose philosophy underpins so much of what we now know about early childhood, wrote that play is the highest expression of human development in childhood. A game played together, with laughter and mild competitiveness and the particular satisfaction of a wooden piece placed correctly, is a fine way to close the year.
Hart, Risley and the power of conversation
The landmark research by Hart and Risley established that the number and quality of words a child hears in the early years has a profound and lasting effect on vocabulary, reading ability and school readiness. Twixmas, with its slower pace and fewer scheduled obligations, is a rare opportunity for the kind of extended, unhurried conversation with your toddler that screens consistently crowd out. Every game played together, every walk narrated aloud, every question answered patiently, is an investment whose returns compound for decades.
There is a reason that the toys which have endured for generations, skittles, stacking cups, simple board games, wooden puzzles, continue to appear on every developmental therapist's recommended list. They require the child to act, rather than react. They offer resistance: the satisfying difficulty of a piece that must be turned before it fits, the concentration required to aim and throw. Diamond's research on executive function in early childhood identifies precisely this kind of effortful, self-directed activity as the training ground for attention, impulse control and working memory. These are the capacities that predict school readiness more reliably than early literacy or numeracy alone.
Jaques of London, established in 1795 and the world's oldest games company, has been making exactly these kinds of toys and games for more than two centuries. The craftsmanship is not nostalgia for its own sake. It reflects a genuine understanding, confirmed now by a century of developmental research, that the best toys do less, so that children can do more.
Panksepp's affective neuroscience research identified play as one of the primary emotional systems in the mammalian brain, hardwired and urgent. Toddlers are not choosing to be energetic and then difficult. They are following a biological imperative. The antidote to afternoon fractious behaviour is almost always the same: outdoor movement in the morning, a genuine rest period after lunch, and calm, low-stimulus play in the late afternoon. Protect the nap or quiet time fiercely during Twixmas. It is the single most effective tool available.
Ginsburg on the irreplaceable role of play
Writing for the American Academy of Pediatrics, Kenneth Ginsburg described play as essential to healthy brain development, emotional regulation and the formation of secure parent-child attachment. He was explicit that unstructured, child-led play is not a luxury but a developmental necessity, and that the presence of a warm, engaged adult who follows the child's lead amplifies every benefit. No app replicates this. No programme substitutes for it.
Nothing, most likely. Screens are engineered to be compelling, with variable reward loops that even adults find difficult to resist. Your toddler is not deficient in curiosity. They have simply learned that the tablet delivers stimulation instantly and reliably. The answer is not confrontation but redirection: get onto the floor with the new toy yourself, begin playing with visible enjoyment, and let your child's natural drive to join you do the work. Radesky's research on mobile device use in family settings confirms that the most powerful factor in reducing screen-seeking behaviour in toddlers is not restriction alone, but the presence of an engaged, playful adult as an alternative.
Prioritise rest above all else. An overtired toddler cannot access their capacity for creative play, no matter how wonderful the toys on offer. Scale back your ambitions for the first day or two: a short walk, a simple meal, a familiar book read slowly, a single tray of toys. Gopnik's work on the toddler brain describes it as a lantern rather than a spotlight, taking in everything at once, which is precisely why overstimulation is so destabilising. Calm the environment first. The rich play will follow naturally once sleep debt is repaid.
Rotate, reframe and join in. Put the toy away for two days, then reintroduce it as though for the first time, ideally with a slight change: a new context, a new challenge, or simply your enthusiastic participation. Sosa's research on toy quality and parent-child interaction found that the presence of an adult who plays alongside a toddler dramatically increases engagement and duration of play with any given object. The toy has not lost its value. It simply needs a social invitation to come alive again.
A wholly screen-free week is aspirational rather than obligatory, and rigidity in parenting rarely serves anyone well. The evidence does not suggest that an occasional, co-viewed programme causes lasting harm. What the research does consistently show, from Madigan's systematic reviews to Christakis's observational work, is that habitual passive screen use displaces the kinds of interaction that build language, attention and emotional regulation. The goal of a screen-free Twixmas is not moral purity. It is to create enough uninterrupted space for the good stuff, the games, the walks, the conversations, the laughter, to happen. If a single episode of something calm on a tired afternoon keeps the peace, the week is not lost. The direction of travel is what matters.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.