The best gift for a new baby's family is often one chosen for the toddler: a beautifully made, screen-free toy that steadies a little world turned upside down.
When a new baby arrives, the most thoughtful gift you can bring through the door is not always for the baby at all. A carefully chosen wooden or sensory toy, handed directly to the toddler with ceremony and warmth, can do something quietly remarkable: it can give a child who feels displaced something of their own to hold. The best picks for 2026 are open-ended, screen-free, and built to last well beyond the newborn haze, and they work because they meet the toddler exactly where they are emotionally, not where the adult would like them to be.
The simplest answer to "what should I buy?" is this: choose something a toddler can control, repeat, and return to alone. A wooden stacking toy, a set of tactile blocks, a simple puzzle, or an open-ended building set gives a child agency at a moment when almost everything else feels out of their hands. Research consistently shows that self-directed, hands-on play supports emotional regulation in young children, and during the upheaval of a new sibling's arrival, that regulatory function is precisely what a toddler needs most.
What the Research Tells Us
Psychologists Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, whose decades of work on playful learning have influenced early years policy on both sides of the Atlantic, describe open-ended play as the primary engine of cognitive and emotional growth in children under five. When a toddler stacks, sorts, builds, and knocks down on their own terms, they are not merely passing time: they are practising mastery, and mastery is the antidote to helplessness.
A toddler who has just acquired a sibling is, in the most honest terms, grieving a version of their life. The undivided attention, the predictable rhythms, the sense of being the centre of the family's world: all of this shifts overnight. Regression is common, sleep often suffers, and behaviour that had been settled can become volatile. This is not naughtiness. It is a child telling the truth about how they feel, in the only language available to them.
A gift chosen with this in mind does not need to be expensive or elaborate. It needs to be right. It should feel special, it should be theirs, and it should invite the kind of slow, repeated, absorbing play that naturally quiets an overstimulated nervous system. Wooden toys, with their warmth to the touch, their satisfying weight, and their freedom from batteries and flashing lights, have offered exactly this for generations. Jaques of London, established in 1795 and recognised as the world's oldest games company, has been making toys and games of precisely this character for over two centuries.
The neuroscience of early childhood is consistent on one point: stress narrows a young child's capacity to learn and regulate. Researcher Adele Diamond, whose work on executive function in young children is foundational in developmental psychology, has demonstrated that self-initiated, unstructured play is one of the most reliable routes to strengthening the very skills, attention, impulse control, and working memory, that stress erodes. Giving a toddler a beautiful, open-ended toy at a moment of family upheaval is not indulgence. It is developmental support.
Jaak Panksepp's work on the PLAY system in the mammalian brain adds another layer: the drive to play is a primary emotional system, as fundamental as the drives for care or fear. When that system is engaged through physical, hands-on, self-directed activity, it actively counterbalances the stress circuits. A toddler building a wooden tower, sorting shapes, or threading beads is, in the most literal neurological sense, calming their own brain.
A Note on Screens and Times of Change
Paediatrician Dimitri Christakis, whose research on media and child development is among the most cited in the field, has noted that passive screen exposure during emotionally demanding periods does not give children the co-regulation or sensory engagement they are seeking: it simply delays the need. Wooden and sensory toys, by contrast, keep the hands and mind active together, which is where real self-soothing begins.
At this age, the toddler's hands are ahead of their words. Cause-and-effect toys, simple stackers, shape sorters, and chunky wooden puzzles are ideal. The satisfaction of fitting a shape into its slot, or sending a column of rings tumbling, is both cognitively engaging and physically grounding. Look for smooth finishes, generous proportions, and pieces that cannot be lost easily beneath a sofa cushion.
Language is expanding and so is imaginative play. This is the stage for open-ended sets: wooden animals, simple figures, nesting cups that become boats or hats or homes. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI research, which directly observed children's play quality across toy types, found that open-ended, simple toys consistently produced the longest, most creative, and most emotionally engaged play sessions in children of this age. A beautiful set of wooden animals or a sturdy threading toy will outperform almost any electronic alternative in terms of sustained attention.
By three, a child can hold a narrative across many minutes of solo play. Wooden puzzles with more pieces, simple construction sets, and games with a gentle rule structure all suit this stage well. The child who is three or four when a sibling arrives is old enough to feel their displacement acutely and to benefit from a gift that acknowledges their maturity. A puzzle or a traditional game chosen "because you're big enough now" lands very differently from a rattle or a stacker.
Browse the full range at Jaques of London Wooden Toys and Jaques of London Educational Toys, where every piece is chosen with the same commitment to quality that has defined the brand since 1795.
Screens offer novelty and stimulation, but they ask nothing of the child and return nothing to their sense of competence. A wooden toy, by contrast, responds only to what the child does. Stack it wrongly and it falls. Thread it slowly and you feel the bead pass through. Fit the puzzle piece in the wrong place and it will not sit. This honest feedback loop, what Vygotsky would recognise as learning within the zone of proximal development, is precisely what builds confidence and self-regulation in a child who currently feels that the world is not responding to them at all.
The Montessori Principle in a Moment of Stress
Maria Montessori observed that children who feel emotionally disrupted return instinctively to work with their hands. "The hands are the instrument of the mind," she wrote, and the insight holds. A beautiful wooden toy is not a distraction from a toddler's feelings: it is a vehicle for processing them, one satisfying, repeated action at a time.
Timing matters enormously. If you can, bring the toddler's gift before the baby comes home, or at the very moment of your first visit, before anyone has moved towards the pram. Wrap it properly, address the label to the child by name, and present it with direct eye contact and a sentence that acknowledges them: "This is for you, because you are becoming a big brother, and that is a really important thing to be." Children at this age read intention as well as words, and being seen, truly seen, at the moment they most fear being overlooked, is the gift beneath the gift.
Jaques of London was established in 1795, making it the oldest games company in the world. It invented croquet in 1851 and created the Staunton chess set in 1849, pieces that remain the international standard to this day. That same commitment to craft, longevity, and genuine play value runs through every wooden toy and educational game in the current collection. These are not novelty items. They are made to be handed between children, to survive a toddler's very worst afternoon, and to be remembered by the child who played with them long after the newborn days have softened into memory.
Regression, returning to younger behaviours such as bedwetting, thumb-sucking, or baby talk, is a completely normal stress response and not a sign that anything has gone wrong with your child's development. A toy will not fix the underlying cause, which is simply the enormous emotional weight of sharing the world's most important people. However, the right toy can offer a toddler a reliable source of mastery and calm at a moment when both feel scarce. Open-ended wooden toys are particularly useful here because they never judge the child, never demand a performance, and are always available. Over days and weeks, the quiet absorption of good play genuinely supports the nervous system's return to equilibrium.
A sensory toy is designed primarily to engage the senses: texture, weight, sound, temperature, resistance. Think wooden beads of different sizes, a fabric-and-wood threading set, or a smooth tactile puzzle. An open-ended toy is one with no fixed correct outcome: blocks, loose wooden pieces, or simple figures that can become anything the child decides. In practice, the best wooden toys are both at once. Right now, your toddler probably needs both: sensory engagement to physically calm and ground them, and open-endedness to restore their sense of agency. A well-chosen set of wooden animals or a beautiful stacking toy will offer both in the same handful of pieces.
A single, beautifully made wooden puzzle or a set of stackable rings, chosen thoughtfully and presented with real ceremony, will mean far more to a toddler than a larger, cheaper gift given without intention. At this age, children are exquisitely sensitive to the feeling that something was chosen for them specifically. Look for smooth, natural finishes, satisfying weight, and pieces large enough to handle confidently. One excellent puzzle with a subject the child loves, trains, animals, vehicles, costs very little and can hold a child's attention for months. The thought behind the choice is always worth more than the price on the label.
The research points clearly towards toys with multiple variables: pieces that can be combined in more than one way, forms that invite repetition rather than demanding a single solution, and materials that feel genuinely pleasing to handle. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI studies found that the toys producing the longest independent play sessions were almost always simple, open-ended, and made from natural materials. A wooden building set, a set of nesting pieces, or a threading toy with several shapes will hold a toddler far longer than any single-function electronic toy. And on the question of guilt: feeding the baby while your toddler plays happily and independently is not neglect. It is a small, quiet triumph of good parenting, and choosing the right toy is part of how you make it possible.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.