A gentle, evidence-led eight-week guide to keeping a toddler and baby happily engaged together this summer, without a screen in sight.
The short answer, if you need it quickly: screen-free summers work best when you stop trying to run two separate activity programmes and instead build a shared environment of open-ended, sensory-rich play in which both your baby and your toddler can participate at their own level simultaneously. Simple wooden toys, water trays, treasure baskets and traditional garden games create what researchers call affordance-rich settings: spaces where a seven-month-old can mouth a smooth wooden ring while a two-and-a-half-year-old stacks, sorts and narrates the same materials. You do not need a packed schedule. You need a handful of well-chosen materials and a low-prep routine that respects nap windows.
The evidence for keeping under-fives away from screens during unstructured time is now consistent and considerable. The World Health Organization recommends zero screen time for children under two and no more than one hour of sedentary screen time per day for children aged two to four, and that hour should be interactive rather than passive. Beyond compliance, the real argument is developmental. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff have shown across decades of research that the richest cognitive growth in the early years emerges from child-directed, playful exploration: precisely the kind that a sensory basket, a set of wooden stacking cups or a garden skittles set reliably produces. When a toddler explains what she is building to her watching baby sibling, she is consolidating language, theory of mind and narrative thinking at once. The baby, meanwhile, is absorbing far more than it appears.
What the Research Says · Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff
Decades of observational research by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff confirm that open-ended, child-directed play produces deeper cognitive and language gains in under-fives than structured instruction or passive screen viewing. The key ingredient is not the toy's complexity but its openness: materials that can become anything invite the most sustained engagement.
Summer with a baby and a toddler is not a curriculum. Give yourself permission to abandon the idea of hourly activities and instead think in terms of invitations to play: a tray left on the floor, a basket refilled with natural objects, a patch of garden made safe and interesting. The low-prep principle means that your setup time should never exceed five minutes. If it does, the activity is wrong for this season of your life. Identify your toddler's two longest reliable windows, usually mid-morning and mid-afternoon, bracketing the baby's longest nap. The baby's awake windows, typically forty-five minutes to two hours depending on age, become your side-by-side play time. Everything else is free exploration and repetition of known favourites.
Janice Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI research, which assessed thousands of play interactions across early childhood settings, found that the toys producing the highest developmental return were those requiring the child to do the work: open-ended materials with no single correct outcome. A set of smooth wooden blocks outperforms most electronic alternatives. Keep that principle in mind when the summer feels overwhelming.
The first fortnight is about establishing rhythm rather than introducing novelty. Place a low tray or wooden treasure basket on a blanket where both children can reach it from their natural positions: baby on a mat, toddler kneeling alongside. Fill it with items safe for mouthing: large smooth wooden rings, fabric squares in different textures, a small sealed container of dried rice that rattles, a wooden spoon. Your toddler will narrate, sort and hand things to the baby. The baby will watch, reach and grasp. Neither needs instruction.
Water play in a washing-up bowl on the kitchen floor covers both ages elegantly. Add a wooden cup, a small sponge and a floating wooden disc. The toddler pours; the baby splashes a hand under supervision. Keep sessions short and stay present. Outside, a patch of earth or a plastic tray of damp sand with a wooden spoon and a few stones will hold a toddler for longer than almost any structured activity, while the baby watches from a bouncy chair or a blanket in the shade.
Explore Jaques London's collection of wooden toys, designed for open-ended early playBy weeks three and four, your toddler will be restless for something with slightly higher stakes. This is the moment for outdoor skittles. A classic wooden skittles set placed on grass gives a toddler a clear cause-and-effect loop: roll, knock, collect, reset. The repetition is not tedious to a two or three-year-old; it is, as Piaget would recognise, the assimilation of a new schema. The baby, propped safely to watch from a few feet away, is already learning about trajectories, spatial relationships and the satisfying geometry of objects falling. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified PLAY as one of the primary emotional systems in the mammalian brain, active from infancy. Even a watching baby is not passive but is priming neural pathways through observation.
Gentle rough-and-tumble between siblings is worth facilitating rather than discouraging, provided the toddler understands one simple rule: the moment the baby makes a sound of protest, everything stops. Sergio Pellis's research on rough-and-tumble play demonstrates that it builds social cognition and emotional regulation more effectively than quieter forms of interaction. Position the baby on a thick mat, encourage the toddler to roll a soft wooden ball gently across to them, and celebrate every successful exchange.
What the Research Says · Panksepp on the PLAY System
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp demonstrated that PLAY is a primary emotional operating system present in the mammalian brain from early infancy. Babies watching an older sibling in active, joyful play are not merely entertained: they are engaged neurologically, laying foundations for social and motor learning through observation alone.
Midway through the summer, the toddler's play becomes noticeably more narrative. This is the season to introduce simple wooden puzzles, stacking towers and the beginnings of pretend play with wooden figures or a basic play set. Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development is useful here: the toddler will attempt tasks slightly beyond current ability when a responsive adult, or an admiring baby sibling, provides the social motivation. The baby's gaze is a surprisingly powerful audience.
Garden exploration in weeks five and six can deepen beyond simple digging. Collect leaves, examine insects under a magnifying glass, float sticks in a water tray. Richard Louv's writing on nature-deficit disorder argues that unstructured outdoor time builds the sensory integration and attention capacities that structured indoor activity cannot replicate. You do not need countryside: a window box, a pot of herbs or a single square metre of accessible outdoor space will do. Let the toddler lead and let the baby observe from a safe vantage point.
Browse Jaques London's educational toys, from stacking sets to wooden puzzles crafted for early learnersBy week seven, many parents feel a familiar dip. The novelty has worn off and the routines feel repetitive. This is, in fact, exactly right. Repetition is not failure; it is the mechanism of early learning. Peter Gray's research on self-directed play demonstrates that children who are allowed to revisit familiar activities on their own terms show greater persistence and creativity than those constantly moved on to something new. Rotate two or three materials back into the basket that have not appeared for a fortnight and watch them be received as entirely fresh discoveries.
Boredom, too, has value. Adele Diamond's work on executive function in early childhood identifies the capacity to self-generate activity from within, rather than relying on external stimulation, as one of the strongest predictors of later learning success. When your toddler grumbles that there is nothing to do and then, ten minutes later, is arranging wooden rings into an elaborate imaginary road, something genuinely important has happened. Trust that moment. The screen-free summer is working, even when it does not feel like it.
The materials that earn their place across all eight weeks share three qualities: they work for multiple ages simultaneously, they require no batteries or instructions, and they last beyond a single summer. A wooden stacking set used by the baby as a grasping and mouthing object becomes a sorting and counting toy by two and a construction challenge by three. Wooden skittles serve a toddler's gross motor ambitions while doubling as a visual and auditory spectacle for a watching baby. Wooden puzzles grow with the child. Traditional games played on grass, even in a small space, introduce rules, turn-taking and the joyful frustration of near-misses in a way that nothing on a screen genuinely replicates.
Jaques London has been making precisely these kinds of toys and games since 1795, longer than any other games company in the world. The Staunton chess set, created in 1849 and still the global standard, and the invention of croquet as an organised garden game in 1851 are part of the same tradition: beautifully made objects designed to bring people of different ages and abilities together around shared, joyful activity. That tradition translates directly to a summer blanket on the grass, with a baby reaching for a wooden ring and a toddler explaining, very seriously, the rules of a game she has just invented.
What the Research Says · Dauch on Open-Ended Toys
Research by Carly Dauch and colleagues found that toddlers presented with a smaller number of open-ended toys engaged in significantly longer, more creative and more sophisticated play than those given a larger quantity of single-function toys. For a screen-free summer, fewer, better-chosen materials consistently outperform a playroom full of novelty.
The most sustainable approach is to build a set of independent-play invitations that your toddler can enter and exit without your constant facilitation. A low tray with wooden blocks, a basket of natural objects, or a water bowl with a cup and spoon will hold many toddlers for fifteen to twenty minutes of genuine absorption, giving you the freedom to feed or settle the baby alongside. The key is consistency: the same basket in the same corner, available at the same time each morning, becomes a signal that independent play is the expected and enjoyable thing. Over two or three weeks, those windows lengthen naturally. You are not neglecting your toddler; you are giving them one of the most valuable early skills there is.
The safest shared activities are those in which the toddler's role is clearly defined at a distance from the baby's body: rolling a wooden ball across to the baby, placing objects into the treasure basket for the baby to find, or performing a skittles game while the baby watches from a safe distance. Singing, reading aloud and simple puppet play are also excellent, because the toddler becomes the entertainer and the baby the audience, a dynamic that feels satisfying to both. When the toddler does make physical contact, naming the baby's responses helps: "Look, she smiled when you did that gently. She loves it when you're careful." Positive narration of successful gentle interaction is more effective than repeated warnings about roughness.
Absolutely and without qualification. A blanket on a balcony, a washing-up bowl of water, a patch of earth in a pot and a wooden spoon constitute a complete outdoor play environment for under-fives. Ellen Sandseter and Mariana Brussoni's research on outdoor risk and benefit consistently finds that the quality of a child's engagement with an outdoor space matters far more than its size or sophistication. The toddler who is allowed to dig, pour, carry and explore a single square metre of accessible garden gains the same sensory and motor benefits as one with a large lawn. Local parks, library story sessions and community gardens extend the range without cost. The screen-free summer is far more about presence and permission than it is about resources.
The most reliable indicators are behavioural rather than quantitative. A toddler who is getting rich, varied play shows increasing ability to occupy themselves, a broadening vocabulary used spontaneously in pretend contexts, genuine curiosity about new objects and situations, and the capacity to return to interrupted play. Dana Suskind's research on language-rich environments, drawing on the foundational work of Hart and Risley, confirms that children in responsive, talk-rich, play-rich settings show measurable gains in language and cognitive development over time. You do not need formal assessment. If your toddler is narrating, inventing, problem-solving and occasionally getting satisfyingly frustrated, the play is working. The screen-free summer does not need to be perfect to be profoundly worthwhile.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.