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| Selecting Toys For Infants And Toddlers |
It's babies wot do it. You go to the playground for the first time and you look around at all these wonderful contraptions they now have, the huge climbing frames and rope bridges and long slides and sandpits, and what do you think? Do you think, 'Wow! My baby is going to love playing in this when he/she is a bit older?'
No, you don't. You think, 'They never had playgrounds like this when I was little.'
Then you go to the toy shop, ostensibly to buy something for your infant, or maybe to avoid real shopping. You try and look around the shelves with a baby's eye. Would Junior like this? Is that too old or too young or too expensive? This lasts twelve seconds, for that's how long it takes you to find something you want to buy for yourself.
For me, it was one of those ruinously expensive Brio wooden railway sets, which I bought for my daughter before she could walk. After you get the basics there are some terrific accessories to collect: junctions, bridges, stations, level crossings. Eventually your child will be old enough to play with it, but you will probably have moved onto something else by then.
(As with so much in this blog I thought I was the only person who did this, until I started asking around. Several dads told me of the cheap pseudo-Brio tracks you can buy at Tesco. One showed me a great little three-point junction he had picked up somewhere on a business trip.)
'When I became a man I put away childish things.' Now we are buying childish things again, and playing with them. Fathers used to be distant, slightly scary figures who had fought wars. Even today, some dads feel the need to be jaw-droppingly pompous, although I think we can recognize this as a lack of confidence as much as anything else. Join in, or keep your distance and your dignity? It's not that hard a choice. Better, I believe, to acknowledge that the infantilisation of parents is a natural process. You can only play with your child if you know how to play at all and if you have forgotten you can learn again.
It is funny that we spend all those years in our teens and twenties trying to be cool learning to put an adult face on, to be men who maybe don't smile much and certainly try and show no weakness if we can possibly help it. Work culture punishes weakness mercilessly, most male peer groups do. Babies render this invalid. You cannot be cool or authoritative or scary with a blob of baby puke on your tie. Hey, and there's Lego and roller-coasters to come. This is the true maturity, I believe: the reaIisation that all your formerly held notions of maturity were completely immature. Go on, have some more pud-pud. Jelly on a plate, jelly on a plate, wibble wobble wibble wobble, jelly on a plate ... To find out more, you can check out Selecting Toys For Infants And Toddlers.