“It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”                                      -DW Winnicott (1896-1971), a renowned British Pediatrician and Psychoanalyst

Yesterday, while randomly browsing over the internet, I came across the above quote. It immediately caught my eyes, and led me to think of the truth in it.

For a child, though the formal schooling starts much later, the learning starts as soon as he is born. Initially, a child learns from his environment. Once he is familiar with the environment, he uses toys to keep himself entertained, and in the process, learns from them. As parent, it is our responsibility to foster this learning by providing appropriate toys to our kids. How often it happens, that in the process of fulfilling this responsibility, we spend endless hours in the toy store to find the right toy.  But when given to the kid, the toy spends no more than 30 minutes with him, only to be thrown away in the toy box with multitude of other toys.

But few toys always remain kids’ favorites. Same is with our 2 yr daughter, Pari.

Often, we wish that someone could tell us which toys would strike a chord with our kids. Here, we are presenting a list of toys that are my 2 year daughter, Pari’s, all-time favorites. In case you are looking for toys for a similar age-group girl, you might want to give one of these a try. We are purposely not providing detailed description of the toys as you can anyways find that on internet. As we did some price research on these toys while purchasing them, we are also mentioning the price at which we purchased to provide a benchmark. Continue reading →