Age-Appropriate Toys For Children’s Eye Safety
Eye safety may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you’re out shopping for a toy for a child, but maybe it should be a consideration. Something like two hundred fifty thousand children are seen every year in this nation’s emergency room for toy-related injuries. Of those, over eleven thousand are eye injuries.
Avoiding anything with a sharp point or anything that launches any type of projectile is a good place to start when toy shopping. But to take it one step further for extra safety, be sure to go with one of the top eye-safe toys for kids discussed in this article.
The Crawling Set
For those that haven’t found their feet yet, activity gyms, mobiles, rattles, and stuffed animals are all good, eye-safe choices.
The Toddler Set
Once they’ve found their feet, the potential for anything held in the hand to become a safety hazard for the eye increases exponentially. Toddlers are adventurous by nature, exploring the environment around them and finding inventive ways to use pretty much everything around.
For the toddler set, modeling clay, finger paints (no brushes yet), large construction blocks with rounded edges, board books, puzzles and sorting games (again, without sharp corners or edges), and certain music makers and instruments (no drum sticks or anything else that could be jabbed into an eye, though).
The Preschool and Kindergarten Set
For children in the three to six-year-old range, coordination isn’t as much an issue as it is for the toddler set. Preschoolers and kindergarteners can handle more sophisticated versions of the learning tools and toys that toddlers enjoy, plus a wide variety of more involved toys.
These kinds of toys include: smaller building blocks, large markers and crayons, balls, books, musical toys, puppets, costumes and dress-up clothes, puzzles, child-sized versions of tools and household fixtures, magnets and magnetic toys. Rudimentary board games are also great choices for children in this age range.
The Big Kid Set
The seven to ten-year-old range of children may be far more sophisticated in their use of technology than contemporary adults were at their age, but this doesn’t mean they’re any more sophisticated in understanding safety concerns and what may permanently injure their eyes.
Art supplies, craft sets and kits (provided that they are used with some supervision to avoid their potentially unsafe misuse), chemistry sets, model building kits, board and card games, computer and video games, music instruments of a more sophisticated nature, and music players are all great gift ideas for this age range.
Prevention Is Only as Good as Supervision
The preceding age-based lists of appropriate eye-safe toys for kids are not to be taken as fool-proof. Kids can be surprisingly ingenious when it comes to finding novel ways to accidentally hurt themselves and others with “safe” toys and other household and natural items.
And, while running with sticks (and other stick-like objects) may still land most kids in the ER with eye injuries, there is plenty of potential for any child to turn the most seemingly innocuous toy into an eye hazard. The keys to safe playtime include educating children in the proper use of their toys, laying down (and consistently enforcing) play rules, and supervising and intervening when things get out of hand.