What Toys Does my 17mo Need?

[SophieLeGiraffe]

I don't feel like I have enough toys for my 17mo DS. He is at nursery full time but when we are at home he has a lot of small toys like cups, soft toys, squishy animals, masses of books, a couple of puzzles, random assorted stuff like stacking cars, pull along do-dahs and so on. But for big stuff he doesn't have much - there's a train set, some lego, building blocks, musical intruments, a post box and that's about it.

What else does he need? I look on Amazon and in ELC but never see anything that seems appropriate. Mostly he just likes to move things around or play with my stuff but I feel like I should just have more - what would anyone recommend?

What you have sounds plenty to me - especially as he is at nursery during the day. DD2 is the same age and we have lots of things left over from DD1 but she plays with very little of it and her favourite game is pulling the pans out of the saucepan drawer. I wish we had less stuff - the house would be much tidier without it!

Wow, that sounds like loads - about twice as much as my 2.5 y.o. has, and he's at home full time. IME children like playing with 'real' stuff even better than they do toys - DS's current favourites are the laundry baskets, lilo pump and a train timetable we printed off the internet.

If he doesn't seem to be playing with things much, you could have a toy rotation system going. Children play more (and more creatively) if they have a small number of toys available which get brought out every week or two to keep them fresh & varied.

That sounds fine to me!

Oh that's good, I was worried he was deprived in some way!

I rotate what I set out for him, always set up a couple of things and swap them around regularly but everything is always available to him at his height.

His current favourite things are helping me sweep the floor and playing an app someone on here recommend on my iPad. Completely obsessed with it.