A Letter to Past Me About the Reality of Wooden Toys

Dear Tom of six months ago,

You're currently standing in the nursery, aggressively arranging a set of aesthetically pleasing, neutral-toned blocks on a floating shelf. You're exhausted, operating on perhaps four cumulative hours of sleep, but you're deeply smug. You've convinced yourself that your newly minted twins, Florence and Alice, will bypass the garish, plastic, battery-operated monstrosities of modern childhood and exist purely in a realm of minimalist Scandinavian design. You think that if you only provide them with the right organic materials, they'll sit quietly on a sheepskin rug, contemplating the grain of an unvarnished sphere.

I'm writing to you from the future to tell you that you're a colossal idiot.

Don't get me wrong, the materials matter. But your expectation of how a wooden toy functions in the wild—specifically, in a London flat occupied by two toddlers who have recently discovered they can use objects as blunt force weapons—is woefully naive. Let me tell you what actually happens when aesthetics collide with the feral reality of raising twins.

What the health visitor mumbled about brain development

You remember that Tuesday afternoon when the health visitor came round? You had hidden the Calpol behind a stack of Guardian supplements to look like a competent adult. She gestured vaguely at Florence, who was attempting to eat a completely ordinary wooden ring, and mumbled something about the 90/10 rule.

I spent three hours that night scrolling through parenting forums while covered in a mysterious sticky fluid, trying to figure out what she meant. Apparently, there's this theory that the best toys are 90% child and 10% toy. If you hand a baby a plastic monstrosity that flashes strobe lights and screams the alphabet in a terrifying, distorted voice, the toy is doing all the work. The baby just sits there, eyes glazed over, essentially watching a tiny, terrible television show. But when Florence demands a new toy, wooden toys force her to actually do something. She has to provide the imagination, the sound effects, and the movement, which supposedly lays the groundwork for things like concentration and spatial awareness later in life. Our GP sort of half-nodded when I asked about this at our six-month check, suggesting that tactile feedback from natural materials might help them understand their physical relationship with objects better than uniform, lightweight plastic.

I don't know if I completely buy the science, mostly because science at 3 AM feels like a suggestion rather than a fact. But I do know this: a wooden block doesn't run out of batteries, it doesn't spontaneously start singing 'Baby Shark' from the bottom of the toy box at midnight, and it requires Florence to actually use her hands instead of just mashing a button with her forehead.

The great hardwood versus softwood conspiracy

Here's a key piece of advice that would have saved us from the Great Splinter Incident of last October. with the raw material of wood, wooden toys carved from cheap pine are a disaster waiting to happen.

You're going to think you're getting a bargain at that artisan market in Greenwich. You'll buy a charming little carved hedgehog. But pine is a softwood, Tom. Do you know what happens to softwood when Alice, who currently has the jaw strength of a young crocodile, decides to use it to soothe her erupting molars? It dents. It splinters. It turns into a jagged, soggy hazard that you'll have to fish out of her mouth while she screams as if you're stealing her most prized possession.

If you're desperately looking for the best wooden toys for babies, you've to obsess over hardwoods. We're talking maple, beech, birch, and cherry. These woods are dense enough to survive being repeatedly hurled against the radiator, and they don't disintegrate when subjected to the terrifying amount of drool a teething twin can produce. I read on some NHS leaflet (or maybe it was a sleep-deprivation hallucination) that these hardwoods are naturally hypoallergenic and their porous structure seriously draws bacteria away from the surface, depriving it of the moisture it needs to survive. So they're marginally more hygienic than the plastic keys Alice found on the floor of the 38 bus.

My absolute favourite distraction tactic

If there's one thing you've done right, it's investing in the Wooden Baby Gym. I'm telling you this now so you don't return it in a fit of minimalist guilt.

This thing is basically the architectural marvel of our living room. It has a sturdy wooden A-frame and these little hanging animal toys that are just visually interesting enough without being overstimulating. The reason I love this specific piece of equipment is quite simple: it really kept Florence occupied long enough for me to drink an entire cup of tea while it was still hot. It’s an incredibly rare occurrence, like spotting a unicorn on the tube. The wooden elements give this lovely, soft clacking sound when the babies bat at them, which is infinitely preferable to electronic screeching. And because the frame is solid wood, when Alice inevitably tried to use it to pull herself up to a standing position—entirely ignoring its intended purpose—it didn't immediately collapse on top of her. It’s sturdy, it’s not an eyesore, and it survives the twins.

Oh, and those old wooden toys your mother unearthed from the loft, the ones she insists you loved in 1985? Chuck them directly into the bin unless you want your children ingesting vintage lead paint.

Why the dishwasher is your absolute enemy

We need to talk about cleaning.

There will come a day—it's going to be a Tuesday, raining, and you'll be running on fumes—when you'll look at a pile of drool-coated, sticky wooden blocks, and you'll think to yourself, 'I'll just lob these in the dishwasher with the coffee mugs, or maybe boil them in a saucepan of water just to be safe.' If you try to sanitize your expensive hardwoods by submerging them in boiling water, tossing them in the dishwasher, or scrubbing them with harsh bleach, you'll end up with warped, swollen, horribly splintered timber that has to be thrown away immediately.

Wood is essentially a sponge. It absorbs water, expands, and then cracks when it dries out. You can't treat it like silicone. You have to wipe it down with a damp cloth and maybe a bit of mild soap, and then you've to dry it immediately with a towel. It's incredibly tedious. Sometimes you even have to rub them with a bit of beeswax or food-grade mineral oil to stop them from drying out, which makes me feel like a nineteenth-century carpenter rather than a modern father, but it's the only way to keep them from turning into kindling.

If you need a break from feeling like a Victorian artisan, you can always check out Kianao's broader wooden play collection to see what actual quality looks like before you accidentally ruin what we already have.

The rattle that saved a train journey

I also need to tell you about the Bear Teething Rattle. It has a natural beechwood ring attached to a little crochet bear.

We took the twins on the train to visit your sister in Brighton. It was a mistake. About twenty minutes past Croydon, Alice started what I call the 'Teething Siren,' a high-pitched wail that makes other passengers visibly tense up. I handed her this bear rattle in a panic. The untreated beechwood ring was exactly the right hardness for her to bite down on with aggressive force, and the crochet texture gave her something else to fixate on. It didn't magically cure her teething pain, but it bought us forty-five minutes of blessed, drooly silence. I've washed the crochet bit in the sink about ten times now, and it’s still holding up perfectly.

Then there's the Bunny Teething Rattle. It's essentially the same concept—a wooden ring with a crochet animal on it. It’s fine. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. Alice chewed the little blue bow tie on it for a few days, and Florence occasionally shakes it at the cat. It's perfectly safe and the wood is good quality, but I wouldn't write a sonnet about it. It’s just a decent, functional thing to have in the bottom of the changing bag when you're desperate.

A final word on expectations

So, past Tom, here's the truth. They're going to throw the blocks at the television. They're going to attempt to eat the puzzle pieces. They will prefer the cardboard box the toys came in for at least three consecutive weeks.

But when you're sitting on the floor with them, and Florence is quietly stacking two wooden cubes together, completely absorbed in the weight and texture of the wood, you'll realise that the aesthetic snobbery wasn't entirely misplaced. You're giving them something real to hold onto in a very plastic world. Just make sure you never step on a wooden sorting star in the dark wearing only socks, because that pain is something you'll carry with you for the rest of your life.

Take a look at the teething toys collection if you want to see what else might save you at 3 AM. You're going to need all the help you can get.

The panicked questions you'll inevitably ask

How do you seriously clean these things without ruining them?

Barely damp cloth, tiny bit of mild dish soap, and immediate towel drying. Never leave them to soak, never put them in the dishwasher, and never use those harsh chemical wipes unless you want your baby ingesting industrial floor cleaner. If the wood starts looking a bit dry and sad, rub a tiny bit of coconut oil or beeswax into it. Yes, it's annoying, but it's better than fishing a splinter out of a toddler's gums.

Are vintage ones safe to use?

No. I don't care how charming that 1970s pull-toy looks in the charity shop window. Unless you know for an absolute fact that it was made without lead paint (which you don't), leave it alone. The regulations back then were essentially non-existent, and heavy metal poisoning is not a fun retro aesthetic.

Won't they just throw them at each other?

Yeah, absolutely. They're toddlers; they're tiny sociopaths testing gravity and physics. You will get hit in the shin with a solid beechwood block, and it'll bruise. The trick is supervision and teaching them that blocks are for stacking, not for orbital bombardment. Good luck with that.

What kind of wood is best?

Hardwoods all the way. Look for maple, beech, birch, or cherry. They're durable, they don't splinter easily, and they can withstand an astonishing amount of chewing. Avoid pine, cedar, or any cheap lightweight woods that feel like they might snap if you look at them too aggressively.

Do they really help with development?

According to our GP and every exhausted parent on the internet, yes. Because they don't light up or make noise, the child has to seriously engage their brain to play with them. It builds attention span and spatial reasoning. Or at least, it keeps them quiet for ten minutes while you stare blankly at the wall, which is basically the same thing.