The Best Gifts for Kids Are Small. Or Big. Or Lots. Or Stomp
When you are a kid, time can seem to organize itself around occasions for receiving treats—and, above all, presents. This is not because children are materialistic monsters (mostly) but because they have a limited ability to treat themselves. Generally speaking, an eight-year-old cannot reward herself, at the end of a tough week, by doing a little window-shopping and deciding that she deserves a cute bag, or its third-grade equivalent (glowing slime?). The calendar can become a series of buildups and letdowns around the prospect of surprise delights. This is the golden age of gift-getting. No one cares as much about presents as kids do. No pressure!
Fortunately, choosing a gift for a child comes with fewer shades of social nuance than picking something for an adult. The goal is pure pleasure, not a statement or message; the worst-case scenario is indifference or mild disappointment—not, say, horror at your fundamental misunderstanding of a long-standing personal relationship. You are going for FUN. Think about the experience of seeing the present and opening the present, and about whom the present is actually going to please.
Gifts “for” Babies
If you are buying a present for a person who lacks object permanence, that present is for their parents. Shop with this fact in mind. Clothes are an excellent gift, in a way that they won’t be again until the child’s adolescence—here is your chance to jazz up the Center of the Universe. Buy something that’s more expensive than anyone thinking about the cost of child care could justify buying themselves, but that’s still functional enough for everyday use. No to tiny buttons, the color white, and lace; yes to $64 balloon pants. Yes to leopard-print anything. (It’ll hide stains!) Yes to seasonally appropriate comical hats ($55-$99).
Parents spend a lot of time gazing upon their babies (how would the Center of the Universe look in pink sunglasses?), and they also spend a lot of time reading to their babies, at least if they are overachieving millennials who have imbibed the requisite parenting expertise. It is important that they have books to read aloud that are not bad. My husband, a bookseller, often notes that most books are bad, and this may be doubly true for children’s books, whose brevity leads foolhardy would-be authors to underestimate the difficulty of their task. Before you give a children’s book, think: Is this book fun to read aloud? Will it be fun to read aloud twelve million times? Rhythm counts for everything, subject matter for almost nothing. Babies do not care about “art” or “science,” and you can’t make them. What you’re after here is fluid prose and pictures that contain lots of interesting items to identify and talk about. There’s a reason everyone already has “Goodnight Moon.” Instead, consider “The House in the Night,” by Susan Marie Swanson, or “All the World,” by Liz Garton Scanlon, both sold in chompable board-book editions. Richard Scarry’s “I Am a Bunny,” though not explicitly bedtime-oriented, is another durable hit. (If you want to give a new parent something to read to themselves, consider “And Now We Have Everything,” by Meaghan O’Connell, a funny and unsparing account of parenthood’s earliest days.) ($9-$40)
As for toys: true infants are scarcely capable of “play” in any sense that requires accessories or equipment; they’re still realizing that they have hands. Something with fabric that produces a crinkly sound ($10) when pawed inexpertly is pretty much the upper limit of possibility.
The Charm of Lots
Not long ago, my husband and I asked our three-and-a-half-year-old what we should get his grandfather as an eightieth-birthday present. “Cars and cars and cars and cars and cars,” he replied. It was an instructive answer: the sorts of gifts that people imagine giving others are a good indication of the gifts that they themselves enjoy receiving. In general, I’m all for quality, but when attempting to please a small child there’s something to be said for quantity. Sheer, dazzling quantity: cars and cars and cars and cars and cars ($7-$30). Present them loose in a bag or in a box; remember that it’s always nice to have spares to lose, or for a visitor to take home.
By a similar token, stickers and stickers and stickers and stickers and stickers ($9-$31). The recipient can stick them on a giant roll of paper ($33) (how giant? That’s up to you), taped out on the floor. The effect is something like an off-season approximation of a sidewalk, and, your winter climate permitting, sidewalk chalk (tons of it, for $18) is another good option. And books are not excluded from the thrill of scale. Richard Scarry’s “Biggest Word Book Ever!” ($45)—about twenty-four by thirty-two inches when wide open—is irresistibly grand, full of many quintessentially busy Scarry characters, and large enough for a small reader to literally climb inside.
The Charm of Little
The appeal of something to climb inside is a valuable reminder of another language that kid gifts can speak: the charm of little. It can be fun to be small and to feel small, and this is why it is nice to build forts. Technically, doing so only requires a blanket, but you don’t need a gift guide to direct you to your linen closet. Expand your household’s fort horizons with the Nugget ($249-$299), a “play couch” made of sturdy, rearrangeable cushions that can be used to construct cozy reading corners and nooks for playing pretend. (A chair called the Smore, at $199-$239, from the same company, offers a similar concept, with a smaller footprint.)
It is also fun simply to think about small things. And so, to stock the fort’s library: the author and illustrator Phoebe Wahl produces books full of magical tiny beings, stories that are beautiful and sweet without being precious or twee. “Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Forest” ($20) collects four stories—one for each season—about a witch who lives in a mossy stump and is small enough to ride on the back of an owl. Her friends and neighbors include the Mole Sisters, Mousepappa, and a frog named Wendell (who might plausibly have been named for Wendell Berry). Wahl’s “Backyard Fairies” ($19) depicts a kid who is sure that there are fairies just out of sight, in the woods behind her house, and tries to find them. For children inclined to such expeditions—or who just want to read in a dark spot—a camping headlamp ($35) makes an inexhaustibly useful accessory.
Everything Changes
Becoming a parent, and shopping for a child, is a constant reminder that everything and nothing changes. I can easily recall the joy of forts; I would have loved “Backyard Fairies.” Yet certain stalwart kid pleasures have been reimagined in the intervening decades. Take training wheels and tricycles: they’re out. Now children have balance bikes, which are two-wheelers without pedals—an arrangement that supposedly makes for an easier transition to riding the real thing. Based on the anecdotal evidence of my local playground, I’m convinced. The little guys get good at gliding, fast. These new versions of that classic Big Present, a bike, can be procured from such manufacturers as Guardian ($149) and Woom ($249) (branding keyed to a target market of anxious parents).
Even crayon technology has somehow improved in the years since I was coloring. Have you tried gel crayons ($20)? Instead of hard and waxy, they’re as soft as oil pastels, but miraculously smudge-proof once dry, with colors bright and opaque enough to draw on dark construction paper. And, for kids approaching the age of phones, Tin Can ($100) has given the humble landline a contemporary reinvention: it permits calls to preselected phone numbers using home Wi-Fi, and has (yes) a cord.
Three, Two, One
When I set out to make a list of gifts for kids, there was only one thing I was sure I wanted to include. If you take nothing else from this guide, know this: a Stomp Rocket ($30) is the perfect present.
One kid can have fun with a Stomp Rocket; two kids can execute some impressive teamwork; three or four kids can share effortlessly. The learning curve is nonexistent. The payoff is immediate. The only way to improve it is to buy extra rockets ($10), which you should do. (And do not go off-brand with these—you want genuine Stomp product. Amazon imitations can get stuck on the launch tube, an unacceptable defect, and one that I discovered the hard way.) I have never seen a group of children get bored of a Stomp Rocket. I have seen a group of adults sipping early-evening drinks on a patio, idly Stomping and chatting, enjoying the beginning of a spring thaw and the return of sunlight. ♦