Presents for toddlers: what to avoid

The safety standard measures small parts with a cylinder that neither the toy nor any detachable piece of it may fit into completely. At home, a toilet-roll tube gets you close — it is slightly wider than the test cylinder, so the home test is stricter rather than more forgiving. Run every new toy through it before you wrap it.

A swallowed bead is a mechanical problem: either it passes or it doesn't. A lithium button battery is a chemical one. If it lodges in the oesophagus, it creates conditions around it that burn the tissue from the inside, and it only needs a few hours to do so. A flat battery from a remote control can do it too — the damage needs only a voltage at which the toy stopped working long ago.

The riskiest items aren't the toys you think about when shopping, but the things around them: flashing trainers and bracelets, light-up and musical books, musical greeting cards, digital thermometers, remote controls, kitchen scales, LED tea lights, key rings, the bathroom scales. They reach the nursery as presents nobody thinks of as toys, so they never get checked.

When buying, look above all at one thing: the battery cover must be held by a screw. The second thing is labelling — an unbranded toy with no traceable manufacturer is exactly the item where nobody tested the small parts or the battery cover, and the kind that later gets recalled. Store spare batteries out of reach, just like medicines, and don't leave used ones lying in the bin at home.

If you suspect your child has swallowed a battery, go straight to A&E — don't wait to see whether anything happens. Don't give them anything to eat or drink, don't make them sick, and take the battery packaging or the toy with you, so it's clear what size to look for. If your child is unconscious or struggling to breathe, call 999 at once; for advice on the way, call NHS 111 (NHS 24 in Scotland). The other safety checks for this age group are covered in the article toy safety for the youngest.

A soft toy is the most common present for a small child — and also the thing every nursery has most of. Yet a child bonds with one, two at most. The rest is scenery that nobody cuddles but everyone tidies, washes and moves from the bed to the floor.

The problem isn't one teddy, it's the mechanism: a soft toy is a present you can't get wrong, so everyone who has no time to think reaches for one. The result is a basket in which the child can't find anything, because a heap of twenty equally soft things offers nothing to discover. And the more soft toys there are, the less often the one that really matters gets washed.

Rather than adding to the pile, it's more practical to thin it out: put some of the soft toys in a box in the wardrobe and swap them for the ones on display every few weeks. Your child greets the “new” ones as if they were presents. And if the choice is yours and you want a present that won't vanish into that pile within a year, look for something with your child's name inside — a book, say, in which they are the hero themselves. It has no batteries and no small parts, it has 12 illustrated spreads, and the digital version is usually ready within 15. Presents that outlast the toys are covered in the article keepsake presents for a first birthday.

The last category isn't dangerous, just quiet. You can spot it with a single question: who is active during play? When the toy talks, sings, flashes and drives by itself, all that's left for the child is to press a button and watch. Before you buy something like that, put it through four tests.

Lists of things to avoid tend to keep growing, so for balance, here's the other side. Plastic isn't automatically worse than wood — what matters is the size of the parts, the strength of the joins and the labelling, not the material; a wooden toy with glued-on eyes is more dangerous than a properly moulded plastic cup. Hand-me-down toys from people you know are fine; just give them the same check as new ones, because they've been through a few extra washes.

Worrying that your child will get “too few” presents doesn't lead anywhere either: an under-three can't compare numbers of parcels, but they can compare how much time someone spent with them. And a toy your child puts aside after a week isn't a wasted present — some things simply suit three months of development and then get outgrown. The only mistake is the one you could have seen coming.

The hardest part of “what to avoid” isn't the choosing, it's telling grandparents, godparents and friends in a way that doesn't sound like a reproach. These three messages are ready to copy and send.