When you’re raising a child with a disability or a complex medical condition, you need to adopt a new mindset when it comes to fostering their development and finding the right tools to support it.
In 2018, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare genetic deletion that causes a range of developmental delays. Over and over again, doctors would ask me if she had reached this or that milestone. Each time, I answered flatly: no. I struggled to square her “failure” on these tests with the strong, happy baby I held in my arms.
Then I found a blog written by the mother of a child with epilepsy. The author’s motto of “taking life one inchstone at a time” made so much sense. A switch flipped. The trajectory for my daughter is still forward—it simply happens at a different pace, and in smaller steps.
“We don’t use milestones,” said Marybeth Finch, MSPT, a physical therapist and infant development specialist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, who coordinates a developmental program for babies and toddlers with intellectual and physical disabilities and their caregivers. “We’re trained to use toys as tools—that’s what separates us from a typical playgroup,” she explained. “We break child development down into many steps, small pieces of big milestones.”
When it comes to assembling your own toy toolbox, what should be in it? After dozens of appointments with specialists; hundreds of hours in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech and language therapy; and years of trial and error, I’m sharing some of our favorite toys, games, and gear. Some of the recommendations are from Wirecutter’s guides to the best gifts for kids, some are from the bags of therapists, and others are toys I’ve discovered on my own that engage and delight my daughter (and, often, my typically developing son).
Specialists often group infant and child development into different “domains,” such as gross motor skills, fine motor skills, cognition, communication, self-help, and emotional range. The toys and gear in this guide cover many of these areas. But the most important thing, Finch reminded me, is to consider each individual child’s personality. “They’re children first. You can show up with the best laid plan, but the first rule of the toy is they need to love it.”
