Two Cubes That Grow With Baby… Save for Later.

Blocks are a classic toy for good reason—they help your child develop fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. They also encourage exploration with cause and effect, gravity, spatial and math concepts, and even basic social skills like taking turns and sharing. Here are some of the ways stacking play contributes to your baby’s development:

Grasping and fine motor skills: Your child uses several different grasping and voluntary release skills to hold blocks and stack them accurately. At first your child’s grasp may seem uncoordinated, but over time they’ll develop greater control of the tiny muscles in their hands and wrists.

Stacking blocks lets your child practice grasping with their thumb in coordination with their other fingers. Around 9 to 10 months, they’ll be able to grasp blocks using a pincer grasp, which allows for more precision when placing objects. All this grasping practice develops their fine motor skills and strengthens their hand muscles, helping with later tasks like handwriting and tying shoelaces.

Hand-eye coordination: When your child first starts playing with blocks, they may struggle to place one block on top of another so they don’t fall. As they gain experience matching what they see with what they touch, your child’s hand-eye coordination will gradually improve. With practice, their aim will become more accurate as they stack taller and taller towers.

Sensory development: Stacking teaches children a concept called graded force. When they can pick up and gently release a block on top of another without knocking the tower down, that’s graded force in action. This understanding will later help your child apply the right amount of force when they push a pencil against paper to scribble, draw, or write.

Cognitive development: Stacking blocks is such a deceptively simple task, it’s easy to overlook its cognitive benefits. Playing with blocks gives your child a chance to problem-solve, troubleshoot, and test hypotheses about structure, gravity, and elevation. What shapes will stack? How many blocks can be stacked before they fall? With practice, your child will figure out that bigger blocks make steadier foundations for towers and flat blocks are easier to stack than curved or triangular ones.

RELATED: Why wooden blocks are actually the best STEM toy

Math concepts: It’s easy to think of math as all about counting or adding and subtracting written numbers. But before your child is ready for written numbers, they learn math concepts in the world around them. Block play helps your child make the connection between a number word, like “one,” and its quantity, a concept known as one-to-one correspondence. Stacking also develops your child’s number sense by providing visual quantities to count, hold, and compare through tactile play. When your child fills a basket with blocks and then dumps it out, they learn about volume and quantity.

Spatial concepts: Stacking play is a hands-on way for your child to learn spatial concepts like “under,” “over,” or “next to.” Research shows that toddlers who hear spatial language as they play with blocks tend to do better on spatial problem-solving tasks in preschool.

Social-emotional skills: Block play offers your child a chance to take turns, problem-solve together, and self-advocate, whether they’re playing with you, a sibling, or a friend. When the tower of blocks eventually falls, they get to practice emotional regulation. These skills are a significant challenge for young children, and they take a long time to develop. Try taking turns with your child and model waiting for each person to place their block.

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