It has been estimated that autism affects 3-6 children out of every 1000 and male children are more likely to get autism than females. The symptoms of autism appear usually before 3 years of age. Children with autism have many difficulties to face including problems in social interaction, problems in verbal and non-verbal communication, and obsessive disorder like repeating something again and again. These problems can be mild in nature or severe enough to make child disable.

Children with autism also have problems in playing with toys and other children. They show little response to social stimuli, rarely smile, and also don’t like interaction with others especially strangers. But they do show attachment behavior to their primary caretakers. The autistic children also show aggressive and destructive behavior in response to various stimuli.
Selection of autistic children can be a daunting task because improper selection of toy for autistic child can turn into untoward results and may cause more harm than good. Those toys should be selected which integrate with the autistic child’s senses and do not provoke him by any means. Selection of battery operated toys can over stimulate the autistic child by their blinking lights and noises to which these children are very sensitive sometime.  In such cases wooden toys are the best option for autistic children. Wooden toys provide peace, harmony, and do not create over stimulation by any means. Wooden toys can also integrate very well with the senses of autistic children and provide them ample time to get use to these wooden toys.  Wooden toys provide natural touch and feeling while autistic children are introduced with these toys. Wooden blocks would be the best choice in selecting first toy for your autistic child. Blocks carry the charisma that would hold the autistic child’s attention for longer period of time. Choose wooden toys are that are multicolor and finely crafted to get the attention of your child. You can also go for those wooden toys which autistic child will use to construct something. For such purpose wooden building blocks can be very handy.

Wooden toys are available for various purposes including educational toys, learning toys, therapeutic toys, and developmental toys. You can select out of these any which suit your child’s mental growth. For example, some autistic children will love to work with developmental toys if they are progressing with the optimum growth and later can handle other advanced learning toys or educational toys. Therapeutic toys are specially designed keeping in mind the needs of these special children. Other type of wooden toys called Montessori toys are extremely beneficial for autistic children as these toys are crafted keeping the Montessori’s school of thought which is extremely helpful in dealing with children with autism or other such problems. These toys work on successful and well researched methodologies and can be very handy in autistic children.

Tags: Autistic Toys, Types of Toys, Wooden Toys

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.