Bricks for Building — Is my child ready for LEGO?

My son became obsessed with Lego two years ago and we have all learnt so much since then. I thought to share some insights from our experience as a mom (and add my two cents as an educator.)

Disclaimer — Lego has not paid me to write about my experience and I’m not endorsing that you buy Lego. This is based on my experience and ANY tiny building blocks would bring about more or less the same learning experience.

This will be part one of a three part mini series (can you tell I’m a bit dramatic?). Part one will tell you about a few things to think about before you introduce Lego to your child.

How do I know my child is ready for it?

Following the age recommendations is usually the best way to go about it. But you know your child best, and in some cases our children can be ready for something a bit earlier than expected. Our experience was sort of a happy accident, our 3 year old found one of our old sets and seemed very interested in it. He and my husband played around with the pieces and we explained how there are super tiny pieces so we need to make sure we clean up properly.

Our son kept going back to it, and he was actually able to put the pieces together so we just let him play with the blocks. By age three most kids are over the random urge to put toys in their mouth so we were confident there wouldn’t be a choking hazard with him. He was focused and enjoying himself so we joined him and let it take its course.

Storage and Clean Up

If you’re actually thinking of LEGO, there are a few things to consider.

• Cost and compatibility — It’s a very expensive investment because once you buy into it, you will probably end up buying quite a few sets (and don’t even get me started on LEGO Technic). But the beauty of it is, every single set and piece fits into each other. Whatever brand you are buying, make sure it’s compatible across the board otherwise it could lead to frustration.
• Clean up - If your child is in the habit of cleaning up at the end of the day, that’s a great start. If not, I would suggest you get this practice down before inviting Lego into your life. Having this habit will make it easier to get your child to clean up their Lego, (even though I say ‘easier’ there will DEFINITELY be days where you threaten to take away the LEGO because they haven’t cleaned)
• Storage — At first, you will be able to get away with one big box and stuffing everything into it, but as the pieces and collection grows you WILL need to put some thought into organizing it more. A few ideas — a massive box with partitions, or a tower of smaller boxes (with partitions), a bunch of smaller boxes (so you can use them as partitions)… see where I’m going with this? You will need partitions. Phoenix and Temu have some storage boxes that worked for us.

It WILL cause frustration

Things that will frustrate your child could be — pieces not fitting properly, inability to remove pieces, when they’ve spent a lot of time building something but then it accidentally falls or breaks. There is no magic solution here, especially for the last one.

• Pieces not fitting together is why it’s important to buy compatible extensions. Even if you do, this can still happen. The most effective way that I found works is when you play with them, show that it happens to you too, and model how to deal with it. You can show how to express your annoyance and disappointment. “Oh no, this is not fitting properly, that’s annoying. Maybe if I try it this way or try another piece?”.
• Inability to remove pieces will be a fine motor skill that will develop with practice, be calm when they lose it and show them how to do it. Do this a few hundred times and they will eventually get the idea.
• The one where everything falls and breaks… unfortunately, children do have to go through the frustration and disappointment of working on something and it breaking apart. Again, when playing and it happens to you use your words to express your frustration “oh no! The vehicle I was making just fell and broke! Argh! I’m so upset! Maybe I can build it again, and make some changes to it to be better than before”. You don’t have to say this to your child, when you look over it they will probably not even be looking at you, but they are watching and listening. When it does happen to them they will scream, cry, shout cause… come on, they spent hours focusing on something and building this beautiful work of art and they were probably on their way to show it to someone when it fell and broke. That’s SUPER frustrating and sad for a child :(
• A big part of playing with building blocks is the fact that they are not forever, you build something incredible but if you want to keep playing you need some of those pieces or you want to remake it. This can be difficult for some kids to grasp. So don’t force anything, observe and see what they wanna do. If they want to make something and keep it as is, let it run its course. Something that helped me is to take pictures after my son built anything and everything he was proud of. That way even if it broke two seconds later, we had a reference image, but in most cases, it was rebuilt to look different and more advanced.

In part two I will be explaining how to introduce Lego, the journey of creativity and the different ways you can make it educational (also includes an opportunity for some productive screen time). Let me know what you think, don’t be shy!