The Best Kids’ Stuff We Bought in 2025

Sleeping Queensis a card game that was actually invented by a child; Sam, who’s 7, plays it with friends at school. It’s the rare game that I genuinely enjoy playing — I’m not really a “game person” — and I have heard the same thing from other parents.

We now have two Bop It!s because Eve, who’s almost 4, also loves it. I’ll pick it up from time to time to play too. It’s just a super-satisfying game that, if the kids have the jitters and are losing their minds, will kind of calm everyone down. It has the sort of “feel” of a screen or a video game without being one.

I caved and bought a secondhand play kitchen. It has not been out of use a single day. If you’re on the fence (or are wondering if you have space), know that the oven can store all the floor clutter that was once strewn across the living room.

I have bought multiples of these Crayola mess-free coloring books — as gifts and as a break-open-in-case-of-emergency sick-day activities.

Since I don’t have space for a sandpit, I picked up thisBlueysand-activity tray that’s been a massive hit. It comes with sand, tools for digging, and some figurines, and you can play directly in the tray it comes with. Then you just put a lid on the tray and shove the whole thing under the sofa. I like to put a table cloth or bedsheet down on the ground before we start, though, as it helps catch any stray bits of sand and makes cleaning up even easier.

This book kicked off a still on-going obsession with Adam Kay’s hilarious, fact-filled volumes (two other favorites:Kay’s Marvelous MedicineandKay’s Incredible Inventions). Like many 9-year-olds, my daughter Andie finds weird, gross, and scatological facts and humor about the human body completely delightful, and she has now reread it at least a half-dozen times. We’ve given the book to other kids her age, and even one who does not love reading loved it and asked for more.

I can’t overstate how bummed I am that Polarn O. Pyret is ending its retail operations in the U.S. at the end of 2025. It’s been my favorite source for merino layers for kids for a decade now. We’ve gotten so much use out of theleggingsand tops for skiing and just about anything else that involves being in the cold, and I find that the sizing usually works way beyond the stated range. This wool terry jumpsuit has been particularly useful this year for our 2½-year-old for late-in-the-season camping and forest school in sub-freezing temperatures.

Remo drums are what you find in all the good kids’ music classes. Our 2½-year-old is really into music and would probably say the 22-inch gathering drum I bought from someone on Craigslist is the best thing we purchased for him this year, but learn from my mistake (and save your eardrums): At home, you probably want something much smaller.

We got this at the beginning of 2025 for Andie. It gets put to use almost every day, and it’s still going strong.

I bought this as a Christmas present, and I’m very excited to give it as a gift to my cousin’s daughter, who crucially has a very patient mom.

My other cousin’s child prefers his toys a little more, well, spooky. His favorite movie this time of year isThe Nightmare Before Christmas, to give you a sense of his aesthetic. So for a Creepy Christmas, we’re going with this animatronic Toothless.

I have to give thanks for Children’s Tylenol Dissolve Packs, which I’ve ordered about four times this year — 2025 was rough in my house, illness-wise. My younger son has a severe aversion to the taste of liquid and chewable medicine, but we discovered this year that he has no issue whatsoever with taking the powder, which does taste much better (candy-like!). This product saved us from some truly miserable high fevers. I once had it delivered at 5 a.m. from a boutique pharmacy downtown; I can’t find it at most Walgreens near me. (Thank you, Postmates!)

The Silent Basketball has been a huge hit for both my sons this year. We live in an apartment, which is really tough when you have two boys you’re trying to keep off screens and who love football, basketball, and baseball. This ball bounces quietly enough not to disturb anyone and scratches the itch on cold days when we can’t go out.

We listened to this book by one of our favorite children’s authors, Adam Gidwitz, over a few long drives this summer, and the entire family — from age 8 to 40 — was completely rapt. It’s the second in a two-book series; you have to readMax in the House of Spies(which we listened to during a road trip to Pittsburgh last year) first.

My older son wears a uniform to school that can be pretty uncomfortable. The most comfortable button-down shirt, I discovered this year after testing out options from about a half-dozen different brands, is made by French Toast. It has an elastic top-collar button, so your kid doesn’t feel choked. I highly recommend it for any and all special occasions.

Earlier this year, my boyfriend’s mom published a children’s book, and we’ve been buying it for all the babies and little kids in our life ever since. It’s a sweet story about a hummingbird who does everything she can to stop a fire near her home. (The lesson is that every action can help make the world better, no matter how small.) One parent told us the story made him cry.

My younger sister has been on a baking kick recently, and I wanted to get her something related to that passion for her 14th birthday. Whenever we used to visit New York when I was younger, we would go to the Flour Shop downtown and get the actually very tasty (but expensive) mini exploding sprinkle cake, and I thought this pop-up cake kit would be a nice homage to those memories. When she opened it, she was so excited that the kit included everything she would need to make the treats.

My husband introduced our first grader to the Wayside School books because he loved reading them as a kid, and now our son is obsessed with them. He’s read the first three and can’t wait to get to the fourth,Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom. If he didn’t already own the first three, it would have been nice to get him this boxed set.

I was looking for a tiny desk for my 5-year-old to replace arather bulky round Skip Hop tableand learned about this, I believe, when Lauren Ro shared it in a Strategist Slack. I think I only thought about it for about five seconds before buying. The size! It’s just perfectly tiny. It used to act as a little nightstand, and now she uses it as a desk, where she sits for imaginary play and drawing and “writing” in her journal. It’s been the perfect in-between before she needs anything even slightly more serious.

We have triedcolor-changing Crestand theblue sparkly stuffand yet this is the only toothpaste that gets them to brush every day.

My 14-year-oldlovedthe bracelets from eNewton. She says they’re really good quality and don’t tarnish.

I’ve continued to subscribe to Tin Can’s “party line” plan since Itested the start-up’s Flashback phonein August and September, and my family will soon be setting up theflagship Tin Can phone. A lot of my two daughters’ friends have finally started receiving their own Tin Cans after preordering over the summer, so they suddenly have a lot more buddies to call, and watching them learn to navigate phone etiquette as they gab with their friends has been pretty priceless.

My younger daughter and I are a little bit obsessed with this set of rubber stamps by theillustrator Barbara Dziadosz— I bought it as a gift for her 7th birthday in March. Each stamp has just one part of an insect, so you can create your own by layering them all together.

I was pretty confused this year about whatshoesto get for my3-year-oldson once the weather got really cold. He wore the fuzzy high-tops fromTen Littlelast winter, but I wanted something different this year and ended up at the best place to buy shoes for kids:Good Footingin Park Slope. There, I bought him this pair of brown leatherFroddo sneakers. He is often uninterested in new clothing or shoes, but when he saw these, he was immediately excited to put them on and even ran over to show them off to my husband. Since then, he has happily worn them every single day.

It is unreasonably difficult to find good waterproof toddler pants that aren’t overalls or that don’t have suspenders attached to them. In November, we started potty training my son and realized pretty quickly that his bib snow/rain pants were too difficult to pull down fast enough to make it to the travel potty. After a long frustrating hunt online, I ended up buying these REI rain pants in a size 3T at the flagship store in Soho while looking for a kid-size balaclava. They make getting out of the house on rainy or snowy days so much easier, and my husband loves that they are lightweight so he can keep them in his backpack in case it’s raining on their afternoon bike commute home from school.

We recently spent some time in the pediatric unit of Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. It was stressful and scary, but one silver lining was the newly renovated Barnes & Noble right across the street. It was nice to be able to pop over and get him anew Duplo set, someNee-Doh squishies, aset of Squigz, and my favorite purchase of all,DK’sA Very New York Christmas.This is the first year that my son is really aware of Santa and other Christmas traditions. So it has been really sweet to see his face light up when we’re reading this book and he notices Santa riding the subway with the main characters. The illustrations of the Met, Central Park, and the Nutcracker are wonderful and there are lots of hidden flaps to open.