Play kitchen or learning tower: which one actually gets used?

Buy the tower first. A learning tower gets used most days, because there is always something on the counter that needs doing. A play kitchen gets used in bursts, and as far as I can tell the bursts thin out before school. Buy the kitchen because your child would love it. That is a good enough reason, and a better one than the developmental case on the box.

Both cookware sets on this site only earn their keep in a house that does a lot of pretend cooking, so this post argues against two of our own products.

The other thing to say up front is that nobody publishes usage data on either purchase. Not on towers, not on kitchens, not on how long either one holds a child. A fair amount of what follows is my judgement, and I have said so in the sentence each time it is.

What you are actually choosing between

A learning tower is a platform with rails that puts a two-year-old at counter height and stops them falling off it. A play kitchen is a piece of furniture where a child cooks food that does not exist. They land in the same gift guides because they cost roughly the same and both have the word kitchen in them.

What each one buys is different. The tower buys your child a place in what the household is already doing at 5pm: rinsing, stirring, tipping flour, carrying the wet spoons to the drawer. The kitchen buys pretend play, which is a real thing to want and a fine thing to spend money on. The trouble starts when a shop sells you the second while describing the benefits of the first.

I think the play kitchen is the most oversold piece of furniture in the toddler aisle, and I say that as the person who sells you the pans that go in it.

Is a play kitchen worth it?

Worth it for what, is the question sitting under that one.

If you want your three-year-old to spend a wet Sunday serving you cold wooden toast, then yes, and there is nothing hollow about that. If you are buying it because a listing said it builds language, imagination and executive function, the ground under that sentence is softer than it reads. More on that below.

My guess at the shape of it, offered as a guess: a two-year-old carries things in and out, and puts a pan on a burner because the pan fits the burner. The whole invented meal, with an order taken and a customer told to wait, arrives nearer three and four. Then it thins. There is no usage study I can point you at, so treat that as a hunch you are free to ignore.

Cost matters more here than it usually does, because the unit is only the start. Ours are the accessories, at $76.99 and $67.99. Furnish a kitchen properly and you are several purchases in before it looks like the photo, and it takes floor space that does not come back.

What the research on pretend play actually found

The most useful detail in this literature is about who was in the room. In many of the studies, the adult running the test knew which children had done the pretend-play condition and knew what the study hoped to show. When the same tests were run with an experimenter kept in the dark, the effects on creativity and on theory of mind often did not turn up.

That comes from a 2013 review in Psychological Bulletin, by Angeline Lillard and five colleagues, who went through the evidence for the claim that pretend play drives development. Their own summary sentence: the existing evidence "does not support strong causal claims about the unique importance of pretend play for development," and "much more and better research is essential."

It works domain by domain, not as a blanket dismissal, and the distinctions matter. For language, narrative and emotion regulation the evidence was insufficient, which is thin and not disproved. For reasoning, pretend play looked like one road to a place that other roads also reach. For problem solving, nothing compelling either way. Three separate comments ran in the same issue, disputing the standard of proof and where the review had looked, and the authors replied to all three. A review is also not an experiment. It carries the judgement of whoever wrote it.

Why the tower gets used most days

The tower's advantage is boring and durable. It fixes a height problem, and the height problem is there every day whether anybody is in the mood or not.

• There is always a job. Somebody has to wash the potatoes. A pretend meal has to be started; a real one is already happening without you.
• The child can tell whether it worked. The peel comes off or it does not. Nobody has to come over and confirm it, and that is what lets a child stay with something.
• It solves your problem too. The half hour before dinner is the worst half hour of the day in most houses. A tower puts the child inside it instead of underneath it.
• It outlives the pretend phase. A five-year-old who has stopped playing restaurant still needs to reach the sink. It is our whole practical life shelf in one object, and that shelf is the one I would build first.

We do not sell a tower, so I have no brand to push. What I would look for is a wide base, a rail low enough that a child cannot slip under it, and a platform that adjusts down as well as up. That is my own judgement rather than any published safety standard, so read the maker's own weight and age limits before you buy, because I cannot read them for you.

The order we would buy them in

Tower now. Kitchen later, if at all. In practice that goes like this.

• Tower or a solid step stool now. It is the cheaper of the two, it starts earning the day it arrives, and it takes no floor space once it is pushed under the counter.
• Then leave it a month. A child newly allowed at the counter will spend two weeks on the novelty of the tap alone. Whatever you were going to buy next, you will choose it better in December than in November.
• Kitchen later, if there is room. Around three, when the pretend has a plot. At two the money goes further on work a two-year-old can already do alone, and the kitchen lands better a year on, when the three-year-old game arrives to fill it.
• Let a relative buy the big one. This is the classic grandparent purchase and one of the few large gifts that needs no explaining. Our gift list is grouped for anyone buying one substantial thing instead of five fillers.
• Accessories last, and fewer than you think. Six wooden vegetables and two pans outlast a fully stocked pretend pantry. Ours are the Wooden Tea & Kitchen Play Set and the Wooden Play Kitchen Cookware & Dining Set, and I would not own either before the kitchen they go in.

The thing we cannot back up

Parents tell us that pretend cooking gets better after a child has done the real thing: that the play has more of a sequence to it, more steps in a sensible order, once there has been actual chopping and stirring behind it. It is a good story and it fits everything above a little too neatly.

We know of no study testing it. Not a weak one, not a small one. None that we could find. Treat it as a shop's impression, no firmer than your own.

If there is only room for one

One purchase, a small flat, no second go at it. Take the tower. It is cheaper, it stores under the counter, and the thing it hands your child is a place in the room where the day is actually happening. That is the part of Montessori at home that costs least and does most. Montessori at home: where to start makes that case without a price tag on it. This post is the same case with one.

And if you can already picture your child at the play kitchen, and you have the floor for it, buy it. She will not read sooner for it. That is fine. She would love it, and a child loving something is a sufficient reason to own it. Enjoyment does not need a developmental justification, and I would sooner sell you a wooden pan for a kitchen you bought on purpose than for one you bought out of guilt.