My toddler throws everything. Is that normal, and when does it stop?

Yes, it is normal, and at this age it is not yet a discipline problem. Between roughly twelve months and two and a half, most toddlers throw things over and over because letting go of an object is the interesting part. You cannot talk a child out of that. What you can do is give the throwing somewhere it is allowed to land, and take the breakable things off the shelf until it passes.

It does not all look the same from close up, either. Some of it is a child finding out what happens when a hand opens. Some of it is a child telling you something without the words to do it. The first cannot be corrected. The second can be answered.

Is it normal for a toddler to throw toys?

Yes. Almost every parent of a toddler this age sees it, usually somewhere between twelve months and two and a half, and it tends to arrive before the words do. A child picks something up, opens their hand, and watches. Then does it again. And again, for far longer than any adult finds interesting.

The repetition is the part parents read as defiance. From where you are standing it looks like the same act forty times over. It is not quite the same act. A ring dropped on a rug and a cup thrown onto a tiled floor do completely different things, and a child who has just learned to let go has a lot of surfaces left to get through.

The behind-the-shoulder throw gets asked about constantly. Our reading is that a child this age is releasing rather than aiming, so where the thing lands is mostly incidental, and it looks deliberate to us only because adults throw at things. That is our reading, not a finding.

The developmental explanation you will read elsewhere

Search this and you will meet the trajectory schema within two clicks: the idea that toddlers work through repeated patterns of movement, throwing among them, as a way of learning how the world behaves. It is a tidy story. It traces mainly to Chris Athey's schema work with a parent-teacher project, published as a book in 1990, and to Cathy Nutbrown and Frances Atherton's 2013 book on the under-threes.

Those are real books by real researchers and we are not dismissing them. They are also observational accounts rather than trials. They describe what children were seen doing; they cannot show why a child did it, or what would change it. We went looking for a controlled study on toddler throwing and did not find one, and nobody appears to have tested whether any response of yours makes it stop sooner.

So read what follows as ours: judgement about what a child at this stage plainly needs to practise, plus what parents tell us works in their own houses. We would rather label that than dress it up as a finding.

Watch what the face does

It helps to know which one you are watching, because they want different things from you.

• The experiment. Calm face, real interest in where it lands, immediate repeat. Nothing is wrong. Correcting this one only adds an adult to a physics lesson.
• Frustration. The lid will not go on, the piece will not fit, and the whole thing goes across the room. The throw is the end of a struggle you probably watched build for a minute.
• The shelf is doing it. A shelf with everything on it gets swept rather than played with. Leave fewer things out; how few is the subject of its own post, How many toys should a toddler have?
• The game where you cross the room. Thrown, then a look straight at you. This one is social and it is working beautifully. You are the toy.
• Nothing at all. Half an hour before lunch, or half an hour past the nap. Check the clock before you go looking for a reason.

Give it somewhere it is allowed to land

You will not extinguish the experimenting kind, so the aim is relocation. One target that is always available, always allowed and never put away, so that "not the mug" comes with an alternative attached instead of being a flat no.

A laundry basket against a wall and four rolled pairs of socks will do it. So will a bucket by the back door and a handful of pine cones. It is what parents report, and it is what we would do. Please do not buy anything for this.

If you would rather it lived on the shelf than in a corner of the hallway, the toys that absorb this energy have a whole-arm job in them, which is roughly what sits under gross motor skills. Some of it goes instead into objects heavy or textured enough to be worth handling slowly, which is most of the sensory shelf. Neither is a cure. They are places for the arm to go.

Which toys come off the shelf until this passes

A toy destroyed in week one teaches a child that throwing ends the game, and it costs you the toy. For a few months, sort the shelf by what survives a hard landing rather than by what you like looking at.

• Anything that breaks in one throw. Thin ceramic, the little glass jug you bought for practical life, a painted plate that chips. Good things, badly timed. Bring them back later.
• Heavy things with a corner. Weight plus an edge plus a sibling on the floor is the combination that ends in a bruise, or worse.
• Sets with a lot of small pieces. Less about danger than about the game ending. Thirty pieces under the sofa is nobody's afternoon.
• The heirloom. It goes in the cupboard for six months. You are allowed to do that.

What stays out should be sturdy and worth repeating, which is most of what we group for one-year-olds and the plainer end of the shelf for two-year-olds: things that can be dropped, retrieved and dropped again without anyone losing a piece.

One honest note about our own shelf. It is our impression that a solid wooden piece gets thrown less than a light plastic one. We know of no study testing that, and we sell wooden toys, so treat it accordingly.

When it is thrown at you, or at another child

Ordinary at this age, and still worth answering rather than ignoring. The response that works is short and boring. Move the object out of reach, say the one sentence you actually mean, and cross the room with no drama attached to it. A big reaction is the payoff, and a toddler will pay a great deal for one.

If it came out of frustration, the message underneath is usually "this is too hard" or "I wanted that one". Saying that sentence out loud for them does more than a rule about hands. Words are what eventually replaces the throw.

There is a narrower case worth raising with someone. Look at whether throwing at people is one of the main ways your child gets anything across, with little else alongside it. No pointing to show you things. No turning when you say their name. Few other ways of asking for what they want. That is a question for your pediatrician, not for a shelf. We are a toy shop and we are not the right people to answer it. A milestone checklist is a reason to ask, never a verdict.

What age does it stop?

The number does not exist. We looked. Nobody has published an age at which toddler throwing ends, so a page that hands you a confident figure either invented it or borrowed it from someone who did.

What parents describe, ours included, is a fade rather than a stop, somewhere across the second half of the third year, with relapses on bad days and in unfamiliar rooms. The experimenting kind usually goes first, once the answer stops being new. The frustration kind, they say, goes as language arrives.

Until then this is closer to a housekeeping problem than a behaviour problem. Put the breakables away, leave one legal target out, keep your reaction dull, and spend the months on something else. Then one afternoon you notice the glass jug has been back on the shelf a fortnight and nothing has happened to it, and you can go back to sorting the shelf by what your child loves rather than by what survives it.