About Gifts by Stage

Gifts by Stage helps parents, grandparents and friends choose thoughtful gifts for children from birth to age five. Instead of broad age bands, we look at narrow developmental windows, because a 6-month-old and an 18-month-old play very differently.

How we choose

Every recommendation is chosen by hand and written in our own words. We always respect the manufacturer’s age label and safety warnings, and we never promise that a toy will speed up a child’s development. We don’t show prices or ratings because they change; check the retailer for current details.

Affiliate disclosure

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Links to Amazon are affiliate links: if you buy through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This never affects which gifts we recommend.

Privacy

There are no accounts or sign-up forms here, and we never ask for a child’s name or birthday. We don’t set cookies ourselves or use advertising trackers. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views and understand how quickly our pages load.

Hosting logs. The site runs on Cloudflare, which handles your IP address and browser details to deliver each page. We keep Cloudflare’s request logs switched on: they record each request, such as the page address, the time and the response, along with related details Cloudflare adds. They are kept for up to 7 days, and we use them only to keep the site working.

Gift finder. Your choices (age stage, budget and play style) go into the results page address, for example /results?age=6-8m&budget=under-25. That lets the page work without JavaScript and be shared, but it also means those choices appear in your browser history, in the request logs above, and in any link you share. Results pages are not listed in search engines.

Amazon. “View on Amazon” opens Amazon in a new tab. The link includes our Associates tag so Amazon can credit the referral, and your browser may send Amazon our site address, giftsbystage.com (not the page you were on). From then on, Amazon’s own privacy notice and cookies apply. Amazon reports only summary activity to us, such as items ordered and earnings, never who you are.