Stacking Blocks Object Permanence: What Kids Learn Before They Talk

The Oasis Health Journal · Submitted October 17, 2026 · 5:30 PM EDT

By Ray 'Sleeves' Okafor · Edited by Mona Trell

Your baby knock over the block tower for the thirty-seventh time today, look at you, and smile like they just discovered gravity.

They might have.

Researchers studying early block play child development are finding that stacking blocks object permanence skills develop together, and the learning happen through the hands before it ever show up in words. A kid who can rebuild a tower after you hide half the blocks under a blanket is doing neuroscience homework. They just doing it on the carpet instead of in a lab. For free. And they gonna knock it down again in three seconds.

Object permanence is the idea that things still exist when you can't see them no more. For a baby, that is a learned concept, not a given. You take a block away, it gone. You bring it back, it a whole new block. Somewhere between six and twelve months, that change. The baby start to track where things go. They remember. And stacking games for toddler learning are one of the ways they practice that memory before they got the language to tell you what they doing.

Or the fine motor control to not slap the tower into next week every time they reach for it.

What the Research Actually Measured (Which Ain't As Much As You Think)

A 2025 review published in Infancy looked at early play behaviors across different cultures and asked whether the stuff babies do with their hands, stacking, climbing, scribbling, taking things apart, actually shape cognitive skills like attention, memory and executive function, or if we just been assuming it do because it look educational and somebody printed it on a box.

The answer is: we pretty sure it do, but we ain't proved it yet.

The researchers found that most of the evidence so far is correlational. Kids who spend more time manipulating object permanence toys babies respond to tend to show stronger problem-solving skills later, but that don't prove the toys caused it. Could be them kids was already developmentally ahead and that why they engaged with the toys longer in the first place. Could be the caregivers who provide them toys also doing fifty other things that support learning. Could be we measuring what we want to see.

We don't know.

What we do know is babies everywhere do the same things with blocks: they stack, they knock down, they rebuild, they taste one, they throw one at the cat. And when researchers track that behavior, the babies who persist at it, who keep trying even after the tower fall, show better working memory and response inhibition down the line. But here the part that should bother you: nobody run the experiment yet. Nobody took two groups of babies, gave one group developmental block sets and the other group something else, controlled for everything else in they environment, and tracked who learned what six months later.

The review calling for exactly that kind of study. Rotate different types of toys through daycares. Change the motor demands. Modify caregiver involvement. Measure the outcomes in attention and spatial reasoning, not just watch what happen and write a think piece about it.

Until somebody do that, we operating on a theory that make a whole lot of sense and a pile of observations that all point the same direction. That ain't nothing. But it also ain't proof. It's an educated guess with a literature review attached.

When Babies Understand Stacking Blocks Object Permanence, and Why That Got Everything to Do With Memory

Object permanence develop in stages, and stacking blocks hit right in the middle of it.

At four months, you hide a toy under a blanket and the baby act like it vanished from the universe. Gone. Deleted. Never existed. At eight months, they lift the blanket and find it. By twelve months, they track it through two or three hiding spots. You move it from one cup to another and they still know where it went.

That tracking, what researchers call mental representation, is the foundation for everything that come after. You can't do math if you can't hold a number in your head when you ain't looking at it. You can't plan your day if you can't remember what you supposed to do when the phone ain't in front of your face. Object permanence is the beginning of thinking about things that ain't right there.

Stacking games put that skill to work in a way that feel like play. You build a tower. You knock it down. You rebuild it from memory. You hiding and finding the same objects over and over, and every time you do it you reinforcing the idea that the block you put on the bottom still there even though three other blocks sitting on top of it now. That block didn't disappear. It just under some other blocks. The baby learning to hold that idea in they head while they hands are busy doing something else.

That why the best stacking blocks for toddlers are the ones that easy to grip, hard to swallow, and stable enough that a one-year-old can actually get two or three pieces to stay up before the whole thing tip over. The game only work if they can succeed at it sometimes. A tower that fall every single time just frustration. A tower that never fall is boring. The learning happen in the middle, in the part where they almost got it.

One case study from 2000 in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology tracked an infant diagnosed with autism from birth to age two and noted that at one year old, the child showed no impairment in immediate memory for actions or working memory on standardized tests, even though social and sensorimotor delays were already present. The memory was there. What was missing was the motor coordination and the social scaffolding that usually support a kid using that memory in play.

The blocks don't teach object permanence by themselves. The blocks give the brain something to practice on while object permanence developing. They the gym equipment, not the muscle.

The Part Nobody Want to Hear: Motor Skill Come First, or You Just Got Expensive Wooden Frustration

You can't stack what you can't hold.

A separate study in Children looked at timing and motor control in young athletes and found that interventions targeting predictive motor skills, teaching kids to anticipate where a moving object gonna be instead of just reacting to where it is, produced gains that lasted months after the training stopped. The study was about volleyball, not blocks, but the principle the same: the brain learn to predict. And prediction require memory of what happened last time.

Babies stacking blocks are running that same prediction loop. They learning how much force it take to set a block down without knocking the tower over. They learning how far they can reach before they lose they balance. They learning that if they let go too soon the block gonna slide off, and if they hold on too long they gonna pull the whole tower down with they hand. Every attempt is data. Every fall is feedback. Every time they smack the tower into the wall, that information.

But if the baby can't grip the block in the first place, or if they muscle tone too low to hold they arm steady, or if they startle every time something move in they peripheral vision, then the learning loop don't run. That why wooden stacking blocks child development toys are designed the way they are: big enough to hold, light enough to control, heavy enough to stay put. The toy got to match where the baby motor skills are at, or it just a object they can't use yet.

Object sitting on the floor making you feel bad about all the milestones you read on the internet.

The Infancy review pointed out that researchers now got tools, motion capture, wearable eye-tracking, embodied computational models, that can measure exactly what a baby doing with they hands and eyes while they play, and use that data to build interventions that actually tailored to what each kid need. We could be rotating toys based on real developmental benchmarks instead of age ranges printed on a box by a marketing team that never met your baby. We just ain't doing it at scale yet. We still guessing based on the month they was born and hoping it line up.

What This Mean for the Pile of Blocks on Your Floor Right Now

If you got a baby between eight months and two years old and a set of stacking blocks, you already doing the right thing. Let them knock it down. Let them rebuild it wrong. Let them put the big block on top of the small block and watch it fall and try again. Let them sit there and fail at the same tower seventeen times in a row like they training for a sport nobody invented yet.

The research say the learning happen in the repetition, not in you showing them the correct way once. The baby need to fail at it a hundred times before the hands and the brain sync up. That look like mess. That look like they ain't learning nothing. That look like they doing the same wrong thing over and over while you sit there wondering if you supposed to intervene or if that helicopter parenting or if the whole concept of helicopter parenting was invented to make you feel bad for caring.

But the memory forming every time they try.

You want montessori stacking toys for infants or object permanence games for babies that actually research-backed? Get something they can grip, that don't have forty pieces, and that you willing to watch fall over fifty times a day without losing your mind. That the intervention. That the whole thing. The fancy developmental language on the package just there to make you feel better about the price.

And if your kid don't care about blocks, that fine too. The same principles apply to nesting cups, to putting rocks in a bucket, to opening and closing cabinet doors, to any game where they hide something and find it again. The block just one way in. The goal is giving they brain enough chances to practice tracking objects through space and time until it become automatic.

Right now, we got a theory that make sense, a bunch of correlational data that support it, and researchers saying we need to run the actual experiments before we call it settled science. In the meantime, your floor covered in blocks and your baby learning something whether we proved it yet or not.

Probably learning that towers fall. That lesson coming through real clear.

This article is education and reporting on published research. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Talk to your own clinician about your own situation.

Sources

1. Toward a Causal Science of Early Play?, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies (2025).
2. Case Study of the Development of an Infant with Autism from Birth to Two Years of Age, Journal of applied developmental psychology (2000).
3. The Impact of an 8-Week Deliberate Practice Intervention on Coincidence Anticipation Timing and Long-Term Retention in Youth Female Volleyball Players, Children (Basel, Switzerland) (2026).