The thing about recommended age ranges for toys is that… for many toys, it’s merely a suggestion. Your twelve year old child might still love the toys he had when he was six years old. Your six year old might be ready for something as complex as a Haynes internal combustion engine toy, and for the most part, this is fine. You know your child better than anyone; buy them something they’ll enjoy.
However, when toys are recommended for a certain age range because of a safety issue, you’ll want to exercise your own common sense, and you’ll want to consider the question of why that toy is recommended for that age group.
Where a lot of these age groups are kind of subjective, as in “kids around twelve should enjoy this toy the most (but who knows? Your eight year old might love it!)”, safety issues are focused on more practical measures than like or dislike.
For example, an obvious one is choking hazard. A young child simply has a habit of chewing on things while developing their teeth, and they simply have smaller windpipes than larger children. If a teddy bear has little button eyes and is deemed a choking hazard for your three year old, they’re not just whistling Dixie. Those little button eyes really are a choking hazard for your three year old, even If that three year old is reading at a college level, that doesn’t change the fact that buttons and three year olds do not mix.
Pointy, heavy, or otherwise potentially harmful toys are another issue. A toy like say, a Meccano kit, which is made of real sheet metal, may be an excellent choice for a pre teen kid who’s old enough to know how to handle it responsibly, but we all know that a smaller child is going to chew on it, they’re going to find it hard to carry and they may drop it on a toe, or they may trip on it and poke themselves.
This isn’t because your three year old is a real dummy or anything silly like that, it’s simply that a child’s motor skills have not developed yet to the point where they can be trusted carrying potentially harmful items like certain electronic learning toys.
Again, this has nothing to do with things like mental development and the personal taste your child has in toys. Heck, some four year olds absolutely love all those scary dragons and dinosaurs and other such creatures of the night more specifically designed for a preteen audience. It’s not an issue of a child not being clever enough to figure something out, but merely an issue of physical development.
So while we recommend that you look at age recommendations as just that, recommendations, we do request that you regard the age requirements as the gospel itself. However brilliant, imaginative and mature your toddler may be, your child may enjoy listening to Mozart and quoting famed surrealist philosopher Albert Camus, but a toddler is simply not quite ready for the potential hazards of certain toys yet, or at least, not from the standpoint of physical development and safety.