It's a joke that's right on the money: When you reach the stepping-on-Lego years, you become the parent trying to silent-scream your curses. The parenting and product pros at our Good Housekeeping Institute Parenting Lab test some 500 toys over the course of each year to include in our toy roundups as well as our annual Best Toy Awards and Parenting Awards. We've seen three and even four kids using this at the same time, making it great for large families or playdates. Plastic looks cheaper but then again, it's very easy to clean and you know it will hold up to some rough play.

Note that the retailer also has its own bag of 201 mixed Lego bricks, sold separately, to jump-start open-ended brick play. There are many STEM skills kids learn through play with bricks and other construction toys, including problem-solving and critical thinking. The perfect first building blocks for little ones, Mega Bloks are super chunky and easy for little hands to grasp onto. Our list does not include any Lego tables for adults, but if you're a "kidult" Lego builder or know someone who is, check out our favorite grown-up Lego sets you might love.

We've seen people get tricked by tops that they think work as baseplates for their favorite bricks when they do not. Note that this is a very small table, about a foot and a half on each side, so it's not going to be very useful past the preschool years.

She's covered the toy market for several decades and has written about the best kids' playhouses and the best magnetic toys for GH. During her 15 years at Good Housekeeping, Rachel has had the opportunity to evaluate thousands of products, including toys and cars for GH’s annual awards programs and countless innovative breakthroughs in consumer tech and home improvement.

It's a genius collab between Lego and IKEA, a retailer that's great at serving families with small spaces. Age grading and size: If your child is still a toddler, be sure to get a table that's appropriately short and easy for them to reach. But the storage is not very generous considering the size of the table — the drawer is only about a foot wide.

The lid is reversible with the Lego platform facing up or a plain wood side so it becomes a little coffee table (if it's in your family room) or art table (if it's in the playroom). Before they can safely advance to Lego bricks, toddlers can play with the chunkier Duplo blocks made by the Lego company for kids under age 4. We love that it comes with 195 bricks, looks good and is an affordable way to encourage building for a child age 3 or older. This comes with a small chair and 128 Duplo-sized blocks to get them started, plus four storage bins that can hang off the sides of the table. The legs can fold under so this can lay flat for easy storage under the couch or get tucked into a corner.IKEA has this age-graded for kids 5 and older so they can move it around and pull off the lid by themselves. It's more "kiddie" than our best overall choice, which makes it less of a decor option, but we love that it comes with so many extras. Rachel Rothman (she/her) is the chief technologist and executive technical director at the Good Housekeeping Institute, where she oversees testing methodology, implementation and reporting for all GH Labs. Note that, despite some of the brand's marketing photography, this tabletop is not compatible with Duplo blocks, just the small Lego bricks. Ideally, they would include a brick-compatible top so that children have a ready-made platform to display their Lego creations.

This wooden table holds Lego bricks and also gives kids a roughly two-foot-square tabletop on which to build.Turn over the Lego-compatible platform and use the reverse side with the included paper roll to encourage art projects. Storage possibilities: As parents ourselves, we're fans of tables where the bricks can be contained and hidden out of sight whether in bins, drawers or under-lid compartments. This great gift for a 1- or 2-year-old comes with 44 Mega Bloks, including some with letters and numbers printed on them and one that's a little vehicle. Kids in Kindergarten and older will be more interested in the smaller Lego that let them build more complicated structures.