My son is still pretty young (10 months) but at that curious age. I'm a musician and I have many hand drums and we had been playing with some of those previously, but I worry about what those might be made of (they were universally hand made but probably tanned with things that shouldn't go in a boy's mouth) so I went searching for drums made for children. This is more geared toward a classroom, but when you're hanging out with this dad every day is music class. He already has been trying to mimic me clapping my hands and dancing around and loves it when I sing and really enjoyed the drumming we did do (inspired in part by the Al Perkins book "Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb") he impressed me already by tapping out very musical and well phrased drum riffs on this thing. It comes with two mallets but for now we're using it as a hand drum. I'm quite impressed by the tone of this drum, I wouldn't hesitate to use it in a recording if I needed such a timbre. It's a real drum, but fairly light and colorful. I always supervise my son when we play with this drum at this young age (I didn't see a recommended age, and checking again on the amazon page I can't find one there) but even for a boy that's not quite a year old it's getting some use. I'm looking forward to getting plenty of use out of this in the next few years (will post back if it doesn't seem to hold up, but it's fairly well constructed). Kids love to bang on things, this is a nice thing to bang on.