The short version: these games all work with toddlers, but not in their standard form. Start with freeze dance from about age two. Red light green light usually needs closer to three. Floor is lava works from about two and a half with short distances. Simon Says is the last to land, because being caught out is not yet funny. Remove elimination from all of them.
Freeze dance: the one that always works
Music on, dance about, music off, everybody freezes. There is nothing else to it, which is exactly why it works when nothing else does.
One instruction. Demonstrated, not explained. No way to lose. A two-year-old who freezes three seconds after the music stops has played it correctly, because the point is the stopping, not the timing.
Freeze as theatrically as you can — mid-stride, arm in the air, face pulled. They are copying your performance far more than they are following your instruction, and a committed adult freeze is the whole difference between this landing and not.
Red light green light: harder than it looks
On the surface this is freeze dance with colours. Underneath it is a significant step up, and it is worth knowing why before you conclude your child "can't do it".
It asks them to hold two instructions at once, connect each to a word, and then stop a body that is already in motion. Stopping on cue is genuinely difficult for a two-year-old — the deciding happens faster than the stopping does.
Closer to three, it clicks. If it is not working, this is not a game to push. Go back to freeze dance for a few weeks and try again; there is nothing to be gained by drilling it.
Floor is lava: keep the islands close
Cushions, towels, books — anything flat. The single most common mistake is spacing them the distance an adult finds interesting, which puts them just out of toddler reach and turns the game into a series of near-misses and one bad landing.
Put them close enough to step between. All the tension should come from your narration, not from the gap. "It's bubbling! It's getting closer!" does more than another thirty centimetres ever will, and it lets them run the route again and again, which is what they actually want.
Simon Says: wait longer than you think
This is the one parents reach for early and it is the one that lands last.
The game is built on a trap. You give an instruction without the magic words, they do it, and they are out. For a four or five-year-old, being tricked is delightful. For a three-year-old who was concentrating hard on getting it right, it reads as being told off for doing what they were asked.
Play it without the trap until then. Give instructions, do them together, make them silly. It becomes a copying game rather than a catching game, which toddlers will happily play for far longer than you will want to.
The rule underneath all four
Every one of these games is really the same skill: go, then stop. Starting is easy and universally popular. Stopping is the part that develops, and it develops gradually over several years.
Which means the measure of whether a game is working is not whether your child follows the rules. It is whether they are enjoying starting and stopping. Everything else — the colours, the lava, the magic words — is set dressing to make that repetition interesting enough to do forty times.
