I purchased these a couple of years ago to work on fine motor skills with our son, who has a rather long list of diagnoses at this point that come with global developmental delays. At the time, I wanted this as part of a fine motor progression for stringing beads. He had become very successful with larger two inch beads, and I thought this would be a good next step progression and challenge for the beads, and I liked that there were pattern cards. And even though we've now progressed to stringing cheerios, I have recently placed this back in my rotation for therapy targets and tasks because of the pattern cards, which was something we could not work with him on at the time of purchase.So, durability wise, we have no issues with this product. The strings have been holding up. For our little man, because of the nature of his challenges, we did have to knot one end of each string to keep the beads on and give him a good basis for adding more beads without getting frustrated. That is something we still need.If you have a kiddo who is a chewer or has impulse control issues, this is a toy that you will need to closely supervise and may still stress the living day lights out of you from time to time. For example, today I was working on a pattern card that involve the cylindrical beads. Which are a lovely size for esophageal obstruction, and my little man (who is 5 and has problems with impulse control, chewing, and risk assessment) kept running off with them the moment he sat down and popping them in his mouth. His first stop with one of the beads was my yoga ball where he proceeded to bounce it into the back of his throat, and with another he ran up the stairs and coughed it into the back of his throat. Because he's quick, he got away from the table those two times before I could grab him, and I was fortunately able to still reach him and the bead quick enough to sweep it before it went down. The moral of the story is I think this is a great toy for fine motor, but depending on the nature of your child's disabilities there is definitely an element of risk that you can not turn your back on. Pretty much ever.So since he is a chewer, I can say the paint holds up well enough for those times he's managed to get one in his mouth. I think this is a great multi functional teaching tool for a typically developing child as well as one with specialized needs. It's good for patterns, colors, shapes, fine motor, and creativity, and as it also has had no quality control issues, it is definitely a 5 star toy with supervision if needed.