A Girl's Toy?

I’ve been doing some internet research on the topic of “Gender Stereotyping” and the role our toy buying choices can play in this. I have an interest in this both as a parent and as the owner of an internet toy shop. How “guilty” am I, or rather, what impact have the toys I have provided my children had in shaping their identity as girls?

Our first daughter is a girly girl and there are no two ways about it. Her closet is at least 60% pink and it’s a rare day you see her in trousers and not a dress or skirt. And this is certainly genetic because my better half rarely wears dresses, skirts or pink for that matter and I certainly don’t! 

As parents, we have always thought of ourselves as open minded and would never refuse a request for any toy, weather or not it is traditionally perceived as being male or female oriented. In fact, our experience with our “all things pink and beautiful” girl has been the opposite. I grew up in a pile of Lego bricks and think it is one of the best toys ever. Our DD just never showed any interest in it no matter how much we bought. In fact, this Christmas she said: “ah dad, you’ll have to stop buying me Lego”!  So, with her, it’s all doll houses, kitchen play things, ponies and dolls. So from our point of view, the only time gender stereo typing has come into our toy buying purchases has been to counter balance our daughter’s tendency to only want stereotypically girly things.

An extreme example of this is when we bought her a Leapfrog Leapster - We’re a bilingual family so we bough her the console and a some games in French in an effort to stimulate her French language development. We bought the console with 2 games. One featured Disney’s Ariel (the little mermaid) and the other featured a little boy character (can’t remember the name). She flatly refused to play the game with the little boy because it was a “boy’s game”. The game still remains un-played to this day.

So we’re perfect, right? Well, apparently not. Here’s something that really caught my eye:

One of the most salient areas in which the effects of gender labeling is evident in children is the prevalence of gender-appropriate toys for children (Basow, 1992). Parental toy choices and child-parent interactions with toys send a clear message to children regarding gender-typed behaviors (Caldera, Huston, O’Brien, 1989). Langolis and Downs (1980) have shown that parents play with their child’s gender-same toys longer, react more positively to gender-same toys, and are more critical of cross-sexed toys. These researchers have also shown that fathers use toys, perhaps unintentionally, to socialize their children differently based on sex and there is evidence that this gender-based socialization process begins as early as the first year of the child’s life (Snow, Jacklin, & Maccobby, 1983). Interestingly, it appears that there may be more stereotyping regarding toys offered to boys. Parents tended to choose masculine and neutral toys more often than feminine toys for their sons but chose neutral toys more than feminine or masculine toys for their daughters (Eisenberg, Wolchik, Hernandez, & Pasternack, 1985).

So while I don’t intentionally try to gender stereotype my children by buying only girl oriented toys, I may, nonetheless, be unintentionally doing the same thing by how I play and interact with them. This is something I never considered and while I don’t see it in myself, I know that if I had boys, I would definitely spend more time playing with them with typically boyish toys - after all, that’s what I know best!

The article also says this:

Miller (1987) has noted that toys viewed as more appropriate for girls were also rated as attractive, creative, nurturing, and manipulable while masculine toys were identified as more competitive, aggressive, constructive, conducive to handling, encouraging sociability, and reality based.

Interestingly, these differences in functionality of gender stereotyped toys correspond to differences noted in the stereotyped feminine and masculine behavioral and personality patterns with stereotypical feminine characteristics described as emotional, gentle, understanding, and creative while masculine traits include aggressive, active, dominant, and competitive (Spence & Helmreich, 1978).

This seems to be suggesting that the toys we typically choose for boys and girls are somehow related to the personality traits which we most often associate with males and females. However, I see it the other way around. We generally choose certain toys for girls and others for boys because they’re different, they play differently and they want different things! We can over-complicate an issue which is really very simple, in my opinion.

For me, observing my daughter and my nephew playing with a wooden toy train set illustrates the difference between boys and girls perfectly. Observing my nephew playing with his wooden train set, he makes the train go around the circuit, puts things in the carriages and generally makes the train do train-like things. However, when my daughter plays with her train set, the locomotive is the school teacher and the carriages are the children. For me, this illustrates a fundamental difference in how both children perceive and interact with the world.

In the end, I believe boys will be boys and girls will be girls!

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Jody Toys and Parenting