9 ms·

Despite social pressure, boys and girls still prefer gender-typical toys

118 points by yamrzou 5y ago

bawolff 5y ago
I hardly think we're in a society where people make fun of girls for playing with dolls, and boys for playing with trucks, which seems to be what this article is implying. Less social pressure to play with gender-sterotypical toys != social pressure to play with opposite gender toys.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  The article doesn't suggest social pressure in the form of making fun. On the contrary, it suggests social pressure in encouraging girls to play with boys's toys and vice versa, although the former more than the latter: > A 2017 survey from Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans considered it a "somewhat or very good thing" to steer kids toward toys and activities traditionally associated with the opposite gender (though respondents were less enthusiastic about doing so for boys than girls).
  - 0942v8653 5y ago
    That survey result has very little to do with the assertion that there is such a social pressure. All it implies is that respondents think it would be nice if there were.
    - etrabroline 5y ago
      Why do you think those parents think that? Would any parent have thought that 50 years ago? No way.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Would any parent have thought that 50 years ago? Yes, not only was parents doing that recognized as common-but-not-dominant thing 50 years ago (as a near-50 GenXer, I was aware of it existing and being perceived by adult society that way as a kid), it was even before that a popular media cliche leveraging a social trope that it was a real if eccentric recurring pattern (especially by fathers without sons toward girls) even earlier.
    - cassianoleal 5y ago
      You do realise that any steering parents apply to their children is social pressure, right?
      - 0942v8653 5y ago
        My point is that there might be unconscious biases at play in parents, no matter what they might respond to a survey. It's not feasible for parents to account for 100% of their behavior when it comes to something as unimportant as this. IMO, this is something that just can't be determined scientifically.
- etrabroline 5y ago
  >probably goes back tens of thousands of years I think you're off by several orders of magnitude, but yea it goes back a long way lol
meristohm 5y ago
What social pressure are you feeling or observing?
- yalok 5y ago
  I observe pressure to pay attention to such stuff.
taylodl 5y ago
I’m a father of fraternal twins who will be 25 this year. One boy, one girl. My wife wanted to raise them in a gender-neutral environment - provide “boy” toys and “girl” toys and let them play with whichever they wanted. My wife was a stay-at-home mom so the kids never went to daycare. What happened? My daughter played with baby dolls - mothering them and taking care of them. My son? He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns. He also liked to use Barbie dolls as hammers. My wife and I learned there’s some things girls like to do and some things boys like to do. It appears to be biological. We’ve known a few other couples who tried the same thing and had similar results. Leads me to believe the difference between the sexes is nature, not nurture, and probably goes back tens of thousands of years.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  > He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns. Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.
  - new_realist 5y ago
    Two genders can observe the same thing, but attach different levels of importance to the observation, and have different preferences for imaginative play based on what they’ve observed.
    - gnud 5y ago
      Or identify with who they've seen do things in different ways.
      - loopz 5y ago
        Before self identification, there might be external expectations and cues. Survival of children depend on picking up cues of parents, and then peers.
    - teachingassist 5y ago
logicalmonster 5y ago
It is unconscionable in 2021 that stereotypes can still exist. Why are certain aisles in toy stores bright pink and geared towards one group? Why are certain aisles in toy stores geared with toys revolving around shooting things? Everybody should have the choice. We should all do our part. I'm trying to do my part to help achieve TRUE EQUITY in all communities. Did you know that just 2.3% of United States plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters are women? Why is nobody talking about this gross inequality? How many young girls have been discouraged and had their dreams of helping their communities in this way denied? I intend to start local and give my daughter a choice. She will have every right to play with pneumatic and hand drills, impact wrenches, band saws, hand clamps, air compressors, as well as G.I. Joe Action Figures and Polly Pocket Playhouse if she chooses. Lean in and help everybody achieve their true ambitions and calling.
- efraim 5y ago
  Why do you think bright pink aisled are geared towards one group? Everyone can like pink, I'm sure the people working in toystores are happy to sell pink dolls do boys or plastic guns and soldier dolls to girls.
  - logicalmonster 5y ago
    I think there's one expectation in society about what certain groups of people like. (For example, pink dolls are just for girls, boys can't be into dollhouses, or girls just aren't interested in deep sea fishing, or what have you) But I think everybody should have the opportunity to live their life and choose the toys they wish as I pointed out. As long as it fixes inequalities and leads to true equity, I'm all for it.
  - CaptainMarvel 5y ago
    I’d bet the lunch I’m about to eat that the bright pink aisle will predominantly contain imagery of girls or toys typically played with by girls. For it to be geared towards both boys and girls, it would need to be bright pink with equal imagery of boys and girls, and equal amounts of toys played with boys as well as girls. Come on, it’s like saying barbie dolls aren’t girls toys. I mean, sure, boys aren’t usually incapable of playing with them, but that’s also irrelevant.
rektide 5y ago
Whatever modern non-normativity pressures might possibly exist, the status quo is that male and female role models in society embody different characteristics. Looking out at the world & seeing what people who look like you do, what roles they embody matter. Different angle, but former & new CEO of TSMC Morris Chang, in a 2014 interview, talks about how he came to semiconductors: he looked around at what other asian businessmen were doing, switched from Harvard to MIT because no opportunities, examples open to him, & saw "no chinese American politicans, no chinese-american even businessman" (1949)[1]. Obviously this is no longer 1949, equal rights is literally the rule of the land in a fair part of the world. But it's a strong story of role models mattering, of doing what you see. And there are definitely still gender-roles prevalent within society, roles taken by masculine figures, roles taken by feminine figures, and people looking in the mirror are like to understand, to see themselves forward on paths where they can already see people who resemble themselves succeeding. Disrupt this, please, but to me, the pressures towards non-normativity are greatly outranked by the evidences & pressures of what we already see in the world. Last, I'll throw in a shout out to Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota[2] series. It's a wonderful story from a Renaissance history professor, of a post-geo-governmental sci-fi world, of politics & great events. One of the interesting flourishes of the book is that the world has largely decided to make gender taboo. To adopt a willful genderblindness, to try to treat everyone equally, to regard to everyone with non-gendered pro-nouns. The world has worked to undo the pre-dispositions set up, actively, rather than merely requiring a legal treatment. It's an interesting detail of the world, & causes no end of tension & complications for the characters of course, which is just one part of this wonderful interesting highly interwoven saga. It speaks to the difficulty of the social science happening in this article, to the impossibility to build a control group that could ever test out how sex shapes us, because so much of society is suffused with it. Even in the Terra Ignota world, where a agendered Puritanism has taken over, the old roles still have root, even though they are illegal, & must hide. When people talk about their anecdotes of boys & girls having different behaviors, I think they must just be so blind to how much influence, how many opportunities for messaging, how much of a status quo the world has, how much they are up against to provide that equal chance. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE#t=29m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE#t=29m https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611648 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Ignota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Ignota
barnaclejive 5y ago
I give my daughter ample opportunities to use hand tools to work on R/C trucks, and generally play with any stereotypical "boy stuff" (I have a lot of stuff like that since I'm just a 40 year old 12 year old) with me from birth, way before any external influences of TV or outside influences. Guess what, she still prefers to take care of her toys in a sterotypical maternal way - animals, dolls, etc. Both options have always been there. The article rings true to me.
Isamu 5y ago
Another is the difference in interest in video games. The thinking has been that video games just haven’t been tailored to girls’ interests. Which actually is admitting a gender distinction. Anyway I tried my best to find games my daughters would enjoy, with some success. But the video game mania of every nephew of mine was on a completely different level. With them it always became an issue for their parents to intervene and moderate.
- danielrpa 5y ago
  It doesn't matter how many game genres I expose my son to - RPGs, puzzle, space, adventure, sports, visual novel... No matter what, he goes back to blowing zombies away in Call of Duty Multiplayer. He could do that for 12 hours a day if I let him. Interestingly, he otherwise enjoys intellectual and artistic pursuits, but I feel there is some deep instinct showing its face in his game preferences.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
I have to disagree, it's not a matter of preference, it's a matter of what they are exposed to. We have dolls, lego, duplo, mechas and a big "kitchen". We live far from family and none of my friends here has kids, so my daughter plays with me a good chunk of the time (I work from home) and with mom. Mom doesn't like dolls, but she puts an effort into showing her. I get just bored with those, so we play with boy toys. She get a little bit of interest in dolls to pretend she is cleaning her little brother, but most of the time she plays with duplo, although she does put to bed the characters in there. There is no one saying "princess princess", so her favourite character in Frozen is Frozen Marshmallow (the big snow monster), she likes singing though. Again, it's all a matter of exposure and it comes heavily from who she plays with the most. In our case, me and my wife are the people she sees the most (and COVID obviously pushed that even further). Oh and yes of course we want a gender neutral environment. Now that I think of it, she also sees me changing diapers, so maybe she is pretending to be me.
panxyh 5y ago
Why is it suddenly so hard to accept that there exist psychological differences between genders as well as undebatably there are physical? The need for discussion about this is really mind boggling to me, considering that the crowd here is supposed to be intelligent and reasonable and not either-wingly and emotionally loaden. The discussion doesn't seem to be about equality of rights and importance anymore. What the hell is happening? Edit: sorry for the rant. Both the article and majority of the comments are a reasonable discussion. "But you get where I'm coming from"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ramphastidae 5y ago
  I agree with the sentiment. I think the issue is that society is finally trying to fix some longstanding inequities but in many areas we have overshot the response and are due for recalibration.
- Thorentis 5y ago
  Because some people have decided to take an all-or-nothing approach to "all people are equal". Imagine if during the social justice movement of the mid 20th century, we saw people saying "actually, there's no such thing as black and white, everybody has the same skin color", in an attempt to show that the races are valued equally as humans. That would be absurd. And yet that's what is now happening with gender.
darkFunction 5y ago
I notice the commenters who agree that it seems to be biological are the ones who actually have children. I have a two year old. He was raised with gender neutral toys and due to the pandemic largely in isolation from the rest of society for the last year with a lot of time spent with both parents. Moreover as the father I don't show strong interest in “typical” male interests like cars or football. The first time my son saw a digger, he was hooked. He is completely enthralled with construction vehicles- dumper trucks, cement mixers etc. His favourite colour of Play Dough is "mud". He has dolls but they hold limited interest over his toolbench. Before having children I would have said it was largely societal. But I've watched my son show strong preference to "boy" hobbies since he was able to show interest in anything and it was really quite surprising how "boyish" he turned out to be considering we tried to give him equal opportunity for all activities. Of course you can never rule out external influences entirely but I remain convinced the difference is biological.
- danielrpa 5y ago
  Great insight. I'm blown away by the amount of nonsense I hear about child rearing from people who had minimal contact with young children. A lot of theories quickly get destroyed when you get schooled by your own child!
- zrail 5y ago
  My 4yo and 2yo girls are also enthralled with diggers. I think there's just something about big equipment that's impressive. This is a really good book on the subject :) was both their favorite for quite a long time: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/228537/digger-dozer-dumper-by-hope-vestergaard/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/228537/digger-dozer...
aristofun 5y ago
Obviously. Children are pure and not spoiled with current agenda.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

118 points by yamrzou 5y ago

I hardly think we're in a society where people make fun of girls for playing with dolls, and boys for playing with trucks, which seems to be what this article is implying. Less social pressure to play with gender-sterotypical toys != social pressure to play with opposite gender toys.

cassianoleal 5y ago
The article doesn't suggest social pressure in the form of making fun. On the contrary, it suggests social pressure in encouraging girls to play with boys's toys and vice versa, although the former more than the latter: > A 2017 survey from Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans considered it a "somewhat or very good thing" to steer kids toward toys and activities traditionally associated with the opposite gender (though respondents were less enthusiastic about doing so for boys than girls).
- 0942v8653 5y ago
  That survey result has very little to do with the assertion that there is such a social pressure. All it implies is that respondents think it would be nice if there were.
  - etrabroline 5y ago
    Why do you think those parents think that? Would any parent have thought that 50 years ago? No way.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Would any parent have thought that 50 years ago? Yes, not only was parents doing that recognized as common-but-not-dominant thing 50 years ago (as a near-50 GenXer, I was aware of it existing and being perceived by adult society that way as a kid), it was even before that a popular media cliche leveraging a social trope that it was a real if eccentric recurring pattern (especially by fathers without sons toward girls) even earlier.
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    You do realise that any steering parents apply to their children is social pressure, right?
    - 0942v8653 5y ago
      My point is that there might be unconscious biases at play in parents, no matter what they might respond to a survey. It's not feasible for parents to account for 100% of their behavior when it comes to something as unimportant as this. IMO, this is something that just can't be determined scientifically.
etrabroline 5y ago
>probably goes back tens of thousands of years I think you're off by several orders of magnitude, but yea it goes back a long way lol

meristohm 5y ago

What social pressure are you feeling or observing?

yalok 5y ago
I observe pressure to pay attention to such stuff.

taylodl 5y ago

I’m a father of fraternal twins who will be 25 this year. One boy, one girl. My wife wanted to raise them in a gender-neutral environment - provide “boy” toys and “girl” toys and let them play with whichever they wanted. My wife was a stay-at-home mom so the kids never went to daycare. What happened? My daughter played with baby dolls - mothering them and taking care of them. My son? He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns. He also liked to use Barbie dolls as hammers. My wife and I learned there’s some things girls like to do and some things boys like to do. It appears to be biological. We’ve known a few other couples who tried the same thing and had similar results. Leads me to believe the difference between the sexes is nature, not nurture, and probably goes back tens of thousands of years.

teachingassist 5y ago
> He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns. Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.
- new_realist 5y ago
  Two genders can observe the same thing, but attach different levels of importance to the observation, and have different preferences for imaginative play based on what they’ve observed.
  - gnud 5y ago
    Or identify with who they've seen do things in different ways.
    - loopz 5y ago
      Before self identification, there might be external expectations and cues. Survival of children depend on picking up cues of parents, and then peers.
  - teachingassist 5y ago

logicalmonster 5y ago

It is unconscionable in 2021 that stereotypes can still exist. Why are certain aisles in toy stores bright pink and geared towards one group? Why are certain aisles in toy stores geared with toys revolving around shooting things? Everybody should have the choice. We should all do our part. I'm trying to do my part to help achieve TRUE EQUITY in all communities. Did you know that just 2.3% of United States plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters are women? Why is nobody talking about this gross inequality? How many young girls have been discouraged and had their dreams of helping their communities in this way denied? I intend to start local and give my daughter a choice. She will have every right to play with pneumatic and hand drills, impact wrenches, band saws, hand clamps, air compressors, as well as G.I. Joe Action Figures and Polly Pocket Playhouse if she chooses. Lean in and help everybody achieve their true ambitions and calling.

efraim 5y ago
Why do you think bright pink aisled are geared towards one group? Everyone can like pink, I'm sure the people working in toystores are happy to sell pink dolls do boys or plastic guns and soldier dolls to girls.
- logicalmonster 5y ago
  I think there's one expectation in society about what certain groups of people like. (For example, pink dolls are just for girls, boys can't be into dollhouses, or girls just aren't interested in deep sea fishing, or what have you) But I think everybody should have the opportunity to live their life and choose the toys they wish as I pointed out. As long as it fixes inequalities and leads to true equity, I'm all for it.
- CaptainMarvel 5y ago
  I’d bet the lunch I’m about to eat that the bright pink aisle will predominantly contain imagery of girls or toys typically played with by girls. For it to be geared towards both boys and girls, it would need to be bright pink with equal imagery of boys and girls, and equal amounts of toys played with boys as well as girls. Come on, it’s like saying barbie dolls aren’t girls toys. I mean, sure, boys aren’t usually incapable of playing with them, but that’s also irrelevant.

rektide 5y ago

Whatever modern non-normativity pressures might possibly exist, the status quo is that male and female role models in society embody different characteristics. Looking out at the world & seeing what people who look like you do, what roles they embody matter. Different angle, but former & new CEO of TSMC Morris Chang, in a 2014 interview, talks about how he came to semiconductors: he looked around at what other asian businessmen were doing, switched from Harvard to MIT because no opportunities, examples open to him, & saw "no chinese American politicans, no chinese-american even businessman" (1949)[1]. Obviously this is no longer 1949, equal rights is literally the rule of the land in a fair part of the world. But it's a strong story of role models mattering, of doing what you see. And there are definitely still gender-roles prevalent within society, roles taken by masculine figures, roles taken by feminine figures, and people looking in the mirror are like to understand, to see themselves forward on paths where they can already see people who resemble themselves succeeding. Disrupt this, please, but to me, the pressures towards non-normativity are greatly outranked by the evidences & pressures of what we already see in the world. Last, I'll throw in a shout out to Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota[2] series. It's a wonderful story from a Renaissance history professor, of a post-geo-governmental sci-fi world, of politics & great events. One of the interesting flourishes of the book is that the world has largely decided to make gender taboo. To adopt a willful genderblindness, to try to treat everyone equally, to regard to everyone with non-gendered pro-nouns. The world has worked to undo the pre-dispositions set up, actively, rather than merely requiring a legal treatment. It's an interesting detail of the world, & causes no end of tension & complications for the characters of course, which is just one part of this wonderful interesting highly interwoven saga. It speaks to the difficulty of the social science happening in this article, to the impossibility to build a control group that could ever test out how sex shapes us, because so much of society is suffused with it. Even in the Terra Ignota world, where a agendered Puritanism has taken over, the old roles still have root, even though they are illegal, & must hide. When people talk about their anecdotes of boys & girls having different behaviors, I think they must just be so blind to how much influence, how many opportunities for messaging, how much of a status quo the world has, how much they are up against to provide that equal chance. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE#t=29m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE#t=29m https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611648 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Ignota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Ignota

barnaclejive 5y ago

I give my daughter ample opportunities to use hand tools to work on R/C trucks, and generally play with any stereotypical "boy stuff" (I have a lot of stuff like that since I'm just a 40 year old 12 year old) with me from birth, way before any external influences of TV or outside influences. Guess what, she still prefers to take care of her toys in a sterotypical maternal way - animals, dolls, etc. Both options have always been there. The article rings true to me.

Isamu 5y ago

Another is the difference in interest in video games. The thinking has been that video games just haven’t been tailored to girls’ interests. Which actually is admitting a gender distinction. Anyway I tried my best to find games my daughters would enjoy, with some success. But the video game mania of every nephew of mine was on a completely different level. With them it always became an issue for their parents to intervene and moderate.

danielrpa 5y ago
It doesn't matter how many game genres I expose my son to - RPGs, puzzle, space, adventure, sports, visual novel... No matter what, he goes back to blowing zombies away in Call of Duty Multiplayer. He could do that for 12 hours a day if I let him. Interestingly, he otherwise enjoys intellectual and artistic pursuits, but I feel there is some deep instinct showing its face in his game preferences.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago

I have to disagree, it's not a matter of preference, it's a matter of what they are exposed to. We have dolls, lego, duplo, mechas and a big "kitchen". We live far from family and none of my friends here has kids, so my daughter plays with me a good chunk of the time (I work from home) and with mom. Mom doesn't like dolls, but she puts an effort into showing her. I get just bored with those, so we play with boy toys. She get a little bit of interest in dolls to pretend she is cleaning her little brother, but most of the time she plays with duplo, although she does put to bed the characters in there. There is no one saying "princess princess", so her favourite character in Frozen is Frozen Marshmallow (the big snow monster), she likes singing though. Again, it's all a matter of exposure and it comes heavily from who she plays with the most. In our case, me and my wife are the people she sees the most (and COVID obviously pushed that even further). Oh and yes of course we want a gender neutral environment. Now that I think of it, she also sees me changing diapers, so maybe she is pretending to be me.

panxyh 5y ago

Why is it suddenly so hard to accept that there exist psychological differences between genders as well as undebatably there are physical? The need for discussion about this is really mind boggling to me, considering that the crowd here is supposed to be intelligent and reasonable and not either-wingly and emotionally loaden. The discussion doesn't seem to be about equality of rights and importance anymore. What the hell is happening? Edit: sorry for the rant. Both the article and majority of the comments are a reasonable discussion. "But you get where I'm coming from"

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ramphastidae 5y ago
I agree with the sentiment. I think the issue is that society is finally trying to fix some longstanding inequities but in many areas we have overshot the response and are due for recalibration.
Thorentis 5y ago
Because some people have decided to take an all-or-nothing approach to "all people are equal". Imagine if during the social justice movement of the mid 20th century, we saw people saying "actually, there's no such thing as black and white, everybody has the same skin color", in an attempt to show that the races are valued equally as humans. That would be absurd. And yet that's what is now happening with gender.

darkFunction 5y ago

I notice the commenters who agree that it seems to be biological are the ones who actually have children. I have a two year old. He was raised with gender neutral toys and due to the pandemic largely in isolation from the rest of society for the last year with a lot of time spent with both parents. Moreover as the father I don't show strong interest in “typical” male interests like cars or football. The first time my son saw a digger, he was hooked. He is completely enthralled with construction vehicles- dumper trucks, cement mixers etc. His favourite colour of Play Dough is "mud". He has dolls but they hold limited interest over his toolbench. Before having children I would have said it was largely societal. But I've watched my son show strong preference to "boy" hobbies since he was able to show interest in anything and it was really quite surprising how "boyish" he turned out to be considering we tried to give him equal opportunity for all activities. Of course you can never rule out external influences entirely but I remain convinced the difference is biological.

danielrpa 5y ago
Great insight. I'm blown away by the amount of nonsense I hear about child rearing from people who had minimal contact with young children. A lot of theories quickly get destroyed when you get schooled by your own child!
zrail 5y ago
My 4yo and 2yo girls are also enthralled with diggers. I think there's just something about big equipment that's impressive. This is a really good book on the subject :) was both their favorite for quite a long time: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/228537/digger-dozer-dumper-by-hope-vestergaard/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/228537/digger-dozer...

aristofun 5y ago

Obviously. Children are pure and not spoiled with current agenda.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]