Men and women have roles – Their roles are different, but their rights are equal. –Harri Holkeri
Growing up, I played with Barbie dolls. I had at least ten dolls, with more clothes than I had in my own closet, and a complete doll house set with furniture for a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom. I played with them almost daily. I remember setting it all up on a glass table in the playroom my house had and losing track of time because I was so engrossed in the world of Barbie. If I didn’t feel like playing with Barbie on a rare day I had princess dress-up clothes, baby dolls, and a little girl’s kitchen set I could play house with.
On the flip side, my older brother wouldn’t touch any of my girly toys with a ten-foot pole. There was serval time in our childhood where I would beg and beg him to play Barbie with me and he would say, “Barbie is for girls and I’m a boy” then would run off to go play with his Lego’s or videogames which were “for boys only”. Which was fine cause I didn’t want to play with those kinds of toys anyway. They weren’t girly.
It’s interesting how at such a young age my brother and I had defined what a “girls toy” (pink and lots of dolls) should be and what a “boys toy” (blue and more hands on) and we didn’t cross that line. He played with his toys and I played with mine. We were just kids without a clear understanding of what gender is defined as, yet we were still distinguished between what we thought should be boy and girl objects.
This week I had the opportunity to read a blog post found on the American Council on Health website. The title of the article was “Infants Prefer Toys by Gender” and was quite a fascinating little read. (I will post a link to the article at the bottom of this post.) The article goes on to tell us about a study that was done to see if starting at the young age of 9 months to the age of 32 months, saying that this was the age “when infants can first demonstrate toy preferences in independent play” children show a preference to toys more catered to their gender (Infants Prefer Toys by Gender). The results of the study showed that the little girls, like me as a small child, tended to lean towards the pink toys and baby dolls and the boys swayed towards the blue and hands on toys.
However, there may be more than meets the eye here. The article references Dr. Brenda Todd who say, “Biological differences give boys an aptitude for mental rotation and more interest and ability in spatial processing, while girls are more interested in looking at faces and better at fine motor skills and manipulating objects” (qtd. In Infants Prefer Toys by Gender). I thought this was quite interesting. There is a biological difference that can lead children to choose the toys that they do. I have definitely seen the truth in this statement. I have a good friend that I follow on social media. She has the cutest little daughter. She posts videos and pictures often of her little girl in the toy isle of a store dragging some toy or doll over to her mom to buy. Every time the toy is a “girls toy”. I had never really payed much attention to that until reading this article.
Boys and girls are different. Gender is not just effected by society and the so called “norms” of gender but there is also something in our genetic make-up that have men and women acting different that does not make anyone of us less equal then the other.
“Infants Prefer Toys By Gender.” American Council on Science and Health, American Council on Science and Health, 22 July 2016, http://www.acsh.org/news/2016/07/22/infants-prefer-toys-by-gender?utm_source=email%2Bmarketing%2BMailigen&utm_campaign=News%2B7.29.16&utm_medium=email.
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