Are we giving our kids equal play? 

Cars and dolls, diggers and prams, children’s toy preferences do seem to fall out down gender lines. Kirstie Beaven finds that our own prejudices might be getting in the way.  

Just before my daughter turned one, someone asked what she’d like as a present. I didn’t have much hesitation in saying she’d like a baby doll. I had noticed her pattern – she made a beeline for them at all playgroups we attended, though we didn’t have any dolls at home. She got one, and she loved it, and I felt good about finding her something that was really her thing. 

Then I had a son. And I didn’t notice my son loving babies before he turned one. I noticed him loving fire engines and diggers. Just as you’d expect him to. Girls love dolls and boys love trucks, right? 

Were my children actually wired differently, and was it coming out in their play, I wondered? Honestly, I was surprised to see it fit so neatly – I’m a crusader against gender stereotypes for crying out loud. 

So, I did some reading. In her book Inferior, Angela Saini explores the (often rather dubious) science of sex differences, and how the inherent sexism of many studies has often skewed scientific research. The book debunks much of what we think we know about the differences between male and female humans. One thing did seem to be borne out by research however, and that was this difference in toy preference that I had noticed:  

‘[Professor Melissa Hines] and others found in study after study that boys on average do prefer to play with trucks and cars, while girls on average prefer to play with dolls.  

 

‘Between twelve and twenty-four months… girls were looking longer at the doll than at the car and the boys were looking for longer at the car than the doll,  

but at twelve months both boys and girls spent longer looking at the doll than the car.’ 

Professor Hines measured that the difference in toy preference is about the same as the difference between the average height in men and women. An obvious and recognisable, statistically significant difference that chimes with what many of us notice in our children’s play. Maybe my children were wired differently – wired to prefer one type of toy over another. 

Except lots of us also know the kids who don’t. The girls who have no interest in dolls or small world play (I was one of them), the boys who have a bed full of cuddlies. The boys who happily push their toy pram around and the girls who can build a mean train track. As he’s grown, I’ve actually found my son also loves babies, both real and pretend. Maybe more than my daughter to be honest. He once had a meltdown in the street when I failed to lift him up to peep at a friend’s newborn.  

In fact, Hines only finds a difference in preference after the age of one. Before that, all children prefer looking at the doll. Under 12 months, the doll is the preferred toy. So why was I so keen to notice my daughter’s preference for dolls that I picked up on it before she was one, while it took till my son was nearly three for me to realise he liked them?  

I’d heard about the idea of confirmation bias in as far as it applied to political posts you read on social media – basically, you are more likely to believe articles or social media posts that chime with what you already think. And you’re less likely to believe something that disagrees with your already-existing opinions. But it’s not just online that we are biased – we tend to notice and give more weight to experiences as well as information that confirms something we already believe. 

So, had I noticed a real difference between my children? Or was I just giving more weight to the things that confirmed my own deep-down biases about what girls and boys like playing with? I honestly don’t know.  I’m not the only one who doesn’t know. As Saini points out a few pages later: 

If toy preferences don’t emerge until after one year, and other differences reveal themselves even later,  [Anne] Fausto-Sterling asks, then what else could be happening up until the age of one? One line of research that hasn’t been fully explored, for example, is counting exactly how many toys babies are given in the first year of life, and what kind of toys they are. 

She goes on to recount research into parents playing with their babies – finding that tiny baby boys, too small to even sit unaided, for example, might be shown a football over and over and be given positive reinforcement for playing with it once they can reach out and grab it. Others show that mothers tend to play more physically and talk less to their sons than their daughters.  

Obviously, I’m horrified to find that these outmoded ideas about boys and girls might have been seeping out of me unconsciously. I think I’m busting the stereotypes, but I’m a product of them myself. As parents we are still fighting against our own ingrained prejudices. How much have my own biases already played a part in shaping my children? Even when I think I’m offering equality, I might well unconsciously be pushing them in one direction or another, reinforcing one thing over another. I think my kids choose their toys, or books or games, but I’ve started to think about how they don’t make those choices in a vacuum. 

Take one example. How many children’s TV shows or films show female characters fighting – physically or with weapons? There’s one of the Lego Ninjago Ninjas. Rey in in the newest Star Wars films. Perhaps there are more, but they aren’t all that easy to think of. If you see aggressive violence (for example, not fighting in self-defence) it overwhelmingly tends to be from the male characters. A 2018 Observer newspaper survey into gender in the 100 most popular children’s picture books, found that storybook villains were eight times more likely to be male than female. So should we be surprised that boys are observed to play more weapon or fighting games than girls? When they see it depicted over and over on screen and in books as a boys’ pursuit?  

How about the other side of that coin – the caregiving roles. How many people buy a baby doll for their first child when they are expecting their second? Chances are, if their first child is a girl they do, and if their first is a boy they don’t. Not everyone, of course, but as a generalisation, parents prepare a daughter for the advent of a new baby with something for them to care for ‘just like mummy’, in a way that they don’t with their sons. That picture book survey showed mothers present almost twice as often as fathers. So again, should we be surprised that boys who like playing with dolls and babies seem to be the exception rather than the rule? 

The truth is, no one yet knows whether there is any biological basis for the gendered differences we notice in the way our children play. (My instinct tells me there isn’t, but as we now know, I’m probably biased.) All we can say is we couldn’t possibly unpick all the societal influences being soaked up by their developing brains from any underlying biology. 

And these divisions imposed by adults, consciously or unconsciously, do matter. When adults decide which toys are for girls and which are for boys, often it is assigning a status to them. And if it’s a ‘girls toy’, chances are the status is low – we think a boy will be taking a step down to play with them. If a boy shows interest in a dolls’ house or a princess dress he is much more likely to be shamed, in a way that a girl playing with the construction toys or the knight outfit isn’t. Because being ‘girly’ is still forbidden for boys (and can also be less desirable for girls as they get older). What does this tell them all? That ‘things for girls’ aren’t as good, aren’t valued, aren’t aspirational. 

Until we start valuing all play we can’t fix the obvious inequalities we see in later life. If we subtly (or not so subtly)  give the idea that we think that some forms of play are inferior, and crucially, that they are only for one gender, all kids take on the idea that some activities and some genders are inferior. Play is a chance for children to try out roles, to mirror behaviours and to process learning. When we, or other adults, impose our own thoughts about who should do what, we narrow children’s possibilities – not just in the short term, but in the long term too. 

Boys (and girls) need to know that we value the skills of nurture, care and empathy, and that we support them to learn about the world through that lens, just as we support girls and boys to learn about it through the lens of physical activity, of trial and error and taking risks. Changing this means not only supporting girls to join in traditionally male-dominated activities, but also making sure that the boys are also fully encouraged and supported to take part in traditionally female activities. We can’t have one without the other.  

When we change our societal expectations, humans adapt and outcomes change. If boys (and girls) know that the adults around them value rather than denigrate what are known as ‘feminine’ qualities, regardless of whether there is any biological background noise in their brain, they will learn to excel at them. When we begin to expect exactly the same of our children regardless of their gender (and stop measuring their differences) inequalities must begin to reduce. And if we adults can keep our ingrained, unconscious prejudices to ourselves, they’ll probably work this out and explain it all to us.  

Kirstie Beaven is founder and editor of Sonshine Magazine 

This article appeared in Issue 14: Play & Creativity 

Find out more at www.sonshinemagazine.com and on Instagram @sonshinemagazine 

PULL QUOTES 

“Why was I so keen to notice my daughter’s preference for dolls that I picked up on it before she was one, while it took till my son was nearly three for me to realise he liked them?” 

“Boys (and girls) need to know that we value the skills of nurture, care and empathy, and that we support them to learn about the world through that lens, just as we support girls and boys to learn about it through the lens of physical activity, of trial and error and taking risks.” 

“Being ‘girly’ is still forbidden for boys (and can also be less desirable for girls as they get older). What does this tell them? That ‘girly things’ aren’t as good, aren’t valued, aren’t aspirational.”