The problem with separate toys for girls and boys

What started our obsession with assigning gender to playthings, and how can parents combat it?

Traditionally gender-neutral toys like building blocks now come in “boy” and “girl” versions.

LEGO’s Friends line has been criticized for featuring hair salons and shopping malls.

GREG MABLY

“Boys and girls stop playing together at a much younger age than was developmentally typical until this recent
gender segmentation,” says psychologist Lori Day.

By Rebecca Hains FEBRUARY 27, 2015

Girls’ toys. Boys’ toys. To many parents, the ubiquity of separate color-coded shopping aisles feels natural,
reflecting a belief in innate gender differences and discrete interests. Recently, however, campaigns such as Let
Toys Be Toys and No Gender December have made international headlines for championing desegregated toy
aisles, recommending reorganization by theme or interest instead. Rather than believing dolls and crafts are for
girls while trucks and science kits are for boys, “we think all toys are for all children,” explains Let Toys Be Toys
campaigner Jo Jowers, who lives in England.

President Obama waded into the matter in December, when at a Toys for Tots event he suggested a T-ball set was
an ideal gift for girls. “I’m just trying to break down these gender stereotypes,” he said at the time.

“Children use toys to try on new roles, experiment, and explore interests,” explains Susan Linn, executive director
of the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School.
“Rigidly gendered toy marketing tells kids who they should be, how they should behave, and what they should be
interested in” — an unhealthily prescriptive situation.

Recent research demonstrates today’s toys are divided by gender at historically unprecedented levels. “There are
now far fewer non-gendered items available for children than in any prior era,” says Elizabeth Sweet, a
postdoctoral scholar at the University of California at Davis — even fewer than 50 years ago, when gender
discrimination was socially acceptable.

How can this be? The answer lies in significant media industry changes during the 1980s, when the Federal
Communications Commission’s television deregulation removed longstanding limitations on children’s advertising
and widespread consumer adoption of cable allowed media owners to target more narrowly segmented audiences
than ever before. As a result, marketers suddenly viewed children as a segmentable, highly lucrative demographic
after largely ignoring them for 50 years.

Traditionally gender-neutral toys like building blocks now come in “boy” and “girl” versions.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that two of today’s most successful companies — Disney, whose Princess brand is
the No. 2 licensed property in the United States and Canada, and LEGO, which recently surpassed Mattel as the
world’s largest toy maker — were early adopters of the trend to meticulously segment the child market by gender
in the late 1980s. The licensing success of Disney’s The Little Mermaid in 1989 prompted several additional
princess film releases in quick succession, positioning Disney as a formidable power in the girl market. Likewise, in
1988, LEGO debuted its “Zack the LEGO Maniac” campaign, squarely positioning itself as a boy brand. A year later,
LEGO began tailoring its minifigs’ historically gender-neutral faces to include lipstick and facial hair — clear gender
markers.

The ripple effects of these monumental 1980s-era marketing changes are evident today. Now, once classically
gender-neutral toys are produced in “boy” and “girl” versions: Radio Flyer wagons, Tinkertoys, Mega Bloks, Fisher-
Price stacking rings, and everything in between come in “pinkwashed’’ varieties, in hopes that families with
children of each sex will buy twice the toys. Meanwhile, Disney Princess’s record-breaking profits prompted a
proliferation of princess items from competitors, and Disney bought Marvel and Lucasfilm, the Star Wars creator,
to compete for the boy market. Similarly, LEGO competes for girls’ purchasing power not through inclusivity but by
offering separate, stereotypically girlish themes, like Disney Princess and LEGO Friends.

What does this mean for today’s families? Lori Day, an educational consultant and psychologist in Newburyport
and author of Her Next Chapter: How Mother-Daughter Book Clubs Can Help Girls Navigate Malicious Media, Risky
Relationships, Girl Gossip, and So Much More, argues that children’s play has been altered, with long-term
consequences. “Boys and girls stop playing together at a much younger age than was developmentally typical until
this recent gender segmentation,” she says. “The resulting rigidly stereotyped gender roles are unhealthy for both
males and females, who are actually more alike than different.” Sweet concurs: “This kind of marketing has
normalized the idea that boys and girls are fundamentally and markedly different from one another, and this very
idea lies at the core of many of our social processes of inequality.”

LEGO’s Friends line has been criticized for featuring hair salons and shopping malls.

Parents can push back against these problems, however, by raising critically aware children. Jennifer Shewmaker, a
psychology professor at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, and author of Sexualized Media Messages
and Our Children: Teaching Kids to Be Smart Critics and Consumers, suggests: “When you see stereotyped
advertisements, ask the child, ‘What do you think about the way that depicts girls and boys? Is that how the boys
and girls in your life act?’ ” Carolyn Danckaert, cofounder of Washington, D.C.-based empowerment resource site A
Mighty Girl, adds, “When parents explain that some people think only girls or only boys are good at something but
their family disagrees, children can recognize stereotypes for what they are.”

Not all parents share such concerns, of course. Jo Paoletti, an American studies professor at the University of
Maryland in College Park and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America, attributes
differing opinions to ongoing culture wars. “Adults who subscribe to more traditional, conservative gender roles
see children’s preferences for stereotypical clothing and toys as natural expressions of innate differences,” Paoletti
says. As such, Erin McNeill, founder and president of Watertown-based Media Literacy Now, advocates for
integrating media literacy into the K-12 curriculum. “Some parents won’t notice or be concerned about the
gendering of products. It’s important that all children have the opportunity to gain the critical thinking skills to
understand how and why gendered ads target them,” she says.

https://www.everydayfamily.com/gender-toys-does-it-really-matter/

Walk into any home with toddlers, and you will no doubt be able to tell whether the child is a boy or a girl by a
quick peek into the playroom. Trucks, trains, planes, and baseballs will scream boy; while a room full of pink and
frilly dolls and stuffed animals have little girl written all over it. Interestingly, toys have become as gender specific
as clothes, and many parents are uncomfortable when their little boy chooses a doll over a truck or their little girl
opts for cowboys over princesses. The truth is that it doesn't matter, and the reality of gender specific
programming is not something a toddler knows; it is something that is learned from the parents.

What your toddler knows is that he or she enjoys doing certain activities. These activities, whether sorting, role-
playing, or building – can be done equally well with toys that are pink or blue, and few children, unless prompted
by siblings or adults, see toys as gender specific. In today's world where gender specific roles of men and women
are becoming less of a factor in families, it is only natural that a little boy may choose to play with a doll. Likewise,
there is nothing wrong with a girl pushing a toy lawnmower through the yard emulating her own mother who does
the same.

Imaginative play is an integral part of childhood development. In a medical thesis by Dr. Carter Bruce, Cognitive
Aspects of Sex-Role Development, clinical research proved that gender specific toys played a significant role in
socialization that led to recognized principles of sex role development later in life. In other words, the mother or
father who gasps or becomes uncomfortable upon seeing their little boy cook or play with dolls is simply passing
on outdated schools of thought about what is acceptable for males and females. This same method of thinking
would serve to stymie a male child as an artist or musician and, likewise, thwart a female from becoming a
professional athlete. Although most parents do not gasp or gawk to intentionally divert their child's attention,
many parents harbor secret anxieties about their child being perceived as ‘normal', as well as fears of their child
becoming or being seen as a ‘homosexual.'

Let's face it, toddlers are just toddlers; they love to play with other children and often can spend lengthy amounts
of time playing with simple toys using their imagination as a guide. While a parent may feel that pointing a child in
a certain direction at a young age will heighten their interest, potential, or talent, chances are, if it isn't something
they are passionate about as they get older, it will fall by the wayside regardless.

WHY KIDS SHOULD PLAY WITH BABY DOLLS (YES, EVEN BOYS!)

This post has been written in collaboration with pediatric speech-language pathologist Katie Yeh
(PlayingWithWords365) and clinical psychologist Laura Hutchison (PlayDrMom). Thank you for your wonderful
contribution, ladies!

The baby doll is such a fantastic toy that we hope ALL children (Yes, even BOYS!) will have the opportunity to own
and play with during the toddler years. This is because baby dolls are packed with potential for teaching children
about themselves and the world around them. Let’s take a look!

Cognitive, Fine Motor, & Self-Help Skills

Baby dolls offer kids lots of opportunities for developing their cognitive, fine motor, and self-help skills. Kids often
find it easier to practice these skills on someone (or something) else before they can apply them to themselves.
And because boys often develop some of their fine motor and self-dressing skills later than girls, it’s important for
them to be exposed to more opportunities for practice. For example:

Dramatizing using a doll: Around two to three years old, children typically begin to act as if their doll can see and
interact with them. They may link several actions with the doll in sequence such as feeding the doll, bathing the
doll, and then putting the doll to bed. This sort of pretend play is a hugely important part of their cognitive
development.

Removing clothes: Though some clothing items are easier to remove than others (like those baby socks that never
stay on their little feet!), kids often benefit from trying it out on a doll before doing so for themselves. Taking
clothing off is usually mastered before putting it on and includes removing items such as hat, socks (pulling from
the top rather than pulling on the toes), shoes, shirt, using a pincer grasp to unzip, pulling down pants, and
unbuttoning large buttons.

Putting on clothes: Getting clothes on can be tough and is typically MUCH easier when first practiced on a doll.
Some common clothing items kids can practice on dolls and themselves include placing a hat on their head, zipping
with some assistance, putting shoes on, pulling pants up, putting on a shirt, and buttoning large buttons.

Using both hands in midline: This skill is expected to emerge around a year and a half and tends to coincide with
the development of skills such as zipping/unzipping or holding the doll while pretending to feed it.

Feeding: As children’s pretend play skills develop, so do their self-feeding skills! Playing with a baby doll gives them
the opportunity to practice appropriately holding and using feeding items such as spoons, bottles, cups, forks,
bowls, etc.

Bathing: Kids can practice giving their doll a bath (with pretend water if the doll is not allowed to get wet)! This is
great for practicing sequencing skills (first fill up the tub, then put on shampoo, then rinse hair, etc.). I have also
used dolls in therapy to help kids move past their fear of bathing by having them help me give the doll a pretend
bath using all the necessary supplies (so they get used to the sensory experience from the water, shampoo, etc.
and can have more control over the experience). We talk about the supplies needed and the steps taken during
bath time, and then they can narrate the steps and comfort the doll during “bath time” while playing out a simple
or elaborate pretend narrative. (A plastic Potato Head also works great for this experience.) Parents have been so
proud when their child eventually agrees to get in the bath after practicing with the doll for weeks on end!
Grooming & Hygiene: Dolls provide the perfect opportunity for practicing grooming and hygiene skills such as
brushing hair, brushing teeth, and washing hands.

Potty training: While I don’t have a lot of experience on this front (yet!), a child with an active imagination can
really benefit from using a doll to help with potty training. While skills such as indicating discomfort over soiled
pants and sitting on a potty chair with assistance are skills a child must develop in him or herself, they can be
played out on the doll either by the caregiver or the child him/herself. For example: “Uh oh! Baby has a wet diaper!
He feels yucky”, or “Okay, Baby, time to sit on the potty!”

Speech-Language Skills

The baby doll is a toy that can really help open up and expand a child’s pretend play. Children learn a lot of
language through their play and play offers them opportunities to use and practice their speech and language
skills. Let’s look at just some of the language concepts that a baby doll can help teach and support:

Body Parts: Dolls are FANTASTIC for teaching various body parts: eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hands, fingers, tummy,
feet, toes, knees, elbows, etc. Yes, you can teach these without a baby doll but providing another opportunity to
practice labeling this vocabulary helps to generalize the vocabulary to other people. It helps to teach children that
“nose” not only refers to the thing on their own face but to all faces.

Clothing Labels: Using the doll and its clothes, you can teach the names of clothing items like shirts, pants, shoes,
socks, jammies, etc. Putting on and taking off the clothes also works on fine motor skills!

Basic Concepts: Use baby with other baby toys (bed, blankets) to teach some basic concepts like: prepositions
(baby in the bed, baby under the blanket), colors, and size concepts (using different sized dolls).

Verbs/Feelings: Use the baby with some other baby toys (bed, bottle, clothes) to teach verbs/feelings/etc. like: eat,
drink, sleep, sit, stand, hungry, sleepy, thirsty, and more. For example: “Is the baby hungry? We should give him
something to eat!”

Answering “wh” questions: You can ask your child an array of questions to work on his understanding of these
words while he plays. “Where is baby?” “Where is baby’s nose/fingers/belly button?” “What does the baby want
to eat?” “Why is the baby crying?”

Social/pragmatic skills: Baby dolls can be a great tool to use to help teach appropriate social/pragmatic skills.
Children can take turns playing with different dolls, and they can practice using language to ask questions about
the dolls and what they are doing.

Social-Emotional Skills

Children use play to understand their world. Doll play helps children:

practice nurturing and caring (socio-emotional)

re-enact interactions with their own caregivers, family, and friends (cognitive reframing)

prepare for a sibling (rehearsal)

Regardless of a child’s gender, these skills are all valuable life lessons. In carrying, holding, feeding, and rocking a
baby doll, children are practicing being loving to others. They may be modeling how they remember being taken
care of as a baby, or how they see adults in their world caring for children. Just as children copy parents talking on
the phone, working in the kitchen, vacuuming, etc., doll play is no different. It is children’s way to understand and
begin to make the world their own by practicing these everyday events. Doll play is also a way for children to re-
enact things that have happened in their lives. Doing so allows them to increase their understanding of the events.
They can also take on the opposite role, which allows them to see things from another’s perspective (SUCH an
important skill to acquire!). Many times children will enjoy taking on the adult role in order for them to feel a sense
of control and power. This makes complete sense because children have very little control over their world (for
some necessary and good reasons). Giving a child the chance to have some power and control in play allows them
to give it a try in a safe way. Playing with baby dolls is also a wonderful way for young children to prepare for the
birth of a sibling. Parents can model ways to appropriately touch and care for an infant which can give the sib-to-
be taste of what they can expect. Also, once the baby arrives, the new big-sib can care for their own baby doll right
alongside mom and dad. This can be particularly helpful since it is quite normal (for obvious reasons) for the older
sibling to not get as much attention once the baby arrives. Being able to have their own activity – but still feel
connected to the parent(s) and family – can help a child ease into having an additional member in the family. Some
children will prefer to play out these same scenarios with other stuffed toys or miniatures because they feel better
connected to them or they need the play to be more removed (less real to the actual situation) than playing with
baby dolls. I’m mentioning this because I don’t want parents/caregivers to think that just because a child doesn’t
play with baby dolls they can’t learn and practice these skills. But I do believe that baby dolls offer children
something unique that other toys just can’t do.

“I didn’t encourage my daughter to play with Barbie dolls and dress up in flouncy fairy costumes, but she just
gravitated toward them.”

When confronted with the idea that gendered marketing and stereotypes have a substantial impact on children’s
play, many parents make claims such as this that suggest that girls have an innate predisposition to acquire pink,
glittery toys.

Not only do many parents deny that gender stereotypes shape what kinds of toys children feel allowed to play
with, but so too does our Prime Minister. On hearing of the No Gender December campaign, which encourages
people to consider what kinds of toys they are buying in the lead-up to Christmas, Tony Abbott dismissed it as
“political correctness”. We must, he argued, “let boys be boys, let girls be girls”.

No Gender December, and similar campaigns such as Let Toys Be Toys, nevertheless suggest that the gender
stereotyping of toys restricts children’s creativity and development. They also argue that the separation of toys for
girls and boys contributes to gender inequality by marking off certain pursuits, careers, and tasks as unsuitable for
one gender or the other.

lil'_wiz

Letting children “be” boys or girls implies that there is a natural set of likes and dislikes for each gender that are
unaffected by the culture in which we live. Behind this view is the sense that toy preferences are rooted in biology,
such that only girls are drawn toward baby dolls because they are driven to nurture, while boys will be attracted
toward active toys such as guns.

There are several problems with this viewpoint. First, to take one type of toy as an example, very young boys seem
equally attracted to dolls. Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender refers to a study that measures young children’s
reactions to dolls, finding that boys only begin to reject dolls around the age at which they can be taught that dolls
are intended only for girls.

Matt Carman

If we were able to create an environment in which limiting cultural views about gender were not presented to
children through the media, advertising, or enforced by their peers or parents, then in all likelihood many boys
would continue to show an interest in dolls beyond infancy, as some still do regardless of these factors. That would
truly be letting “boys be boys”.

Indeed, such an attempt to counter the effects of gender segregation in toy stores is already in progress in Sweden.
In 2012, Top Toy, the franchise holder for Toys R Us in Sweden, produced a catalogue with a girl shown deftly
working a Nerf gun, a small boy cradling a baby doll, and both a boy and girl playing with a doll’s house.
International media reports about the catalogue reacted along predictable lines, suggesting that gendered
separation of toys mirrored children’s natural preferences and that the concept of gender neutrality was bizarre
and artificial.

Nevertheless, Toys R Us Sweden has only continued to move towards gender neutrality in its stores, with the
physical layout being transformed such that typically masculine and feminine toys are intermingled throughout the
aisles.

Second, these supposedly “natural” preferences for particular kinds of toys or colours shift according to what our
culture believes appropriate for children and what the toy industry finds profitable.

We know, for example, that the “pinkification” of girls’ toys is a relatively recent phenomenon, in part motivated
by a desire to improve sales by rendering the most innocuous of toys unusable by siblings of different sexes.

Similarly, where Lego was once imagined as a relatively unisex toy that encouraged creativity and developed fine
motor skills, in recent years a separate line intended for girls, which involves less freedom to construct, has
become a bestseller.

Andrew Becraft

We place great strength in the idea that the kinds of toys that children play with helps to determine the kind of
adults they will become, especially in terms of how appropriately masculine or feminine they will be. Even children
know enough to act as “gender police” if a boy or girl attempts to play with a toy outside the accepted items for his
or her gender.

The No Gender December campaign notes that:

It’s 2014 – women mow lawns and men push prams but while we’ve moved on, many toy companies haven’t.

Yet some of the main markers of gender inequality refuse to budge in countries including Australia. The majority of
housework and childcare is still performed by women, even as more women are in paid employment than ever
before. High-paying industries and senior positions within most fields remain dominated by male employees, while
feminised occupations, involving caring or working with children, remain low paying.

The segregation of toy aisles is a reflection of a society in which gender inequality is normalised and children are
taught to understand that the disparity between male and female social roles is inescapably natural.

While making it easier for girls who want to romp adventurously to do so and for boys who want to show an
interest in clothing to play with Barbie won’t single-handedly correct gender inequality, it will help to minimise the
internalising of gendered limitations during childhood. It also won’t stop girls being girls or boys being boys.

Toy Companies Exploit Gender Stereotypes

Toy companies want to make a profit. Sadly, the truth is that it is much more profitable for toy companies to
create separate markets for boys and for girls, each requiring their own, separate products, rather than making
products that appeal to boys and girls both.

By reinforcing the idea of gendered colours, personality traits, clothes, and even careers, toy companies create a
pressure for children to 'fit in' with their genders, for fear of ridicule and social isolation if they do not. Suddenly,
and unsurprisingly, children start to place an intense interest in defining and separating genders, and in conforming
to these expectations.
Thus we see more and more extreme versions of masculine and feminine children’s toys being created and being
accepted by children, who certainly don't have the power to properly consider these social pressures and/or resist
them. We get those separate pink and blue isles in toy stores, separate clothing designs and different shoes, and
suddenly even our doona covers become something that needs to be gendered.

Scientific Studies on Children's Toys:

A recent study in 2005 by Blakemore & Centers involving using a number of undergraduates to provide ratings for
certain children’s toys supports many of these findings.

Undergraduates rated toys as to how ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ they were. They then rated each toy for a number
of other characteristics. Blakemore & Centers found that more toys previously thought of as being ‘masculine’
were now rated closer towards neutral (like blocks and legos), however they conclude that toys for the most part
are usually able to be classed as being associated with one gender or the other.

They found:

Feminine toys were more likely to be associated with encouraging appearance and attractiveness than masculine
toys, and were also rated as being more visually attractive.

The more feminine a toy was rated, the higher it was also rated in encouraging nurturance and domestic skills.

Masculine toys were rated as more aggressive, competitive, violent, sustaining of attention, exciting, fun,
dangerous & risky, and in need of adult supervision, than feminine toys. The toys themselves were also more likely
to move on their own than girls’ toys.

Neutral and masculine toys tended to be more responsive to the child’s input, and were more likely to encourage
the development of spatial, scientific and intellectual skills, than feminine toys.

It is important to note that these ratings were provided by undergraduate students, and does not necessarily
reflect children’s actual behaviour (Click here to read the full study).

Unfortunately, and surprisingly, little study has been done on children themselves, to determine to what extent
toys can influence their behaviour and cognitive development. Most research on the effects of toys investigates
the contribution of video games in promoting violence, and the effects of toys like guns and action figures that can
lead to an increase in aggressive play (Goldstein (1995), Hellendoorn & Harinck (1997), Watson & Peng (1992)).
However it has also been shown that video games can actually improve cognitive and spatial skills ((De Lisi &
Wolford (2002), Green and Bavelier (2003), Greenfield, deWinstanley, Kilpatrick and Kaye (1996)).