NYT: toys and gender makes America look more like 1952, not 2012

Parent Cafe
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I’d consider SimCity fairly gender neutral from what I know if it (just cursory) but realistically, give a boy a choice between SimCity and Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto and they’ll likely pick the latter two over 90% of the time.</p>

<p>I wouldn’t have gone for an easy bake oven - I would have always rather be running around playing war or cowboys/Indians or something with a lot more action (pre video games). It wouldn’t have mattered if the oven was painted blue or was stainless - playing cook wasn’t something appealing to me. I also never played with dolls including GI Joe, Batman, whatever - no appeal.</p>

<p>Again though - stores sell what people will buy. They lay out the store in the way most conducive to selling. Toy manufacturers produce toys they think will sell. All of that is based on market research and actual success/failure. It’s the consumer who ultimately decides what’s available including aspects such as store layout.</p>

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<p>Dolls dont have to be frilly.
I used this book to make dolls, it looks like it is out of print but you can find free instructions online.
[Amazon.com:</a> The Doll Book: Soft Dolls and Creative Free Play (9780943914015): Karin Neushutz: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/The-Doll-Book-Dolls-Creative/dp/0943914019]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/The-Doll-Book-Dolls-Creative/dp/0943914019)
I dont know who would " shame" children into choosing another style or color of toy or activity than they wanted to play with. If someone tried if I was in earshot, that would be the last time.</p>

<p>When my oldest was in preschool, one of the boys wore clips in his hair and a flowered pajama top everyday. One of youngest Ds friends loved dress up, and he took his " bag of things" ( which was a large clasp purse) every where ( it held Godzilla, a measuring tape, books, etc) He is now a US Marine.</p>

<p>My kids liked dress up & playing with balls, building things and painting pictures, just like other kids in the neighborhood- both boys & girls.
My H built them a toy kitchen out of leftover red formica & plywood. ( before that they used to “cook” in the cupboard).
If you provide them with different materials & tools to try, you can help them expand and explore their interests.
Grandma wasnt far off when she said let them play with pots & pans.
Children enjoy using tools they see their parents use.
They can be entertained all day with some scraps of wood & hammer and nails.
Let them help to make rolls for dinner including measuring the ingredients.</p>

<p>Play is your child’s work. It should be taken more seriously than to buy what ever you see on television. We actually didn’t have a television for some of their childhood, it died & we didnt replace it until Hs parents were horrified we were so " destitute" we didnt have a tv, so they gave us one of theirs. ( however - when H was unemployed for over a year, it never occurred to them that a bag or two of groceries might have been nice)
:rolleyes: We haven’t had cable since we’ve had kids. We have a television now, but H only turns it on to watch football.
( I do watch shows on my ipad with Hulu or Netflix)</p>

<p>Its unfortunate that there are adults raising children can’t think creatively enough to imagine their childs life without a television or computer screen in their bedroom, but I can’t say that Ive met any.</p>

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<p>Happens a lot in Asian society more than you know :(</p>

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<p>Computer and TV: none of our family members has had the computer in the bedroom. Regarding TV, the only TV we have is in the family room. Since we have not had cable during most years our child was growing up, TV was mostly used as a video game screen than anything else. We were quite “destitute” in this area. But we purchased too many expensive toys, some of which we should have never purchased in the first place like that large set of BRIO train set (which was not appreciated by DS back then.) And we have spent tons of money on his music education. He has had 3 violins and the very last "competition level " one cost about $5000 ten years ago! (And he is playing anything except violin now :()</p>

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<p>I do admit I am mostly familiar with the mostly liberal, mostly laid back culture in the northwest, although both my sister & brother are conservative republicans, who are more traditional than I am.</p>

<p>My brother has stereotypical rigid thinking about gender, which is perhaps the reason why he has been divorced twice, and his children were mostly raised by their mothers.</p>

<p>But even though my sister follows her patriarchal religion closely, the huge tubs of lego & K-nexs, were used by both her three boys & two girls. Her oldest daughter is now a program manager in the Kinect division @ Microsoft. ( & now that I think of it- the building toys were by far the dominant toys in her house, always - her daughters btw, are the oldest kids)</p>

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<p>boys play with dolls all the time… they are just called action figures instead.</p>

<p>but really… they are the same thing.</p>

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<p>emeraldkity4 - I read, but I am still not convinced. I think there’s a lot more going on with the way people interact with kids that goes beyond trying to keep gender neutral things in the house. That’s not to say that there might not just be innate preferences. It’s really hard to isolate what is coming from culture and what is innate to a person. I will say that while I played with my brothers’ G.I. Joes, I would do certain things that they wouldn’t, like using boxes and Lincoln logs to build them houses, whereas my brothers would generally set up battlefields. </p>

<p>Then there is that time I had a whole van packed with clothed Barbies and returned to find them naked… But I’m not sure what that has to do with gender stereotyped toys. :)</p>

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<p>Does it really matter what % is learned & what is genetic?
You would be surprised how much is with them when children are born & how much stays with them, at least I was.
My youngest, is strong willed and stubborn.
I knew this even before she was born, when I had to go to the hospital to have her turned when she was breech.
Twice.
She turned back each time, but then she went " the right way" when labor started.</p>

<p>There is more variation between males, and between females, than there is between females & males.
But still if you took the rowdiest, most " tomboyish" girl, in most cases, they would not be as " boyish" as the average boy. As well as the reverse.
And nothing wrong with that.</p>

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<p>mcat2, Playmobil is a selection of [~3 inches tall] toy people, cars, etc. in scenes such as an airport, pirate ship, farm, and police station. Playmobil figures are very high quality and are designed and made in Germany. </p>

<p>On November 28th, the WSJ published the article In Sweden, Playtime Goes Gender-Neutral For Holidays about how Toys “R” Us’s Swedish Licensee was debuting a gender neutral holiday toy catalog. It then compares the catalog to its Danish counterpart which retains the traditional gender roles. The catalog depicts both girls and boys playing with toy weapons on page, cooking at a play kitchen in another, and a boy blow drying a girl’s hair.</p>

<p>I’m a big proponent of buying toys that a child enjoys playing with, regardless if they were originally designed for that gender or not. If a girl wants to play with GI Joes or a boy wants to play with Barbie dolls or vice versa, good for them.</p>

<p>It also appears to me that more people have problems with boys playing with stereotypically feminine toys than with girls playing with masculine toys. This is especially odd considering that many of the top celebrities/talents in cooking, hairdressing, and fashion are male. Granted, many of the men in the latter two industries are gay or bisexual, but there is no reason why a heterosexual male could not do very well in those industries. </p>

<p>I’m proud to be a guy that cooks, goes discount grocery shopping, and buys his own clothes. Many guys I know don’t know how to do any of these things. To use a 21+ reference, sure some people might think it’s odd that I try to make [stereotypically feminine] fruity drinks out of [stereotypically masculine] whisky and bourbon, but why not combine things that I actually prefer instead of aspiring to be some masculine ideal that I don’t want to be?</p>

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<p>This has been debated ad infinitum, it is part of the wars over nature versus nurture, where there were those saying everything was a cultural construct, that nothing was inate, while there were those saying that especially with gender roles and such, it was totally hardcoded. </p>

<p>I think most people think it is a combination of both and I agree it is. However, I also think that what boys and girls in general are attracted to are influenced more often then we think innately. I think, for example, that girls do tend to be more attracted to dolls then let’s say toy cars or trucks, and that when a little girl plays with a car, they tend to play with them differently then boys do. It doesn’t mean there aren’t boys who like dolls, or girls who like trucks, I a just saying I think there are differences on the whole in what they choose and how they play with them.</p>

<p>Personally, I think what parents should do is give the kids a lot of choices and let them gravitate to what they like, and don’t worry about it. When we gave our son gifts growing up, it ranged from toys like trucks and cars, but he had stuffed animals (that he had a whole world with, with elected officials, organized events, etc), he had a toy kitchen he liked a lot, we tried him on a lot of things. If parents buy their daughter legos and she likes them in pastel colors better, then buy them that way, if she doesn’t care, but legos that are all colors. </p>

<p>I have heard all the arguments, that even where parents try to be gender neutral they are giving off subtle hints and so forth, but I don’t buy it, I have observed enough kids, kids raised by parents really concerned about gender stereotyping, who for example stayed away from the pink and blue thing, and to their astonishment they found that the girls and boys still tended to head that way, despite what they tried to do. One couple I know of is a family where there are two moms, both of whom are pretty kind of gender neutral people (neither masculine/butch nor particularly femme), and one of their daughters is the princess type girly girl, the other one is more tomboyish, and their son loves gi joes and trucks, even though he had the option of playing with a wide range of toys, as did his sisters, they never made the distinction between boy and girl toys, they kind of bought them ‘for the family’ so to speak, and it still played out like that.</p>

<p>And sometimes it fails even when you try…in the 1950’s Lionel came out with what they called the ‘girl’s train set’ , it was all in pink, I kid you not…and didn’t go over well, pink or not, trains tended not to be something girls gravitated towards.</p>