The Science behind Choosing Toys

Wondered why girls are drawn to baby dolls while boys are fascinated by guns, balls and toy cars as soon as they crawl?

Generally in our society, we have indoctrinated with a cultural and societal dogma that girls prefer kitchen toys or pink dolls and, boys picking up wheeled trucks, Legos, or balls, which is more kind of a traditional inheritance for gender classification that evolved alongside the process of evolution.

However, with an increasing number of scientific evidence obtained from various empirical studies, it has revealed that the children are born with gender-specific toys, meaning that the preference of the toys by both male and female is more likely influenced by biological (hormones or genes) reasons.   

The experiments conducted by some notable social scientists and psychologists involving the primates - primarily the rhesus and vervet monkeys (Alexander & Hines, 2002) – have found that the preference of the toys is more likely influenced by hormonal and genetic reasons. The ingenious study which got published in Evolution and Human Behavior stunned the scientific world by its findings as male monkeys preferred masculine toys while female monkeys chose feminine toys among those masculine, feminine and neutral toys.    

Later a study by Brenda and Sara (2010) has also reported to the British Psychological Association a similar finding that ‘the infants showed a strong preference for the toys which were stereotypically representative of their gender’. Of the infants (9-14 months) who were involved in the study, they found that the girls spent significantly longer playing with the dolls while the boys were gravitated towards playing car and balls. ‘The males through evolution have been adapted to prefer moving objects, probably through hunting instincts, while girls prefer warmer colours such as pink, the colour of a newborn baby’ the paper reported.   

  

Such studies have set up a momentum of a historic breakthrough in establishing the relation of toys based on gender.  

In the field of Health and Physical Education, such biological bias for their choices in children is also largely associated with so-called the Anticipatory Theory.

From a very young age, the girls are interested in cuddling the baby dolls, often displaying the representative role of a mother and her nurturing fondness. The boys, on the other hand, are inclined towards wearing a military uniform and playing with gun toys, lifting the weights – and these days, those typical WWE stunts or NyaGoe actions – or jumping over a hill, mostly involving a muscular capacity. Basically in almost all ways, ‘the boys form hierarchies, wrestling, play-fighting and electing leaders, which are hardwired male brain’ (Allan & Pease, 2010).  

Such acts, in reality, depict how the child anticipates its future based on its gender. As parents, it is vital to understand their form of play with the kind of toys they interact with, as it not only derives them fun and amusement but also hints at the kind of future they would take interest in later in life.

“Men are self-confident because they grow up identifying with super-heroes. Women have bad self-images because they grow identifying with Barbie”- Rita Rudner