Category Errors

While Megastores Fuss About the Toy Aisles, Kids Remain Confused

A bill recently introduced into the California legislature would prohibit large department stores from dividing toys and some other childcare items into "boys" and "girls" sections.¹

California is hardly the first state to consider such a measure. Back in 2015, Target infamously "de-gendered" its toy section, so that confused and befuddled parents can wander between the doll aisle and the Hot Wheels aisle, wondering where the politically correct place would be to find Play-Doh and the newly rebranded "Potato Head" (the "Mr." was recently dropped as too polarizing). As a 2015 New York Times piece put it when analyzing Target's move, "a stroll through the toy section at a Target or a Toys 'R' Us is still a gender-specific experience"—you'll find a pink Barbie aisle next to some glittered My Little Pony toys, in between the aisles of robot dinosaurs and Nerf guns.²

The larger toy manufacturers have also tried to break out of some of the old categories. Mattel recently announced its release of fifteen new Ken dolls meant to represent a wider swath of American male-dom, including "man-bun" Ken and what many have dubbed "Dad-bod" Ken.³ Lego has introduced more girl-specific building sets.

Real Confusion

These efforts all point to some very real cultural confusion over how parents should raise their children to handle their own biological sex. Of course, for the modern leftist, "sex" is irrelevant. Boys don't really prefer construction toys, and girls don't really prefer dolls. Those are simply the gendered toy stereotypes that backward parents have been perpetuating for centuries. And yet, the evidence does point to some seemingly natural preferences in children, even from infancy.

One study found that 12-month-old baby boys tended to gaze longer at images of moving cars, while 12-month-old baby girls looked longer at moving faces. Other research found that 3–5-year-old boys were more likely to request typically male toys, while girls didn't show a similar gendered preference until they were 5 years old. Studies of primates (who would theoretically be free of cultural influences on toy preferences) found that male monkeys were more likely to pick up toy cars, while female monkeys were more likely to pick up dolls.⁴

Some toy preferences may, then, be innate. Yet, as noted in the New York Times piece, a stroll through most toy sections will show some wildly "gendered" toys—but these are geared toward the most superficial aspects of gender, such as fighting (for boys) or appearance (for girls). Judith Elaine Blakemore of Indiana University claims to have found that such "strongly masculine" or "strongly feminine" toys tend to be the least effective at improving children's cognitive, artistic, physical, or other skills.⁵

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Trawick-Smith, professor of Early Childhood Education at Eastern Connecticut State University, has found in his research that the best toys for children's development tend to be rather basic ones.⁶ Think hardwood blocks, wooden cars and road signs, and simple construction toys. Such toys, he says, "are relatively open-ended, so children can use them in multiple ways."

In other words, the best toys for kids are the ones that encourage them to use their imaginations. And yes, boys may in fact innately prefer hammers and trucks, while girls may innately prefer dolls and toy kitchens. As Anthony Esolen writes in Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, "Give [children] a room full of hammers, boards, nails, and saws, and the girls will make something nice to go on a wall, and the boys will build a battering ram to knock down the wall."

Our culture has been trying for decades to do away with such natural differences, but in a rather confused way. We give our girls hot-pink purses and plastic credit cards, then tell them that womanhood means whatever they want it to mean, but stay-at-home mothers are societal parasites. We let boys play single-shooter videogames and give them muscled-up superhero toys with machine guns, yet tell them to stifle their natural sense of justice and refrain from punching the bully in the face. Meanwhile, we keep rearranging the toy aisle, praise Mattel for more "representative" Barbie dolls, and now, hand out synthetic hormones by the bucketload to kids who don't know if they're boys, girls, or something else entirely.

What Boys & Girls Need

But biological sex is too strong a force to smash, though it can certainly be beaten down. Even decades after the sexual revolution, professional women still prefer part-time or flexible working hours, particularly during their childbearing years.⁷ But men, penalized for being aggressive, assertive, or trying to be the household breadwinner, have started to give up. The result? A recent analysis from the Journal of Marriage and Family shows that there has in fact been a decline in the number of "marriageable" men—men with career prospects, incomes, or educational levels that meet or exceed women's.⁸

Girls and boys need to be allowed the confidence of knowing their biological sex, and the freedom to figure out their own talents, abilities, and desires within that realm. They need more open-ended toys that foster imaginary play, and they need to be allowed their natural toy preferences, however those manifest themselves. What they don't need are junky gender-stereotyped toys telling them that male means fighting, female means shopping, and "gender-neutral" means man-bun Ken.

Notes
1. Alex Wigglesworth, "California bill would ban boys' and girls' toy sections in big department stores," Los Angeles Times (March 7, 2021): latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-07/california-bill-would-ban-boys-and-girls-toy-sections-in-big-department-stores.
2. Hiroko Tabuchi, "Sweeping Away Gender Specific Toys and Labels," New York Times (Oct. 27, 2015): nytimes.com/2015/10/28/business/sweeping-away-gender-specific-toys-and-labels.html.
3. Rebecca Wilkin, "Mattel reveals dad bod and man-bun Ken dolls," New York Post (June 20, 2017): https://nypost.com/2017/06/20/mattel-reveals-dad-bod-and-man-bun-ken-dolls.
4. Studies cited in Gwen Dewar, "Girl toys, boy toys, and parenting: The science of toy preferences in children" (last modified November 2012): parentingscience.com/girl-toys-and-parenting.html#:~:text=And%20there%20is%20another%20interesting,typical%20toys%2C%20girls%20did%20not.
5. Judith Elaine Blakemore, "What the Research Says: Gender-Typed Toys," National Association for the Education of Young Children (accessed March 24, 2021): naeyc.org/resources/topics/play/gender-typed-toys.
6. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith, in "What the Research Says: Impact of Specific Toys on Play," National Association for the Education of Young Children (accessed March 24, 2021): naeyc.org/resources/topics/play/specific-toys-play.
7. Charlotte Hays, "What (Professional) Women Want: Two New Studies Show Disproportionate Percentage Prefer Part-Time Work," Independent Women's Forum (Sept. 18, 2019): iwf.org/2019/09/18/what-professional-women-want-two-new-studies-show-disproportionate-percentage-prefer-part-time-work.
8. Daniel T. Lichter, Joseph P. Price, and Jeffery M. Swigert, "Mismatches in the Marriage Market," Journal of Marriage and Family (April 2020): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12603.