Gender Socialization: Toys

Gender Socialization: Toys
Gender roles are a very important aspect of our culture and individuals are expected to act according to these roles, if not you are either seen as less masculine or feminine. These gender roles are taught a young age by teaching boys and girls to act and feel a certain way. We are often not aware of the many ways we are being socialized to certain gender roles. I visited a Walmart toy section to observe the different types of toys, their packaging, and colors to see the differences between the toys for boys and girls. In doing this I saw how much toys are used to socialize children to those certain gender roles.
The toys for the young children like toddlers are not very different from each other. Many of the toys can be for both girls and boys. They usual more colors such as blue, green, purple, and pink together. The packages also picture both boys and girls playing with the toy indicating that it is acceptable for both genders to play with this toy. Although there are a few toys for this age group that do appear to suggest they are for a specific gender. An …show more content…
The boy toys are action figures, guns, robots, military and construction vehicles, space ships, and sports. These toys seem to promote violence and have to do with fighting and anger, which is emotions that are okay for boys to show oppose to crying for example. The boys have more toys where they have to construct and build, like Legos. This is because men are supposed to be builders and providers opposed to women. The boys do not have any customs to role play like the girls, although the girls mostly on have dresses and tiaras so dress in. In the older age groups there were toys that were for both boys in girls, same function and toy. They separated them for boys and girls by decorating them differently even though they were still the same toy, such as: bikes, power wheels, roller skates, and