Gender-Typed Play In Children

If children’s toys were marketed based on racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups, a major backlash would occur; however, companies have produced and marketed gender-differentiated toys to the masses for decades if not centuries. In the midst of the modern push toward gender equality, aisles are still separated by pink and blue, aggression and domesticity, heroes and princesses, and so forth. Finding a toy or activity for children not unambiguously targeted towards male or female children has grown increasingly difficult, and this trend poses a potential threat toward the gender equality so desired by the public today. In studies conducted to assess the impact of these gender-stereotyped toys and marketing, researchers and authors are finding …show more content…
The significant majority of male and female subjects reported that their fathers, mothers, babysitters, siblings, and peers would consider their gender-typed play with the toy associated with their own gender as “good” or that it did not necessarily matter, with very few subjects reporting that gender-typed play would be considered “bad.” With regards to the cross-gender-typed play observed, male subjects specifically reported that their fathers would consider cross-gender-typed play “bad” more often than could have been due to mere chance. Consequently, the authors suggested a generalization to preschool-aged males that their discernments of their fathers’ social expectations of cross-gender-typed play might be associated with their choice of toys in a free-play setting, exemplified in the male subjects’ deliberate avoidance of the toy dishes and even frequent statements about their dislike of the toy itself (Raag and Rackliff, 1998). This study expands the results mentioned earlier and observes the effect of learned gender stereotypes regarding play on later early development as toddlers. Being older and more developed in understanding, …show more content…
First, Raag and Rackliff found that their male preschool-aged subjects were far more criticized by peers and teachers for cross-gender-typed play, while female preschool-aged subjects experienced far less severe reactions to both gender-typed and cross-gender-typed play and behavior (Raag and Rackliff, 1998). This surfaces the concerning possibility that developing male children could be predisposed by nature to more firm gender roles or experience more rigidly harsh social expectations than females might be when considered in a contextualist approach. In addition, Chandler and Griffiths reported immensely more male than female voice-overs in commercials targeted towards both male and female adults, a finding that they attributed to the association of the male voice with authority and wisdom but did not find in children’s commercials (Chandler and Griffiths, 2000). In fact, their sample of commercials targeted toward boys and ones targeted towards girls used more female voice-overs than male, posing questions surrounding the time in development at which the male voice gains some supposedly dominant