Parent Interview Paper

The criteria for our project involved each member interviewing the parent(s) of three different families that had both male and female children under the age of ten to determine what types of toys the children have; and we also had to visit toy stores to determine if a link exists between toys involving physicality, gross motor skills or fine motor skills and if this toy is marketed for girls, boys, or is gender neutral. The parent interviews yielded interesting results for this age range. Of the twelve families interviewed, there were fourteen boys and thirteen girls. The two most popular activities in which boys engage in are riding bicycles and other forms of physical play, such as jumping rope and jumping on a trampoline. These activities …show more content…
Of the twenty toys observed, five were marketed for boys, six for girls and nine were gender-neutral. Of the boy toys three involve fine motor skills and two involve gross motor skills; for the girls’ toys four were fine motor skills and three gross motor skills; and of the gender-neutral, five were fine motor skills and four were gross motor skills. Despite our group’s collective number of more fine motor skill toys we believe that cultural bias may be affecting the toy industry based upon the following:
1. The style and theme of toys depict gender roles with boys seeming to have more toys geared toward building, fixing, or being a super hero; and girls’ toys seem to have themes representative of cooking, taking care of the house, and child-rearing.
2. Boys’ toys promote more physical activity than do girls’ toys. Boys have a larger selection of sports related toys and toys that promote more physical activity than girls have.
3. Toy marketers often fail to include girl’s pictures in toy packaging even if the label is marked for both girls and boys. Additionally, the toys that are supposed to be gender neutral are still mainly in shades of blue, which has long been labeled a “boy